How to Hack Your Game Saves: A Basic Guide to Hex Editing

Dec 14, 2011 07:23 PM

The days of entering left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, a, b to cheat your way through a video game are long gone. With achievements and trophies in existence, game developers have, for the most part, removed cheats from video games.

But cheats aren't entirely gone! Since computers and game consoles are so closely linked now, it's rather easy to connect the console's storage medium to a computer and gain access to its data. This provides write access, and with write access we can edit the files and manipulate the data inside of them, potentially scoring ourselves a million Septims in Skyrim.

Today's Null Byte covers a simple, universal way that you can hack your game saves. However, some game saves cannot be hacked easily, because the developers will sometimes put encryption in place to prevent gamers from modifying online stats and other global statistics.

Warning

Requirements

  • A game save extracted from your save-device. You can learn how to do that on your Xbox 360 from the information contained in this Null Byte.
  • HxD. A hex editing program that will be used to modify the data contained within our game saves.
  • Windows OS. If you already have your game saves extracted, there are a ton of hex editors for other platforms.

Hack Your Game Save

1.  Make sure that on your game save, you have key values memorized. Examples could be your amount of money, skill levels, etc.

2.  Start up HxD.

3.  Open up your game save via the File > Open menu.

4.  Search the games hex for a value that you took note of.

5.  Change the value to any amount you desire, but it has to match the length of the original string.

6.  Throw the save on your device, rehashing if necessary. When you load them, if you got the right value, it should be the new value that you specified!

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Image via cod-orc

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