Cheat Engine Tutorial for Beginners: Your First Scan, Step by Step

Cheat Engine is a free, open-source memory scanner and debugger for Windows. It lets you look inside the memory of a running program, find the numbers a game keeps there (gold, ammo, health, a timer) and change them. This guide walks you through a complete first session: installing it from the right place, attaching to a game, finding a value, narrowing the results, changing and freezing it, and saving your work as a cheat table.

A note before you start: everything here is meant for single-player and offline games. Do not use Cheat Engine in online or multiplayer games, where it affects other players and can get your account banned. Back up your save files before you change anything, because an edited value can be written into a save and stay there.

Get Cheat Engine from the official site

Download Cheat Engine only from the official website, cheatengine.org. Cheat-Engine.net is an independent community site for cheat tables. It is not the official Cheat Engine site and is not affiliated with Dark Byte, the developer. We do not host the program itself, and you should be wary of any other site that offers a "repacked", "portable" or "pre-configured" installer.

The official Windows installer may offer optional bundled software from third parties during setup. Read each screen of the installer instead of clicking Next on autopilot, and decline any offer you did not ask for. The extras are optional; Cheat Engine installs and works without them.

Once installed, start Cheat Engine. The main window has three areas you will use constantly:

• the process button at the top left (a small computer icon), which chooses the program you work on;
• the scan panel on the right, where you type values and choose scan options;
• the address list at the bottom, which holds the entries you decide to keep.

Practise with the built-in tutorial first

Cheat Engine ships with its own practice program. Open the Help menu and choose the Cheat Engine tutorial; on a 64-bit system this starts Tutorial-x86_64.exe. It is a small window with numbered steps, each teaching one technique: exact value scans, unknown initial values, floating point numbers, finding the code that changes a value, pointers, code injection and multilevel pointers. Each step unlocks the Next button only once you have completed the task, and it shows a password you can use to jump back to that step later.

The tutorial is the best place to make mistakes. Nothing you change there can break a game or a save file, and the steps map directly onto the workflow below. If you work through the first three or four steps, you will already understand most of what a beginner needs.

Attach Cheat Engine to the game

Cheat Engine works on one process at a time. To choose it:

1. Start the game and load a save, so the values you want are actually in memory.
2. Switch to Cheat Engine and click the computer icon at the top left (the File menu has the same option).
3. In the process list, find the game's executable. The Applications tab, which only lists programs with a visible window, is usually the quickest way to spot it.
4. Select it and click Open. The game's name now appears at the top of the main window.

Pick the game itself, not its launcher. Many games start a launcher first, which then starts the real executable; if you attach to the launcher you will scan the wrong memory and find nothing useful. If the game runs in exclusive full screen, switch it to windowed or borderless mode so you can move between it and Cheat Engine easily.

Your first scan

When you can see the number: Exact Value

Say your character has 1250 gold. In the scan panel:

1. Type 1250 in the Value box.
2. Leave Scan Type on Exact Value.
3. Leave Value Type on 4 Bytes, the default and the most common type for whole numbers in games.
4. Click First Scan.

The list on the left fills with every address in the game's memory that currently holds 1250. Expect thousands of results. That is normal: the number 1250 appears in many places that have nothing to do with your gold.

When you cannot see the number: Unknown initial value

Some values are never shown as a number: a health bar, a stamina meter, a cooldown. For those, set Scan Type to Unknown initial value and click First Scan. Cheat Engine takes a snapshot of memory without filtering anything. The result count will be very large, and the list may not show individual addresses yet. You narrow it down with the next scans, based on how the value changes.

For bars and meters, a Value Type of Float is often a better first guess than 4 Bytes, because games tend to store health, stamina and positions as floating point numbers. The value types guide explains how to choose when you are not sure.

Narrowing the results with Next Scan

Now change the value in the game and scan again. This is the core loop of Cheat Engine: change, scan, repeat.

• If you know the new number, spend or earn some gold, type the new amount and click Next Scan with Exact Value.
• If you started with an unknown value, use the relative scan types: Increased value, Decreased value, Changed value or Unchanged value. Take damage, then scan for Decreased value. Wait a moment without taking damage and scan for Unchanged value. Heal, and scan for Increased value.
• Variants such as Increased value by and Decreased value by let you enter the exact difference, which filters faster when you know it.

Each Next Scan only checks the addresses that survived the previous scan, so the list shrinks quickly. Two or three rounds usually bring an exact-value search down to a handful of addresses. Unknown value searches take more rounds; Unchanged value scans are a cheap way to throw away noise between them.

A few habits help:

• Make the value change between every scan. Scanning twice for the same number without changing anything in the game removes very little.
• If the result count drops to zero, something did not match: the value is probably a different type, or it changed in a way you did not expect. Click New Scan to start over and try another value type.
• What you see on screen is not always what is stored. A game may show 100% health while storing 250.0, or display a number that is calculated from another one. If an exact scan fails, fall back to Unknown initial value.

Adding a result to the address list

When only a few results remain, double-click a result to add it to the address list at the bottom of the window. You can also select several results and use the red arrow button beside the result list to add all of them at once.

In the address list, double-click the Description column and type a name such as "Gold". Descriptions cost nothing and save you confusion later, especially once you have a dozen entries.

If two or three addresses all follow your gold, one is often a display copy and another the real value. Add all of them, then test which one actually matters in the next step.

Changing and freezing a value

To change a value, double-click the number in the Value column of the address list, type a new value and confirm. Then check the game. Often the screen only updates after the value changes again, for example after you buy or pick up something.

If the game changes it straight back, you probably edited a display copy rather than the real value. Try the other candidates.

To freeze a value, tick the Active box at the left of the entry. Cheat Engine then keeps writing the stored value back to that address, so the game cannot lower it for long. Freezing is useful for things like health or a timer, but it is blunt: the game still runs its own code, and its changes are simply overwritten. Some games react badly to a frozen value, for example when a script expects a timer to reach zero. Untick Active to unfreeze.

Change values in small, sensible steps. Setting gold to 999999999 can overflow a counter, break a shop, or end up permanently in your save. A reasonable number is less likely to cause trouble.

Saving your work as a cheat table

Everything in the address list can be saved as a cheat table: open the File menu, choose Save (or Save As) and pick a name. The file gets the .CT extension. Next time, load it from the File menu, attach to the game again, and your entries are back.

There is one important limitation. A plain address like the one you just found is usually valid only for this session of the game. After a restart the game often stores the value somewhere else, and the saved entry will show a wrong number or ??. The fix is to find a stable path to the value, which is what pointers and code injection scripts are for. The pointer scanning guide covers the first of these.

Using tables made by others

You do not have to build every table yourself. Many players share finished tables with entries already set up, often including scripts that keep working after a restart. Loading and using one is a skill of its own, with its own pitfalls around game versions and updates; the guide on how to use a cheat table explains it step by step. Before you enable anything from a shared table, look at what it contains, just as you would with any file you download.

Quick checklist

1. Download Cheat Engine only from cheatengine.org and decline any bundled extras in the installer.
2. Practise with the built-in tutorial.
3. Back up your save files. Use Cheat Engine with single-player and offline games only.
4. Attach to the game process, not the launcher.
5. Run a First Scan with Exact Value, or with Unknown initial value if you cannot see the number.
6. Change the value in the game, then Next Scan. Repeat until a few results remain.
7. Add them to the address list, test by changing the value, and freeze with the Active box if needed.
8. Save your table as a .CT file, and learn pointers when you want it to survive a restart.