How To Use Cheat Engine To Cheat in Games

by Gary Oldwood on 25 July 2016 · 16683 views

Are you stuck on a game? Having difficulty passing a particular level? Cheat Engine is a free program that allows us to hack the game’s code and increase our lives, ammunition, money, or anything else we need, in order to be winners always.

How does Cheat Engine work?

Whenever a game is running on the computer, all information about our in-game progress, such as the current score, lives, coins, etc., are stored in numerical form in the RAM. The RAM is divided into millions of sectors, and each sector has its own memory address.

Cheat Engine is a free and open source program, which detects the memory addresses that a running game is using. After identifying the memory address containing, for example, the number of lives that we currently have, we can change this number so that instead of 3 lives we can have 100, or as many as we want.

Even though Cheat Engine will work in most offline games we play on our PCs, its usefulness is limited in most online games, where the information is usually stored in the server, and therefore we cannot change it from our own computers.

Generally, websites that claim to provide hacks for online games usually try to trick us to participate in fraud surveys.

Game hacking methods with Cheat Engine

We can download the latest version of Cheat Engine from its official website here.

After downloading the program, proceed to install it. Note that you will be asked to install 3^rd-party applications as well, so make sure that you avoid doing so.

1^st hacking method (low difficulty)

There are games like our favorite Candy Crush Saga, in which we can change the values very easily and have unlimited lives. So, let’s begin the game.

While the game is running, we launch Cheat Engine. Then we open the File menu and select Open process to display a list of running processes. We locate the game, and press Open.

In the window that appears, in the Value field we enter the number of lives we currently have in Candy Crush- let’s say it’s 5, and click the New Scan button.

This search will return several addresses. But the lives we have are saved in only one memory location, so we replay the game, and lose on purpose, to reduce our lives by one.

Now, in the value field we enter the number of lives we have (which is 4 now) and scan the RAM again, this time pressing the Next Scan button.

The search returned a large number of addresses again, so we repeat the above procedure once more.

Now, after losing one more life on purpose, enter 3 in the Value field and scan the memory again, we can observe that only one of the previously found addresses changed its value. So, we double click on this address to add it to the address list.

In the Value column, we double-click on the displayed number to change the variable’s number and press OK.

Now we have 20 lives in Candy Crush Saga!

We can also hack the score or other in-game elements by following the same procedure.

However, it is recommended avoiding very large numbers because that is likely to crash the game. Besides, we can repeat the above procedure as many times as we want.

2^nd Hacking method (medium difficulty)

In some games, like AdVenture Capitalist, variable values are stored in multiple memory locations. And not only that, but they’re displayed in decimal form and are too large. But the correct use of Cheat Engine can give us the solution to this problem for effective game hacking.

From the Cheat Engine window, we locate AdVenture Capitalist's process and press Open, as described in the previous example.

Suppose that in our game, the money value is 26.72 and we want to increase that into millions.

In the Cheat Engine main window, first we change Value Type to Double, and then from the options on the right side we select Rounded (default).

Next, we write the decimal number using a comma (not a full stop), and click New Scan.

The search will return several addresses, so we buy a company or press the lemon to change the amount of money and search again.

After our money has changed, we enter the new value in the Value field and press Next Scan.

We observe that no matter how many times you press the lemon and perform a Next Scan, the number of addresses is not reduced significantly. This means that this value is stored in multiple memory locations.

So, what we need to do now is select all of them (press Ctrl + A) and transfer all of them to the address list panel (right-click -> Add selected addresses to the address list).

Then, we have change each address' value. This step requires some patience, as you will find out, since you have to change the value of each address separately.

When we finish making changes, and pressing the lemon again, the game will automatically get the value we entered.

We can hack the number of companies by following the same procedure, only that this time we don’t have to change the value type to Double.

3^rd Hacking method (using a Cheat table)

What is a Cheat Table? It’s a code that can hack a particular game so that you don't have to search memory addresses manually.

If you visit Cheat Engine’s official website you will see a Cheat Tables section, which includes a list of games.

Suppose that we choose Bejeweled 3 Deluxe, and download its table on our computer. While playing Bejeweled 3, we open the table Bejeweled 3 Deluxe.ct that we just downloaded.

Then, in Cheat Engine, we open the Bejeweled 3 process, and in the Active column, we check the box that we want to activate.

In this particular cheat table, the first script fires us directly at the highest score, and the second one levels up with a single move.

4^th Hacking method (for strong hackers)

This time we will cheat in Facebook’s Farm Heroes Saga, defining a fixed number of moves. We will be playing, but the number of moves will not be reduced.

First, let’s begin playing and open Cheat Engine. With the known process, we choose from the list of processes the browser we’re using to play the game. Then we perform the process of searching for addresses, as explained in the previous methods, and finally reach 2 addresses that refer to the number of moves.

By double-clicking on them, we transfer those addresses on the bottom of the window. Then, we right-click on any one of these and select Find out what accesses this address.

A confirmation message will appear, so click Yes to continue.

Afterwards, a new window will open, which is initially empty and all its options are grayed out, so we make a move in the game so that a new address is added to it. Then we select it and click on Show disassembler.

This will display the address’ details. We scroll down and look for the OpCode mov eax,[ecx+04].

When we locate it, we select it, open the Tools menu and select Auto Assemble.

From the window that opens, we go to Template -> Cheat Table Framework code, and afterwards we go to Template -> Code injection.

We insert the code in the specific location so as to have an infinite number of moves left (which is in essence a fixed number of 40 moves) and then click on Execute.