This post describes how I managed to fix a friend's save where he was trying meet Hanako at Embers, but the elevator/lift that's being guarded by two bouncers is marked "Off" and he couldn't enter it. I've heard of another issue where the lift is open, but the bouncer is stopping you from entering. I'm not sure if this helps with that issue.

Please note that I am not providing support for this issue, and I am not responsible for any damage this can cause to your save game/computer/etc. Check out the CP77 Modding Tools Discord if you need help.

You need a recent CyberEngineTweaks installed and working (see other resources for how to install as that's beyond the scope of this post), as this workaround requires poking at game state in the console that CET provides. Instructions tested below on v1.06 of the game and a CET build newer than the 5th of Jan, 2021.

  1. Go to the Embers lift with the two bouncers, and trigger the Point Of No Return dialog by walking up to the lift.
  2. Open the CET Console with tilde (`) or whatever it is on your keyboard
  3. Teleport inside the lift with: Game.TeleportPlayerToPosition(-1794.316040,-535.862915,10.11386)
  4. Look at the elevator control panel
  5. Run ts = Game.GetTargetingSystem(); lift = ts:GetLookAtObject(Game.GetPlayer(),false,false):GetDevicePS(); print(lift:GetDeviceState())
  6. The console should display EDeviceStatus : (4294967295)
  7. Look away from elevator control panel
  8. Run lift:SetDeviceState(1)
  9. Look at control panel, and it should update and allow you to go to the Embers floor.

Things that didn't work

  • Thanks to @SirBitesalot's fact dump, I found a q115_embers_elevator_unlocked flag which I was certain that was it cause it was not set in friend's file. However, this didn't fix the issue.
  • Teleporting into Embers itself: NPCs were there, but do not react. I believe there's a trigger when the elevator doors open.
  • Gradually teleporting up the lift well: This does trigger a conversation with Johnny, but doesn't seem to progress further, even teleporting into Embers after that.

Thanks to the modding community for making this remotely possible. No thanks to C++ which still doesn't have a nice way to join an array of strings with a delimiter in its standard library.