Elden Ring has been out for a week and we’ve already seen a mod that lets you pause the game. Now, an industrious NexusMods user going by the handle Marcus101RR has already produced a cheat table for Elden Ring using the popular CheatEngine utility.
If this sounds like just the thing for you, read on, but note that this tool is only designed for use in offline mode (with very good reason), and it’s hard to tell at this point how closely FromSoftware is scrutinizing saves and user activity. You could very well get a ban if you ever go back online, no matter how well you quarantine your modified saves.
To use Marcus’ tools, you’ll have to download their cheat table from NexusMods, as well as CheatEngine from its official site. Marcus’ instructions for getting it up and running are a little terse, and assume you have already disabled Elden Ring’s Easy Anti-Cheat.
One method I saw for doing so, suggested by Shamadrun in Nexus’ forum thread on the project, requires you to:
- Go to your steam install folder (steamapps/users/common/Elden Ring/Game)
- Rename “start_protected_game.exe” to something else (could be anything, you just want to be able to change it back)
- Rename “eldenring.exe” to “start_protected_game.exe,” effectively replacing the original Easy Anti-Cheat launcher
I’m not sure if making this change will force the game to run offline, or if you’ll have to manually set it yourself after changing the .exe’s. If the game doesn’t immediately default to running offline in this configuration, you’ll need to close the game and run Steam in offline mode. If you log into a character while online there’s a chance FromSoftware’s detection system will flag you and ban you for any number of days, which is how it handled it in Dark Souls 3.
The next step is to follow Marcus’ instructions for running the cheat table, but instead of attaching CheatEngine to “eldenring.exe,” like it says, attach it to “start_protected_game.exe,” instead. I think the original instructions assumed a different path to getting around Easy Anti-Cheat.
From here, you should be able to use Marcus’ table to perform typical CheatEngine-y functions like editing stats and equipment or running the custom scripts Marcus has implemented.
To re-enable Easy Anti-Cheat if you need to play online again, all you have to do is undo the steps in reverse.
Again, you do this only at the risk of messing up your saves or getting banned from online play. I saw several commenters brainstorming ways to edit a save in offline mode and then bring your game back online, with some even stating that they did so successfully.
However, for past games FromSoftware has performed weekly account checks that have caught even innocuous changes made to saves while offline. The ultimate opsec would be to move a modded save to another folder entirely before going back online, but even that may not be enough to evade FromSoftware’s detection—it’s hard to tell this early on in Elden Ring’s life.
And really, that hypervigilance is for the best. The Souls games have seen some truly egregious online cheaters in the past, with ne’er do wells dropping save-corrupting hacked items being some of the worst of the lot. We also had a bit of a scare in January when the extent of Dark Souls 3’s online security vulnerabilities were revealed, but thankfully that issue seems to have been resolved in Elden Ring. Still, if you wish to enter the world of Elden Ring cheats in offline mode and the privacy of your own home, the left-hand path is open to you.