A Beginner's Guide to Cheat Engine

Cheat Engine is a free program off the internet that allows people to isolate specific addresses within a running process and manipulate them in order to alter the way it runs. In simpler terms, Cheat Engine allows you to mess with the video game you are playing without the need for cheat codes. Cheat Engine comes with a tutorial on how to use it, but this tutorial can be very confusing to someone who is new to 'process hacking', so I made this tutorial to give a step by step example of how Cheat Engine would be used.

Before You Begin

For this tutorial, I will be showing you how you would hack a common flash game found on the internet like Motherload. To start, make sure you have Cheat Engine installed on your computer, it can be found here:

http://www.cheatengine.org/

Next, you will need to go to the webpage that has Motherload which is here:

http://www.miniclip.com/games/motherload/en/

So now that you have your flash game running open up Cheat Engine and you are ready to start hacking!

An Important Note about Flash Games

When using Cheat Engine on a flash game found on the internet, you must take into consideration one major concept. Flash, in order to prevent people from messing with programs, takes every variable in Flash and multiplies it by 8. But the tricky thing about Flash is that only some games, often newer games, actually implement this feature. So when you try to hack a flash game, verse any other game, if at first you can't find your variables using the numbers you see on the screen, try multiplying every number by 8.

Preparing Cheat Engine

So the next thing we must do, now that we have Cheat Engine and our flash game running, is tell Cheat Engine that we want to focus on the game's process. In this case, since the game is running in an internet browser, we must tell Cheat Engine to focus on that browser. We can do this by clicking the icon in the top left corner of Cheat Engine (looks like a computer with a magnifying glass). Once you click it, you will get a window with a list of all the processes currently running on the computer. You must now find the process for your browser (for Firefox, it is firefox.exe) and select it. Once you have selected it and pressed OK you should now see that process's name across the top of Cheat Engine (in my case it says '00000E14-firefox.exe'). You are now ready to start hunting for your variables.

Finding Your First Variable

So let's start by clicking 'New Game'. Once your pass the opening transmission you're ready to get your variables. It is important to note that since Cheat Engine is locked onto the internet browser and not just the game, when you do a scan Cheat Engine is going to look through every variable in the browser. This means that scans will take longer and return more results. Anyway, let's first focus on the money. You will notice the game starts you off with $20. This means that the variable for money is currently 20 (or 160 because this is a flash game so everything gets multiplied by 8). So let's tell Cheat Engine to give us every variable in the internet browser that equals 160. You can do this by entering 160 into the space that says 'Value:' and then by hitting the button 'First Scan'. But before we scan take a quick look at the two settings below the value. They are titled 'Scan Type' and 'Value Type'. Since we know the exact amount of money we have, we will use the 'Exact Value' scan. This means that Cheat Engine will only display address that exactly equals 160. We will also use '4 Bytes' as the value type so Cheat Engine will only focus on 4 byte data, but it is important to note that sometimes flash games will hide their addresses in a value type called 'Double'. But enough lecturing, let's set our setting to 'Exact Value' and '4 Bytes' and enter the amount of money times 8 into the value box (20x8=160). Once you have done that, hit the 'First Scan' button. If all went right, you should now see in the section of Cheat Engine on the far left a box listing 'Addresses' and their 'Values'. As you can see, there are a ton of them so we need to narrow down the search. We can do this by first gaining or loosing some money in the game. In my case, I'm going to by some gas. Now I only have $15. This means that the value of the address that controls money is now equal to 120 (15x8=120). So now where I typed in 160, I'm going to replace that number with 120 and click the 'Next Scan' button. What this does is it tells Cheat Engine to take the long list of addresses that it collected from the first scan and pick out every address that has changed to equal exactly 120. And if I continue to change the amount of money I have, doing another scan each time, I should eventually have only one address left in the list. If no addresses show up, then you most likely forgot to multiply by 8 or mistyped the numbers. Anyway, now that you have your address, it's time to start the fun part.

Manipulating Your First Address

Now that you have the address, double click on it and it should now show up in the bottom part of Cheat Engine. There are now two things we can do to manipulate this address, we can freeze it and we can change it. So let's say that I want $1,000,000. To do this, right click on the address in the lower section of Cheat Engine and hover your cursor over 'change record'. Now select 'value' from the drop down menu and you should get a window asking for a number to change the value to. Since I want $1,000,000 I'm going to type 8000000 into this box. Now click OK and when you go back to the game you should now have $1,000,000. But now I want to freeze it at that number so when I buy stuff it doesn't go down. To do this you can check the box next to the address in the column titled 'Frozen'. You have now frozen the address so it cannot change. In other words, it will stay at $1,000,000 no matter how much you buy. Congratulations, you can now purchase every upgrade in the game!

So What Else Can I Find?

Now that you have found the address for money, you can try to find the address for health or fuel. The only tricky thing about these addresses is that you can't see what they are equal to, so in order to find them you will have to use the other scan types in Cheat Engine, but that is much more difficult so I'll save it for someone else to explain.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you now understand the basics to finding variables in Cheat Engine and how to manipulate them to do as you please. If you would like to learn more about using Cheat Engine you will now have the basic knowledge required to attempt the tutorial included in Cheat Engine (but let me warn you it can get complex). Either way, congratulations and have fun in your newly hacked game.