Overview
Randomly tested 30 experienced human players for cheats and found that most of them do have cheats. Includes description of common cheats in BTZ for 2020 to look out for.
Introduction
I have spent almost 250 hours on BTZ mode primarily as an Apex Predator zombie and have recently stopped playing due to the shear amount of cheaters online nowadays. I am not using this guide as a way to shame pro survivor players out there but to inform night hunters of common cheats used. I will be describing the different cheats used by human players in BTZ mode not the night hunter(only have seen infinite health/stamina). For this guide, cheats are considered an outside mod, unimplemented by the developer, that gives an advantage in this mode for the humans, excluding glitches such as side kick and backwards slide. I only included cheats that gave a large advantage in BTZ specifically, so cheats like no recoil, infinite ammo and weapon spawners will not be included.
I found 30 high experience human players to play against as a night hunter and used a mod I created to download their game files to see if they had any cheats installed. Unfortunately, I cannot tell which of the cheats were active in the current game, but I can report on the cheats they had installed and how they work. I also noted where in the world these players had their steam profiles based in and recorded their hours in Dying Light.
Cheats Summary
Just because many of these players had cheats installed, doesn’t mean that they necessarily used them while I played with them on BTZ. For example, I confronted many of them about their cheats and other than outright denial I got responses of them only using them if I used cheats with them as a way to counter play. I only chose to check 30 random players I got assigned and this is a very small sample size to extrapolate to the hundreds of thousands of players that play Dying Light so take this statistic with a grain of salt. i will not make references to or name any individual players for the purposes of shaming them in this guide.
Very many of the players I tested did indeed possess several different cheats. Surprisingly, 76.67% (23/30) of the players had cheats installed while they played against me. This confirms that VAC doesn’t work in Dying Light since my VAC setting was always on for me. Hacked weapons were even more common upon looking at the inventory files of players, with 90% of all players having at least one. As discussed later on, hacked weapons don’t give too much of an advantage and thus can be considered as a intermediary between a cheat and a glitch. Here are the results per region as to which players were cheating but did not necessarily have hacked weapons.
Cheats Part 1 (In the order I saw them used)
Description: By far the most common cheat used since it is available on Nexus Mods[www.nexusmods.com]. The cheater has a special grappling hook, often with an elemental effect, that has no cooldown and has a further range. If you notice that the human travels a very far distance when using the hook or uses it more than 3 times in a row, then they are likely using this cheat.
How to Counter: Do not get killed by the human! Try to annoy them as much as possible and pounce when they quickly switch to it as they will have put away the UV flashlight. If you die, they can get to your nest extremely fast due to the no cooldown and destroy your nest in mere seconds. They can also attack you very fast with it at close range, taking 20% (30/150) of your health away each hit.
Important Note: can be used to destroy nests and attack you very fast since it has almost no delay between using it and has no cooldown.
Description: Allows the human to see a rectangular prism around you at all times and displays your distance too. They can see you much better with this than the regular survival sense so don’t ever expect to surprise them! If a human still can perfectly see you even when you use a sensor suppressor spit on them, then they almost definitely have this since the sensor spits do not blind them to where you are.
How to Counter: Sensor suppressor spits will not do anything to them, so never use them. Since this cheat is so common, you might be better off never using it in the first place. Sometimes they get confused on how to get to you if you are through a wall since they see you so clearly and you can use this to get them quickly with a UV spit by coming around a corner and shooting at point blank range.
Description: By far the most annoying cheat that many players use. Not only do they use this to line up their shots with crossbows and shoot at you, but 2/3 of the mainstream cheats I found had an auto feature where the aimbot would activate on its own and use UV flashlight whenever you pounce the human! This is how many of the players you frequently play with, seem to instantly turn around and UV flash you, just before you can kill them. The aimbot also defies normal viewing restrictions during certain animations like falling and using the zipline, where the hunter usually can easily pounce the human while they are stuck looking in a certain direction by the game. You can tell if a human has this if you pounce them from less than 4m from behind and they manage to UV flash you since the time for them to react is way too short given the distance, even with a very high DPI mouse. The aimbot even changes the equipment slot to their UV flashlight just as a pounce occurs so you will not be able to pounce them even if they are blocking one of your spits with a shield. The aimbot is not a prediction aimbot as far as I can tell, so the human’s accuracy will not be too good with a crossbow but can be deadly accurate with a rifle.
How to Counter: Unfortunately, many of the experienced players resort to this cheat since blocking a pounce from behind is so difficult and requires incredibly fast reflexes, and is downright impossible at a close distance. You will pretty much never be able to land a pounce on them since their aimbot will always look at you no matter what. Sometimes you can manage to pounce them if their view of you is partially blocked by an obstruction such as an arch or even a roof of a building. Your #1 priority should be to hit them with a UV spit before pouncing since they can’t flash you without their flashlight working.
Description: This cheat makes humans automatically dodge any of your tackle attempts at them by jumping just as you attack them. After a few failed tackle attempts where they magically dodge you, you can conclude they are probably using this common cheat.
How to Counter: The cheat can’t prevent them dodging your tackles if they are climbing up a ledge, using the grappling hook or you tackle them from behind. You can also tackle through some solid objects to some extent by looking towards the player. Some objects cannot be tackled through and the cheat will still auto evade you even if you do this glitch. Usually you have to resort to other tactics besides tackling when the human has this cheat on.
Description: A cheat that makes the player skip all stun animations when you attack them, allowing them to instantly start attacking you again. Humans with this on will not be affected by your ground pounds so you will do the missed animation even if they are right next to you. Tackling them will not stun them and not force them to take fall damage from a building like it usually does.
How to Counter: Don’t use any of your power moves against them since they will attack you during your recovery (especially for ground pound). Rely more on pouncing and using your spits.
Description: This is pretty easy to identify actually. Speed potions only boost the human’s speed a tiny amount and speedhackers go at least twice as fast as they usually do. This large boost gives them a major advantage as they dodge twice the distance and can easily sprint out of range for your groundpound, making it hard for you to even land a spit on them.
How to Counter: Playing with these players is very difficult because their speed roughly matches yours and they easily dodge any spits you use as well as your ground pound. It’s best just to identify this early and quit the game to avoid a defeat. They usually have all the cheats listed above too since the two cheat packs that have speedhack have those cheats included.
Description: These are different then the “hacked weapons” covered later. The one shot kill is done by a cheat hat the human must have installed to override the default damage tables used normally in BTZ. They can also increase the weapon swing speed of weapons to make two handed weapons swing much faster so that they appear to kill you in one hit. These warped damage values also apply to nests, allowing them to pretty much instantly destroy them.
How to Counter: As a night hunter you must be very careful for when you choose to tackle or pounce as one missed pounce will get you killed. Use your spits and keep in mind that some users of this mod don’t have UV aimbot or auto tackle; at least one cheat pack doesn’t come with these other features.
Cheats Part 2
Description: Human quickly goes into their game menu to either teleport to each of your nests to instantly destroy them or just auto destroy them straight from the menu depending on the cheat pack they have.
How to Counter: I would just leave as soon as you see them teleport but they often are quite new to the game and you can pounce them as they fall from the sky above your nest before they can land on the ground when they teleport to it.
Description: Human essentially locks you in place, not allowing you to look around, move, attack or do anything at all except go into the menu and drop out.
How To Counter: Just drop out, I hate to say that there is nothing you can do about this.
Description: Pretty rare cheat where the humans jump as high as you and use it to insta kill you with the Death From Above perk.
How to Counter: Do not let them get above you; just try to pounce them mid jump from behind and above since they seem to forget using their flashlights alot.
Hacked Weapons and other questionable tactics (not glitches)
Hacked weapons are weapons that have an enormous amount of damage on them, much higher than is possible normally for the game. Many cheat packs offer options to spawn them into the game with strange elemental effects like a level 4 toxin upgrade. They don’t provide too much of an advantage on Be The Zombie because the damage of all weapons is normalized, which negates their high damage output. Normal night walkers, the fast zombies that defend you nests a little, can be easily killed with these weapons or any zombie encountered besides the night hunter, giving a slight advantage. These hacked weapons are so rampant throughout Dying Light that I don’t even consider them as cheating since almost every player has them (including me) and they barely give an advantage. This is not to be confused with a cheat that changes the damage tables of weapons covered earlier in the guide.
Binds can be used for performing normally challenging moves like a side kick or backward slide with the press of a button. This doesn’t quite constitute a cheat but many players who have to manually do these moves screw them up as opposed to the players who have the extra macro keys to do these moves.
These are used to temporarily cut all internet connection of the human to you, essentially giving them breathing room to stop your pounce or do any number of things like use a medkit or get further away. If timed properly, the human will lag across the level very fast as if speed hacking but may not actually have speedhack.
I quit BTZ mode because of all the cheaters I got paired with and it turns our they are much more common than you would think. Keep in mind that the statistics I got were from high ranking players and not the newer players just starting BTZ mode. The best thing you can do with a cheater is to comment on their profile to inform other players of the cheats they have so that they can avoid them. I seem to recall that the newer players have far fewer cheaters among them from when I first started BTZ mode. Playing within your friend groups is a better idea than going public since you usually know these people more and they will be less likely to use cheats to beat you. Ultimately it’s up to you whether you want to continue playing BTZ given all these cheats and I hope that my countering advise helps you deal with the cheaters in BTZ mode if you continue to play.
P. S. I really wish Techland would beef up the anti-cheat so that I can get playing again.