Remember the good old days where you had to use a trainer to get infinite money, level up etc?
Well now you can do it yourself !
First and foremost. I don't fully condone cheating by writing this. Even though this method works for some online game that have bad protection. It's not fun to ruin the experience of other players. Not even to make a point.
There are enough sad asshats online that cheating is the way to win in life...
I'm writing this because with over 300+ games in my library, i've come across quite a few badly designed games that lock everything behind a leveling system that have extra benefit to the player exept artificially extend your play time.
And sometimes I love messing with my friends playing online, we but all love messing with our friends whether it's online or offline.
To start "hacking" your game, you will need a specific piece of software called Cheat Engine.
You can download it here: https://www.cheatengine.org/downloads.php
What does Cheat Engine do for you?
Just like trainers, Cheat Engine modifies values that the game is storing in memory and by memory I mean your RAM.
Why there? RAM has always been faster than mechanical hard drives and even SSD's, this is due to spinning drives and the SATA bus respectively. That is why games loves to store values in RAM that needs to be accessed fairly quickly.
These are value's like your hitpoints, experience, currency, etc.
Does Cheat Engine work on everything?
To be frank no. If you decide to go online with this, expect some games to ban you for eternity. Most online games however store your statistics server-side making it the primary data file. Anything you edit on your own machine will get overwritten by it anyway.
There are games that obviously know about re-wrriting memory values and encrypt the data in it. It is possible to decrypt it involves a lot of work and to be honest, I can't be bothered to do it myself and put that much effort to mess with a game.
Another protection you might encounter is games running anti-cheat software, they will detect if there's a running instance of Cheat Engine and prevent you from booting the game or even ban you if it has a onine component in it.
I experienced this personally myself when I was experimenting with another game and wanted to play some CoD: Warzone online. Wondering why I couldn't log in, turns out it detected my Cheat Engine instance and banned me for eternity after 3 tries or so.
Nothing you can do to unban yourself sadly...
How do you use Cheat Engine?
Here is a standard set of instructions you can use that applies to a lot of games. There are only a few that differ, mostly because of the way the game is made, like using a different executabel.
- When you first start Cheat Engine, click on the monitor icon on the top left.
- A new popup shows all running processes on your computer, select the executable for your game and click Open
- Now you need the current value that is listed in your game that you need modified, be it currency, level or experience. Type this number in the Value field and click First Scan
- The first scan will always yield a lot of results and it's hard to make heads from tails which value you actually need.
To filter out more values, in your game make the value change. If it's currency, buy/sell something to change the value, kill or do something to gain a level or get more experience and take note of the new value
Back in Cheat Engine, type in this new value in the Value field and then click Next Scan
- This should result in a smaller list of results.
Keep repeating this until you reach a reasonable list of results, some games will give you 1 result some give you 10.
You'll start noticing Cheat Engine constantly showing the same amount of results no matter how many times you search. - Double click on one result on the left side or select them all and then right click and select Add selected addresses to the addresslist
The found result(s) should now be listed in the box at the bottom
- Double click on one of the values in the value column to edit it.
Depending on your game, the change could change instantly or be applied on the next change to the value, like for example when you gain experience points.
It is possible to save the findings you made into a file that only Cheat Engine can read, but memory addresses tend to change so it's not always guaranteed that once you load the file that it will work again. You will have to repeat all the steps again to find the value.
You can also save yourself some work by skipping all these steps and finding specific Cheat Engine files online for the game you are playing. Simply load the file, select the game process and start changing values in the bottom section.