If you are an ardent PC game cheater, you should’ve by now realized that Cheat Engine is synonymous with over 90 percent of all offline game cheats. But do you know what it really is? Do you know how to install Cheat Engine? Do you know how to use Cheat Engine?
Look for your game in the list. If the name is not in there, try looking for game.exe. When you selected your game successfully, 'No Process Selected' in the middle changes to your game process. How do I use my Cheat Engine? Here you can see the top half of Cheat Engine. I will now tell you what most of it is for.
Here is a quick guide to answer all your questions once and for all.
What is it?
Cheat Engine is a free open source tool dedicated to modifying single player games running on the Windows or the Mac platform. The modifications can either make the game easier by giving you added equipment, perks, money, and skill or make it harder by lowering your skill or simply raising game expectations.
The Cheat Engine does this by inspecting memory location modifications done by the game during operation. These changes are then matched to in-game values, for instance, your health bar, your ammo or skill rating. Once you have a successful match, you will know which variables to change in order to affect these readings.
Apart from this, Cheat Engine also packs:
- A game debugger
- A disassembler and assembler
- A speedhack tool
- A trainer maker
- Direct 3D manipulation tools
How to Get Started
Cheat Engine For Games
Head over to the official downloads page and grab the latest copy of the Windows or the Mac installer. Install the given file and launch your Cheat Engine. You will get a popup prompt requesting you to go through the Cheat Engine tutorial. It is wise to go through this tutorial if you don’t want any frustrations in future.
The tutorial teaches you how to mine for actual value changes. Even though this is the engine’s real power, most gamers like you and I just download ready-made Cheat Engine files (.ct) and load them into the cheating engine.
If this isn’t your intent, go through the entire tutorial and learn how to find your own way around different games. Don’t forget to compile your found cheats into a cheat table and share them with the community.
Games To Use Cheat Engine With Among Us
No Set Up (Download and Run) Cheat Engine
Sometimes, it pays to use the no set up version of cheat engine. Just download the set up here, extract the rar file to a folder of your choice and run cheat engine from there. You can even extract it to a flash drive and have your own portable cheat engine.
This makes it easier to clean up cheating records when you want to play an online game. Remember to run the cheat engine as admin for elevated privileges.
How to Load a Cheat Table
Opening a cheat table is easy.
- First, you’ll have to download the game specific cheat table and save it somewhere on your PC.
- Open Cheat Engine and click on the Open Folder icon. This will open a file browser
- Navigate to where you stored your cheat table (.ct) Select the file you want and click open
- Alternatively, you can just double-click the .ct files to open them automatically in the app. If your file associations are right, this should work.
- If they are not, right-click the cheat table and select open with> cheat engine and remember to tick the always button
Using Cheat Engine When Playing a Game
- Start the game you want to play
- Press ALT+TAB to activate windows switch and choose the Cheat Engine window
- Click the First Icon and then ‘select a process to open.’ Look for gamename.exe (e.g witcher3.exe for Witcher 3 Cheats), select it and click open
- Click on the next icon to activate the cheat table explorer or press CTRL+O
- Load the cheat table you downloaded and head back to The game to implement the cheats you just activated
- Each cheat table has its own hotkeys. Remember to go through the description so that you know what to press or what to do to evoke a change.
Is Cheat Engine Safe?
Many people have issues with Cheat Engine since they are not sure if it is safe. This has led to the big question: Is Cheat Engine safe. Well. The quick answer is yes. I have been using Cheat Engine on the right games for a year or so now and I have never seen it run away on nefarious missions.
The Cheat Engine installer is safe. However, it does have some toolbars and adware bundled in. You can always uncheck the checkbox for each additional to ensure that you install Cheat Engine and nothing more.
But why do some antivirus software flag Cheat Engine as a Trojan or a malicious software? Well. This has to do with how Cheat Engine works.
It is an external tool that modifies the operations of an application, counters, pointers and other memory locations. This is basically what Trojans do. They modify application counters and pointers.
However, since Cheat Engine only modifies what you tell it to modify and never goes making changes on its own, it is 100 percent safe. Think of it as a gun that will never fire a bullet unless you aim and pull the trigger.
The only time Cheat Engine will harm you is when you run it on a PC that has a game with a serious anti-cheat system in place. If you want to use Cheat Engine, ensure that:
- You don’t have a game that punishes cheats installed in your system
- If the game is installed, use Windows firewall to block it from accessing the internet ever
- Always clean uninstall Cheat Engine when you have high-risk games in your system
These are the basics you need to get started with your cheats. Remember that the engine was designed for use on offline games where cheating isn’t illegal. Using Cheat Engine to modify online games or games with an online alternative might result in a terminated account. Ensure that you use the engine responsibly.
Check this too:
If you ever tried to find topic on the Internet about game cheating, you have undoubtedly seen something about Cheat Engine (CE). CE is powerful memory scanner and editor, which you can use to change values in memory that shouldn’t be available to you. It is not used only on games; you can use it on any program.
In this article you will learn how to use cheat engine. We will start from the very beginning, and finish with the advanced techniques of cheating.
For the first tutorial, we will use simple PC game – Plants vs. Zombies. Game Plants vs. Zombies is chosen because it lacks any kind of encryption.
How to use Cheat Engine
First of all, download Cheat Engine from official site (LINK). I won’t teach you how to find our game, but I’m sure that you know that already.
After you started Cheat Engine, you will see following window. You have to become familiar with this user interface.
- Open process – This will almost always be your first step- to choose which game or program you want to “read”.
- Process list – After first step, in this window you will see all started processes on your system. On this picture, you can see two processes that might be interesting to us – PlantsVsZombies.exe, and popcapgame1.exe
- This is the place where you define which type of value you are looking for, and which scan type you want to use. In our first tutorial, we will use Scan type Exact Value, and value type 4 bytes.
As you will see, this combination will be the most simple example that you will see in practice, usually when you try to cheat offline PC game. On flash games, or games for mobile devices, you will encounter more complicated types. - First scan – Nomen est omen. First scan, to make list of all addresses that contains same value.
- Next scan – After you scanned all addresses that contains the same value, you will need this button to find if any of the values changed. But let’s stop with theory, and find out how to use cheat engine in practice.
Plants vs. Zombies cheat
Start the game. The main currency in the game is SUN, so first we have to find starting value. In our case, starting value is 150. Write it down, or remember it, and pause the game.
On the CE main window, click on Open process, and choose game from the list. In our example, game creates two processes – “PlantsVsZombies.exe” and “popcapgame1.exe”. You have to open “popcapgame1.exe” to change values in the game. In most cases, when game creates more than one process, we have to try all of them to find out in which one wanted values are stored.
For this tutorial, we will skip this.
Our next step is to find all addresses that contains value 150. To do that, we have to make scan like this. As value write 150, scan type Exact Value, Value Type 4 Bytes, and click on First Scan.
On the left side of the screen, you can see that there is 126 addresses that store same value. We can change them all, but game would probably crash. So we have to eliminate addresses that we don’t need.
Now spend some SUN, or produce some more. Out target is to change our starting value (150) into bigger or smaller number.
After starting value changed, enter that value in CE, and click on Next Scan.
This step will find all addresses that prevoiusly contained staring value, and now contains changed values. In our example, if you are lucky, on the right side you should see only one address.
In some huge games, or games with encrypted values, you will have to repeat previous step ten or twenty times before you find right values. Scan, spend some in-game currency, scan for new value, spend some more, scan again, spend more, scan…Until there is only one or two values left on the screen.
In our case, in the end you should see similar thing.
Double click on address, and it will appear at the bottom of the CE main window. Now, just double click on value that you want to change, and write anything you want.
And click OK, and we are done. If you want, you can check the box under Active. If you do that, our value won’t be changed anymore. That means that you can spent as much money/gold/sun as you want, and the value would be same.
If everything is done right, our ingame situation will look like this.