How To Cheat Yoink

This is the most recent tutorial, and it also includes a sample cheat file with the saved cheat used in the tutorial. This tutorial is provided under the terms and conditions of the  Creative Commons - Attribution / Share Alike license.

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Welcome back to the second official tutorial of The Cheat! This is going to be a fun little hack. This time we are using The Cheat 1.2 on a fun 3D cartoon game called Yoink. We are going to make our character invincible! If you don't have Yoink 1.0.0 d6, it is available from Neil Carter's  web site. Yoink is also open source along with Neil's other projects. Unfortunately, it may not run on modern versions of Mac OS X, but you may still find some value just reading along.

Now let's begin. First, launch The Cheat and Yoink. Yoink does have a window mode, but cheating it will be a bit more frustrating than it could be because Yoink opens up a debugger window every time you switch to another program. Oh well. Choose "Yoink" from the list of programs in The Cheat.

The hit points variable we are searching for is displayed as a blue progress bar along the top of the screen. That means we'll be searching blind, because we don't know what the value is! The hit points variable is a double, so choose Double for the variable type. If you didn't know what type of variable to use, you would have to just guess and see if you can find the variable using a given type. When the game starts, the health bar is at "full." We don't know what the value is, but we can make a pretty safe guess that whatever it is, it's currently greater than zero. So, do a search using the "greater than" operator and the search value zero.

You no longer need to worry about doing searches with the value zero, because The Cheat is now very fast. You'll see a million or so results; no biggy! In order to narrow down our results, we need to change the value of the hit points variable and do another search. The easiest way to change the value is to go back to Yoink and let a robot punch you--but don't die! Now what do we know? We don't know exactly what the value is, but we do know that whatever it is, it is now less than what it was when we did our first search. So, do another search using the "less than" operator and choose "last value" instead of entering a value.

Indeed, our results were narrowed down significantly, but we will need to do a lot more narrowing down to find the address we're looking for! Go back to Yoink and play until a robot gives you a cookie. See if you can figure out what type of search we are going to do. Give up? Since we know the value increased since our last search, we need to do a "greater than last value" search.

Again, our results were further narrowed down. Notice that it is a lot easier to figure out what type of search you need to do if you just phrase how the value changed in plain English. It will still take a few more searches to narrow down the results to an acceptable level. Just keep changing the health bar and performing a search based upon how the value changed. If you mess up, you can always use the ever-so-handy Undo. Keep searching until your results are in the double or single digits.

Okay, if you're following along with the screenshots, you'll notice I have nine results left. Seven of the variables have a value of zero, and the other two both have a value of 14.0. Notice that my health bar is not completely empty. You can make a pretty good guess that the variable is NOT one of the first seven variables, but you can double check by going to Yoink and changing the health value again. Then you can switch back to The Cheat to see which values have changed.

Five of the nine values have changed. We can immediately rule out the first four which did not change. Notice the two variables we were looking at earlier are the only ones whose values have decreased, which is what we would expect because our health bar got smaller. It's a safe bet that the variable we are looking for is one of those two. The problem is, they both always have the same value. One variable is probably mirroring the variable we are looking for. We can still find out which one it is by trying to change both variables. Select both variables in the list of results, and add the variables.

If you are prompted to enter a new value, opt not to by pressing cancel. We don't yet know the range of values these variables can take. To find out which of these two variables is the true variable, our strategy is to change both variables one at a time and see which one actually changes the game. Uncheck one of the variables and enter a new value for the one that is still checked. You want the new value to be fairly conservative because we still don't know what values are valid. Do a new value that is pretty close to what the value currently is. Then apply the cheat.

Ah hah! The value of the variable before we applied the cheat was 9.0. By changing the value to 7.0, we would expect the bar to get slightly smaller, and it has! We have found the variable which controls the health of our character. Now we need to find out what value causes the health bar to be at maximum. You can do this one of two ways. The first way is to try changing the variable to new values until you get it. The easiest way is to go back to Yoink and eat a cookie or two to get maximum health. Then go back to The Cheat and switch to Search Mode. The variable we found will still be in the list of results, and it will have the maximum value. That value, as it turns out, is 30.0.

This is also a good time to do some other things in The Cheat. You can delete the other variable we added to the cheat view which did not turn out to be the variable we were looking for. You can also change the title bar and description to help you remember the range of values the health variable can take. The best thing you can do is to make the cheat repeat very often so that you will always have maximum health! If you want to save the cheat for later use, you can also do that now.

So there you have it. If that took you a long time to successfully complete, don't fret. With a little more experience, you should be able to cheat something as simple as this in around five minutes, and without any hand-holding. Below is the cheat file containing the cheat used in this tutorial. A bonus variable is also included which will keep your special attack at maximum damage. Enjoy!

Downloads

Super Yoink Cheat - Requires The Cheat 1.2 or higher.

If this cheat file does not work for you, you will have to search for the variable manually as demonstrated in this tutorial. Variables are not guaranteed to have the same address every time.