Cheat Engine

[Newgel]

Game: Time Break Chronicles

I've been using cheat engine for years to change basic values in offline games like currency. I am in no way an advanced user.
I'm trying to change the value of an item in the inventory (encyclopedia) and I'm scanning 4-bytes. I can find the value on the third scan but when I change it the game freezes for a second and crashes. I open the game again and the value is unchanged. Help?

[ParkourPenguin]

The game is probably storing redundant information for the value. When some invariant between multiple values is broken, the game crashes. I've seen plenty of games do this intentionally to deter cheating, but they usually restore the correct value instead of crashing (this is different from visual values).

If other values (e.g. money or health) behave the same way, then it's probably intentional. You might get lucky with "unknown initial value" and changed / unchanged scans. The code maintaining the invariant(s) is probably near an instruction that writes to the value. You'd have to know how to read assembly to make any use of that information.

Otherwise, it could be something specific to items in the inventory. e.g. maybe the value you found is the number of elements in a container, and changing it to something bigger makes the game read uninitialized memory. At that point, anything can happen, but crashing is the most likely scenario. There's not much you can do here by simply changing values- you'd have to call a function to add an item to your inventory, and that requires knowledge of assembly.