How to Beat the Dark Souls: Remastered Hackers

It’s the moment all the masochistic PC gamers out there have been waiting for — Dark Souls: Remastered has arrived with better graphics, better frame rate, and some quality of life changes. It even landed on Steam a full day early and can be installed right now instead of waiting for the official Friday release.

In this instance, that early release wasn’t quite as exciting as it could have been, as the launch was (perhaps predictably) marred by a major issue with unethical players.

Without any effective tools to stop them, hackers have immediately infested the new multiplayer aspect and are busy ruining the game for everyone they come across.

Check out our other guides for this remaster here: 

• How to Find Every Ember
• Best Starter Builds for PvP 

Dark Souls: Remastered Hackers Mar Launch

Anyone loading up the game will be subjected to nearly immediate harassment by players who can insta-kill them with a single spell, destroy their equipment, or modify them with terrible status effects.

Sometimes they come from the front and annihilate you, while at others, they are completely invisible to attack from behind, and they never seem to go down no matter how much damage they receive. One of the hackers has even gone out of his way to helpfully chronicle his exploits on YouTube (see the clip below).

While mods like PVP Watch Dog warn you when a known hacker is playing with you for Dark Souls III, there’s no such mod available at the moment for the remastered version of the original game.

Beyond just getting killed or being Cursed and needing to make a new character, there’s been some major collateral damage here as people who aren’t breaking the rules are now getting soft banned. Hackers are abusing the anti-cheat function to convince the game that normal players are doing the cheating, resulting in absolute havoc.

A serious question for the hackers ruining Dark Souls: Remastered — what’s the appeal here? If you want to cheat in single player mode, well cool, that’s between you and your PC, but why go out of your way to ruin the experience for other people in multiplayer when you don’t have to?

Luckily, there is a workaround made by a fan to mitigate the worst of the abuses currently going on.

What You Should and Shouldn’t Do Right Now

First and foremost, do not pick up any items the cheaters drop. This will normally get you flagged as a cheater and soft banned, but that’s not a guarantee of avoiding the issue, as they can trip you up in other ways, like messing with the code to change your stats.

For now, it’s also best to avoid Undead Berg and Anor Londo entirely, as that’s where the majority of the problem can be found, with hackers congregating there to kill other players. That’s not a great solution, though, as eventually you will want to pass through those areas. This is where a nifty little player-made tool comes into play.

An enterprising Redditor who goes by the handle Sciguma came up with a quick solution (why do the fans always end up having to do this stuff instead of the developers?) that effectively negates the hacking problem.

Save yourself a lot of trouble while waiting for the official patch in the works, and grab the anti-hacking tool here. While it doesn’t stop the hackers in their tracks, this Python auto-save script for Dark Souls: Remastered does significantly reduce their annoyance.

Essentially, the script immediately creates a backup of all your save files, then automatically backs up any save that gets modified at regular intervals, preventing hackers from spamming copies of your characters. This reduces the likelihood of a character getting soft banned, and also means you won’t lose much progress when coming across a cheater.

Because the auto-save script initiates itself every five minutes, this means that in the event that you do get hacked (and you probably will), you will only lose a few minutes of play time at most when you restart.

Have you found any other effective tools for avoiding the Dark Souls: Remastered hackers, or have you been soft banned by these annoying players trying to ruin the game for everyone else?

Let us know in the comments below, and hopefully we’ll see a patch soon to address this ongoing problem in the Souls-verse.