Elden Ring cheats offer unlimited runes and your pick of gear in offline play

Elden Ring Varre looking pensive in front of the Scadutree.

Elden Ring and all its Souls-style predecessors are notoriously difficult, and Shadow of the Erdtree has reached a fever pitch: we won't judge if you want to turn to Elden Ring cheats to smooth things over.

An industrious NexusMods user going by the handle Marcus101RR produced the first table for Elden Ring using the popular Cheat Engine utility, and things have only expanded from there in the intervening two years.

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 you'll want to carefully quarantine your modified saves for if you ever do go back online.

How to get past EasyAntiCheat

To use these tools, you'll have to download The Grand Archives' Elden Ring cheat table, as well as Cheat Engine from from it's official website or GitHub.

A word of caution: Cheat Engine's installer is known to contain third-party adware separate from the utility itself, with even experienced users accidentally consenting to the download through a confusing EULA. Download with caution. 

Using an Elden Ring cheat table will require running the game in offline mode and disabling EasyAntiCheat.  Here's The Grand Archives' recommended method for running their cheat table:

• Unpack steam_appid.txt from the latest release of The Grand Archives' cheat table.
• Locate your Elden Ring folder in the Steam/steamapps/common directory
• In Windows, play Elden Ring by running eldenring.exe instead of from Steam. On Steam Deck or Linux writ large, you can add eldenring.exe as a non-steam app and access it that way.

You can alternately use Seamless Co-op creator Luke Yui's alternative Offline Launcher, a route The Grand Archives characterize as the "compatibility" option.

This third method was suggested by Shamadruu in Nexus' forum thread on an older Elden Ring cheat table, and is referred to as the "legacy" method for disabling EasyAntiCheat by The Grand Archives:

1. Before anything, launch Elden Ring and set it to run in offline mode from the options menu.
2. Go to your steam install folder (steamapps/users/common/Elden Ring/Game)
3. Rename "start_protected_game.exe" to something else (could be anything, you just want to be able to change it back)
4. Rename eldenring.exe to "start_protected_game.exe," effectively replacing the original Easy Anti-Cheat launcher

If you log into a cheated character while online there’s a chance FromSoftware’s detection system will flag you and ban you on a temporary or permanent basis, which is how it handled things in Dark Souls 3.

How to load the Elden Ring cheat table

(Image credit: FromSoftware)

With EasyAntiCheat out of the way, The Grand Archives' instructions for running their cheat table in Windows are as follows:

• Download and install Cheat Engine
• Unpack the .CT file from the GitHub download to wherever you'd like your Elden Ring cheats to live on your PC.
• Run your game from eldenring.exe or Luke Yui's launcher as outlined above.
• Launch Cheat Engine and load The Grand Archives' .CT file from the location you selected.
• Activate the "Open" script.

On Linux and Steam Deck, the process is more complicated:

• Launch the game at least once the "normal" way.
• Download and install the Windows version of Cheat Engine and use the Wine compatibility tool to run it.
• Install protonhax or protonhax-git if you're on Arch Linux.
• Download The Grand Archives' cheat table and unpack the .CT file to somewhere you can easily access it.
• In Elden Ring's launch options in Steam, manually enter the line protonhax init %command%
• Launch Elden Ring.
• Run Cheat Engine by entering protonhax run 12345620 /path/to/Cheat\ Engine.exe into the terminal
• Load The Grand Archives' .CT file via the File > Load option and activate the Open script.

What about reversing cheats?

(Image credit: Tyler C. / FromSoftware)

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 at the risk of messing up your saves or getting banned from online play. I've 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.

And really, that hypervigilance on FromSoft's part 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 2022 when the extent of Dark Souls 3's online security vulnerabilities were revealed, but thankfully that issue seems to have been fully resolved. 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.