Cheat Engine

[KingMigi]

Hi guys! Obligatory preamble where I say that I've perused the stickies and FAQ, and I believe I am not in violation of any board rules posting here. If so, please let me know and I'll delete my post or alter it so as to follow rules and etiquette.

Anyways, I'll get to the point.

I'm playing Immortals: Fenyx Rising (referred to as IFR from here on). There's a buff in IFR I'd really like to change.

In IFR, armor has buff slots, up to 2, which give various beneficial effects. The buff in question offers a chance every time you gather an ingredient in the world to gather a second ingredient. For various long-winded reasons having to do with the gameplay loop and other intertwining systems, I believe it was a poor choice to implement this buff via the armor buff system as opposed to other routes. I also think this buff has poor scaling, but that's a secondary issue.

I'm sure by now you've gathered that I wish to modify and enhance this buff in some way.

- I want to make the buff active without the armor it's associated with being equipped.
- I want to tune the percentage of the buff.

Therefore, I believe this means I would need to:
- Identify the buff in it's active state and activate it without the need for the Armor to be equipped.
- Identify the value of the buff and modify it.

Or, if the above is impractical, I thought the following might be an alternative solution:

- Identify when an ingredient is gathered and add an additional number of said ingredient to the inventory.

So, what do you guys think?
Which of my goals, if any, are possible?
Secondly, what functions of CheatEngine do I need to learn to make this happen?
Lastly, if this is possible, is it too technically advanced for someone who's just learning?

[ParkourPenguin]

Your first thought is impractical. Modifications made to the buff system necessarily involve the implementation of the buff system. You don't know how the buff system is implemented since the game isn't open source. You would need to reverse engineer that part of the game to figure it out, which can require a substantial amount of knowledge and a ridiculous amount of both time and effort.

Your second thought is fine and can probably be done somewhat easily with code injection. Two main problems: you need to know the basics of x64 assembly (and CE's AutoAssembler), and you need to find an injection point.

I'd pick an item, find the value corresponding to the quantity of that item in your inventory, and look at what writes to that address. An instruction executed when you gain the item as loot is probably a good injection point. From there, watch what other addresses that instruction accesses for a while and make sure there won't be any surprises (e.g. maybe that instruction also modifies health for some reason?). If that instruction only accesses items' quantities when loot is picked up, then it's a good injection point, and I can write some code to make it do whatever I want it to do (within reason).

As for whether or not a beginner can do this? Everyone started somewhere. If you want to learn, try. If you want someone else to do it for you, ask on a third party site:
https://forum.cheatengine.org/thirdparty.php

There are plenty of tutorials covering CE and code injection- some of which are good. You can learn general knowledge about this process by looking at them.

[KingMigi]

Thank you so much for the detailed reply PakourPenguin. I very much appreciate this information.

I suppose with that in mind, I will hop down the rabbit hole of code injection via CE with your thoughts on how it might best be used in this scenario in mind while I do!