Years ago I was lost in the Shaded Woods, a foggy forest full of moaning trees. I didn’t have enough health to fight the invisible backstabbing murder ghosts, and every time I ran away from the spooky sound of their footsteps, I got lost in the fog all over again.
That’s when a hacker invaded and injected me with hundreds of cursed swords, corrupting my save file and dooming Dark Souls 2 to crash over and over.
It was deep magic, more powerful than any game system or lore, overwhelming the code itself. To uncurse myself, I’d have to embrace the darkness and download cheat tools too.
And now I’ve tracked down my hacker, to thank him.
Dark Souls 2 has a complex reputation.
It’s ambitious and prophetic. “Many experiments do not pan out,” says Aevee Bee, a writer on Neon White, “but you don’t get to Elden Ring without it.” Austin Walker, host of Friends At The Table, agrees: “It anticipates so much of what follows.”
It’s disappointing. “They bailed late on a darkness mechanic that would have been really bold,” says Bennett Foddy of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy and Baby Steps. “My guess is it got nixed for being ‘annoying.’ Games need to be more annoying.”
Yet we love it anyway. “It’s still the best soulslike at retaining the *feeling* of playing Dark Souls 1 for the first time,” says the director of Celeste, Maddy Thorson, implying that Dark Souls 1 is the best one. Artist and writer Oma Keeling concurs: “It’s my favourite, exemplified by the hub area, a hole in the ground next to the hut with the talking cat. It’s a fairytale.”
So when I got hacked, I just thought Dark Souls 2 was being quirky and unique.
The first popup message was routine: another player was invading my game.
Fortunately I was safe in this foggy forest full of backstabbing ghosts. Besides, what was the invader going to do, stab me? Get in line.
The second popup message changed my life: I had just received 500 Enchanted Black Knight Ultra Greatsword +14’s.
Wow, Dark Souls 2 really is the best one! Maybe the ghosts sent me this generous gift out of pity?… No, at the time I didn’t suspect the invader was a hacker injecting me with hacked swords.
I didn’t suspect a thing until he made me explode. That’s not a metaphor. My hacker literally bathed me in a fullscreen inferno of acid hellfire. I couldn’t even see my pathetic corpse through all the poison, lightning, piss, and blood.
“You died,” said Dark Souls 2.
I woke up at a bonfire outside the forest. My hacker was gone and the nightmare was over. I just hoped the acid hadn’t melted my brand new ultra greatswords.
But when I opened my inventory screen, the game crashed.
Ah Dark Souls 2, you rascal. Bold ambitious prophetic quirky lovable games can sometimes be a bit buggy and unstable, no big deal. I rebooted the game.
But when I opened my inventory screen, the game crashed.
I began to suspect those 500 Enchanted Black Knight Ultra Greatsword +14’s weren’t so enchanting after all. No big deal, I’d just open my inventory and discard the swords.
But when I opened my inventory screen, the game crashed.
Uh oh.
“The crash is based in the upgrade level of the item,” says Dark Souls 2 modder Ethan ‘Boblord’ Patterson. “DS2 upgrades max at +10 but it’s stored as a hexadecimal digit, which can be any number from 0 to 15.”
“The game dereferences memory based on the upgrade level,” adds Yui, creator of popular Dark Souls and Elden Ring seamless co-op mods. “When an item exceeds the usual upgrade limit, it will access invalid memory and cause crashes.”
It’s an old exploit, dating back to 2015. However FromSoftware / Bandai Namco’s official response offered +0 sympathy. If they detected any invalid items, regardless of the source, they still threatened to “softban” you anyway, condemning your character to matchmake only with other convicted hackers. So just don’t pick up any cursed swords! Easy, right?
Unfortunately, as I discovered, hackers can force invalid items directly into your inventory. “Item injection is an ancient script,” Boblord says. “You can basically just pick what item you want them to have, click send, and it’s put right in the inventory of an unsuspecting victim… There’s no packet validation.”
This core vulnerability is baked into the peer-to-peer netcode; your computer will always trust whatever other computers say. This lax attitude to security came to a head in 2022 when FromSoftware was forced to disable multiplayer across all Dark Souls games to fix multiple Remote Code Execution exploits (RCEs), severe security holes that let hackers run any code (keyloggers, viruses) on your computer. When they patched these exploits, why didn’t they also fix the rest of Dark Souls 2?
“I don’t know why,” says Yui, who also reported an RCE back in 2020. “The vulnerability documents I sent them regarding all of the games covered item injection. For some reason there were a few well-known exploits that FromSoftware neglected to patch in Dark Souls 2 specifically.”
Now the community has taken its safety into its own hands; Yui is the creator of Blue Acolyte, a popular Dark Souls 2 anti-cheat mod that blocks hacked items and injections and disconnects banned hackers. It also blocks trendy new DS2 exploits, like hackers impersonating the matchmaking server to abuse and crash players without even invading. It’s essential protection for any player.
… Unfortunately it was too late for Blue Acolyte to protect me. I hadn’t been using it, and so I was already injected with these cursed swords that crashed my inventory.
I considered finishing Dark Souls 2 without opening my inventory ever again. After all, people do Level 1 runs all the time — very skilled patient people. Hmm. My no-inventory run lasted about two seconds.
I also tried to sell off the cursed swords, braving a gauntlet of pirates and giant spider monkey demons to visit Gavlan, the only NPC who takes items, but he was gone already. Maybe he didn’t want to catch my inventory curse, which would’ve been devastating for a merchant.
Clearly I couldn’t undo this curse with game mechanics. I’d have to embrace the darkness.
In Dark Souls lore, everyone is cursed to lose their memory and Humanity, to become a zombie-like Hollow. Each death Hollows you further, but consequences differ in each game.
When you die in Dark Souls 1, any Hollowing cuts you off from multiplayer features, both friendly and hostile. In Dark Souls 2, each Hollowing decreases your maximum health, like a fun extra punishment for dying. But Dark Souls 3 flips Hollowing into a bonus questline for free level-ups, strong summons, cool-looking armor, and even marriage. By falling in love with failure, you become happier and more powerful than all those so-called “skilled” players. (Dark Souls 3 is the best one.)
It emphasizes a deeper lesson of Dark Souls: when you die and lose your unspent experience points, it’s actually empowering, because now you have nothing left to lose. Drowning in a poison swamp, dying to a boss for the 20th time, getting cursed by hundreds of swords — it’s freedom to live fully.
To exercise my freedom and transform into a depraved hacker Hollow, I got a tool called Cheat Engine, beloved by cheaters and anti-cheaters alike.
“Cheat Engine can directly modify and mess with the game memory as it’s running,” Boblord says. “It is a very awesome, very powerful, and very dangerous tool that can do pretty much anything.”
After loading my Dark Souls 2 save, I opened Boblord’s cheat table in Cheat Engine, attached it to the game process, and activated the +14 Crash Protection script. With the curse quarantined, I could finally open my inventory and safely discard the hacked swords.
It must’ve taken less than a minute to clean my save file. It was a bit disappointing.
I had come all this way, it’d be a shame to stop here. There were so many more cheat scripts to explore: SuperArmor, Unlimited Stamina, Auto Parry, Remove Fog Gates, Teleport to Mytha the Baneful Queen, Restore Humanity, Disable Gravity, Fly…
Then I saw it: the Spawn Item script. It just needed the unholy numbers. Quantity: 500. Infusion 8: Enchanted. Item ID 0050B810: Black Knight Ultra Greatsword. Upgrade Level: +14.
It must’ve taken my hacker less than a minute to derail my life and plunge me into the abyss. It would be so easy to be like him, to invade, to inject someone else…
But I couldn’t. That last pesky stupid pitiful shred of Humanity wouldn’t let me go completely Hollow. I had cured my curse, and that would have to be enough. With regret and relief, I closed and uninstalled Cheat Engine.
So what kind of person could do this? I had to find my hacker and ask him.
Other victims also injected with 500 Black Knight Ultra Greatswords had complained on Reddit, enough to ban my hacker’s account when he bragged about it all. Fortunately his Counter-Strike aimbot videos were still up, and if I zoomed-in I could see his full Steam username listed in the on-screen kill log. I cross-referenced it with Blue Acolyte’s Steam ID blocklist until I found a match — banned about a week after he had hacked me. It was definitely him. I sent a friend request and we started chatting.
My hacker Fu estimates he hacked “around 30” people in total. “It’s easy to learn once you see how the code and stuff works,” he says, “it’s probably one of the most unstable Souls games.”
However, Fu claims he’s changed his ways. “I stopped once I realized I was just ruining the game for myself,” he says, “because after that day when I played legit, like 80% of my invasions were disconnects.” This makes sense; when Blue Acolyte detects a banned player, it disconnects. Effective anti-cheat really does change hackers’ hearts after all.
But without his hacking, I wouldn’t have stared into the abyss and seen myself. I had to thank Fu, I had to forgive him from the depths of my pathetic ruined withered heart, no matter how much anguish and despair he had put me through.
“no problem lol,” he said.
A dozen hours later in my Dark Souls 2 run, I defeated The Duke’s Dear Freja, a giant spider boss possessed by a petrified dragon. Then, with the Duke’s key, I found a genuine Black Knight Ultra Greatsword. Although it didn’t crash my inventory, I didn’t have enough Faith to equip it. Oh well.
When I journeyed back to the Shaded Ruins to tell Manscorpion Tark I defeated the spider dragon, the NPC was skeptical: “But our master never dies, only changes form…”
Tark gave me a rare Fragrant Branch of Yore to get to a scenic overlook above the foggy Shaded Woods where I had been hacked long ago. There I found a strange glowing object, unlike anything else I had seen in the game. Dark Souls 2 was always full of surprises like this! I had come so far and learned so much. What reward did I deserve after this epic journey of pain, perseverance, and hardwon wisdom?
When I picked up the item, the popup message said I was now the lucky owner of 500 Enchanted Black Knight Ultra Greatsword +14’s.
Quotes were edited for length and readability. This is a true story, though all screenshots are Photoshopped recreations.
If you play Dark Souls 2, make sure you get Yui’s Blue Acolyte mod to protect yourself.
You can also now use Boblord’s new streamlined DS2 Inventory Cleaner tool to clean invalid item injections from your inventory, no Cheat Engine required.
