One simple way to hack them all
There is actually one simple way to hack almost any single player game running on your computer. All you need is Cheat Engine (link above) and the game you’d like to hack. Cheat Engine is a free piece of software and the hacking process is quite simple, so don’t be discouraged. This is a tutorial for newbies, so we will take it slow and use a really simple cheating technique.
Here is how it works:
- First we need to make sure that Cheat Engine and your game are running, then we click the little PC icon in Cheat Engine to choose the game process. In the list you now select your game process; it is usually called the same as your game and can also be identified by its icon that should correspond to the game icon on your Desktop or Start Menu.
- After you have chosen your game process, you now need to find the value you want to hack. Health, Skill Points, Gold, Money, Energy and similar values shown in your HUD or character menus are generally useful to hack.
- After you have chosen an in game value you would like to change, enter it under Value, click New Scan, then First Scan. – Cheat Engine will now browse your game process for the value you entered and display all corresponding values in the list on the left.
- Now in the list on the left there will most likely be a lot of values with the same value as the variable you are trying to change. Now to narrow the list down, we go into the game and change the value by doing whatever one needs to do in game in order to change it. – That means spend cash, spend skill points, spend energy, get hurt.. whatever it takes.
- Now that the value has changed, we go back into Cheat Engine and enter the new value, then press Next Scan. We repeat that until we are just left with 1 or 2 values (could be more too).
- Now in order to change the value(s), we select it/them, then click the red arrow in Cheat Engine. That should put the values in the list at the bottom of Cheat Engine.
- Now we select the value(s) again in the list at the bottom and Right Click them, go to Change Record, and then Value. Now enter the value you want the value to change into and you are done. Go back into the game and enjoy.
Where this works
This should technique will work for a lot of games, but not all of them. There are games that try to keep hackers at bay. They will either use different Value Types like Floats, String or Doubles. In that case try scanning with those value type options. Some developers will even multiply the value by some weird number. I will publish a tutorial on how to hack encrypted values soon. – Keep in mind that Cheat Engine is a tool to help you hack a game, it will however not hack the game for you.
Still unable to Cheat? – Watch this:
Different Value Types:
Now the technique shown in the first video above does not work for all applications. Sometimes the developers decide to save their values in another form than the Cheat Engine standard “4 byte”. In those cases we have to switch the “value type” around. The most commonly used values in games are the default “4byte”, the “float” and the “double” value types.
So now you have two possibilities: Either you scan for each of the most common value types separately or you try to set your value type to “ALL”. If you set your value type to all, Cheat Engine will scan all possible value types. The good thing about this is that this will make it very likely for you to find the value you are looking for, the bad then is that there will be a lot of values and it does consume a lot of resources, depending on the game or software you are trying to hack.
Other than that, scanning for different value types works exactly the same as scanning for the 4byte values. So just scan, change, scan, isolate the value, change the value and you are done.
Still not working? – Watch this:
Finding Encrypted Values
Sometimes a developer will go through the trouble of making a cheaters life a lot harder by “encrypting” values. These encryptions are mostly just simple multiplications and only very rarely they will go through more trouble. The video above shows you one of the rare cases where a developer used (v*8+6) to encrypt the money value. This is a really rare case and still quite easy to figure out.
Basically what we need to do when dealing with encrypted values is scan for an unknown value (best set your value type to ALL), then change the value, make assumptions as to how it changes and then scan for the option that applies. So as shown in the video, if the value increases, we can assume that the encrypted value also increases (unless the developer is really evil and multiplies by a negative number). So we in/decrease the value in the game, scan for in/decreased values and after doing this 10+ times, you should have narrowed your list down to single digits of values. Of course you can never be sure that what you are doing is going to be successful. However, since most developers use simple multiplications and additions to encrypt values, you will almost always be on the save side, wen assuming that the encrypted value will increase, if the values itself increases. Figuring out the applied encryption should be fairly easy to do. In my case it was 1000 = 8006, so (v*8+6), pretty simple math in almost every case.
I know there are encryptions out there used in games that simply cannot be broken using this method, but I have never encountered one so far. If I should ever come across one, I will try and figure it out and then make another video showing you how to try and get around those as well.
Need more useful tricks?
Speed Hacks in Cheat Engine
A speed hacks is a very useful cheat to have in almost any game out there, since it gives you more time to aim, dodge, make decisions, and generally rule in any game where reflexes are important such as first person shooters.
Activating a speed hack is quite easy: Either we use the “Enable Speedhack” checkbox in Cheat Engine, or we set specific hotkeys for our speed settings. To set hotkeys you need to go to “Edit”, then “Settings” and then “Hotkeys”: There you will be able to set hotkeys for your speed hack settings. So for example you can set a speedhack of 0.5 (half speed) to your Numpad 1 Key. Do not forget to set a key for normal speed (1.0), so that you don’t have to watch cut scenes in slow motion.
This kind of speedhack works for most PC games (about 95%). However in very rare cases a speedhack will make the game crash, so always be aware that this can happen. If no other hacks work, a speedhack can be a nice replacement for a god mode, if you do not mind the slow pace of the game.
