Gaming

In Civ VI you can buy a unit in Apocalypse mode called a soothsayer. The soothsayer has the ability to cause natural disasters. If you build a wonder called The Great Bath, it increases the faith yield of all floodplains tiles on the river by 1. Each soothsayer can cause the river to flood twice, so you can essentially inifinitely stack faith onto the floodplains. The bigger the floodplains, the better, since it means that more tiles gain yields.

One of the older madden games (like somewhere between 06-09) I found a way to get guaranteed onside kicks. If I scored i would always get the ball back. Worked online too. Lots of rage quitters after the 2nd or 3rd time

In Chrono Trigger when you got to the other side of Medina (where it was monsters instead of humans and where Melchior was located) the villagers hated humans.

The shopkeeper would say "ha, you think I'll lower my prices for a human?!" When you tried to buy from him.

The exploit? You could also SELL stuff for way more money. It was awesome.

Ditto for Ruble farming at mount woe. If you spent a few hours doing it, you could get a lot of level XP and max out all your techs.

I was a professional game tester for 13 years, so I found some big ones in my time. But my favorite was DOOM 3 for Xbox. Triggering a cutscene caused the game to memory dump everything else, which despawned every enemy active on the map at the time. So if you memorized where the cutscene triggers were, you could sprint around the whole map, spawn in every monster, and then trigger the cutscene to kill everything without firing a single shot.

In Dyson Sphere Program you are able to build factory's in whole planets along multiple solar systems.

I needed power in a new planet and because You have limited abundant but limited resources I choose the renewable solar panels. Then I placed a ring of solar panels along the whole middle of the planet to have 24/7 power.

Not an exploit but players at the start whole put solar in one place and use battery's.

by complete accident while playing oblivion with friends (they were watching me), i clipped through the skingrad city gates while trying to mount a horse. i ended up in the unloaded or low poly version of the city where you can walk through walls and stuff. we were all in awe because we didn't know that was even possible.

then lightning struck the nearby transformer and our power went out for the rest of the day.

I mean I remember in one of the Lego Star Wars games there was a dooku boss fight that you could just hide behind a staircase to cheese. Kid me was smart like that

I was playing wynncraft (Minecraft MMORPG server) and discovered that a launch pad in a city would launch you way farther if you used a movement ability right as you stepped on it. I was testing to try recreate it and managed to teleport myself onto the invisible roof.

I did get tempbanned for being out of bounds and needed to explain how it happened, and now the launch pad is patched just teleports directly to the intended landing location

If anyone who plays on wynncraft wants to know where, it was to the airship in Detlas

In Lufia 2 on SNES there was some buggy setting in the options menu that when messed around with made whoever was in the fourth character slot get obscenely powerful stats, but also made the game take a lot longer to load battle results when they were in the party.

Might've just had a bad cartridge though, since the game was missing a chipset (the entire screen was black, not including sprites/text boxes) in a couple of places

This is rather complex to explain and involves two separate mechanics.

Part 1:

In the original Star Wars: Galaxies, each character had access to a bunch of different classes that you could level up with different kinds of experience. Experience was banked and used to 'buy' levels in the classes that used that kind of experience, and sometimes you needed more than one type of experience to buy a particular level. Most characters were a combination of levels from several different classes using several different kinds of experience.

There was a limit to how much experience of a given type that you could bank that was based on the number of levels you had in certain classes, and there was a limit to how many total levels you could take at once across all of your classes. It was also possible to 'forget' levels to allow you to respec and change up your build, but you'd lose the experience you spent on those levels. If you had experience banked and 'forgot' levels that brought your maximum experience below what you already had, you'd lose the excess. However, critically, this loss wouldn't be triggered until the next time the experience counter for that type changed, either by gaining experience or trying to spend it on a level.

Part 2:

SW:G had a faction system that allowed you to take missions from and ally with different groups in the Star Wars universe. The two main factions were, obviously, the Empire and the Rebellion. Completing missions for these factions gave you faction points that you could spend on a variety of things including special items, vehicles, resources, and faction-specific cosmetic or combat pets. You could also trade in your faction points for experience at a rather painful rate, something like 100 faction points per 1 experience point.

Here's where the exploit comes in:

If you have a lot of experienced banked in an experience type in which you have a lot of levels, when you 'forget' those levels, you'll end up with a bunch of surplus experience that you can't use, and that will be lost the next time you gain or spend experience of that category.

When you purchase experience for faction points, your faction point counter is decreased in increments of 100 points, and your experience counter is increased in increments of one point. While clearly not intended, this function also worked in reverse.

Therefore, if your experience went down during a faction point transaction, your faction points would go up by 100 times the amount of experience. If you dropped a bunch of levels, then use faction points to buy 1xp in that experience category, all of your banked experience above the limit would disappear, and your faction points would be increased by the number of experienced points removed times 100.

This allowed you to generate hilarious numbers of faction points by sacrificing experience.

What made this an exploit was what you could buy with the faction points. The most expensive items you could buy were the combat pets. Imperial allies could buy AT-STs to follow them around and blast the shit out of everything. They cost several tens of thousands of faction points each, and were intended as a major reward for someone who committed to grinding Imperial missions for a long period of time.

With this exploit, you could turn a couple hours of grinding experience into hundreds of thousands of faction points and buy a bunch of AT-STs to kill everything around you. I think there was a limit to how many pets you could have out at once, but that just meant that you'd have spares.

I personally bought 5 AT-STs with this exploit, went to Tattooine, and soloed Krayt Dragons for a few days before finally getting bored with the whole thing and quitting the game.

Back about 10-15 years ago when ROSE online was popular there was a trade hack I used to do. There were gems called garnets with ranks going up to 7 so what we'd do is put a g7 in the trade window, pause the game with our tool and swap the g7 with a rank 2-3 that was worth almost nothing compared to a 7. Made a crap tonne of money until I did it to a GM and got soft banned (could only walk around not run, trade, attack or anything else) probably the biggest exploit Ive ever done.

Skyrim. The game. There was an exploit for damn near everything.

There was a bug in Forza Horizon 2 where if you tried to fast travel anywhere before you had enough money to do so, the game would glitch and max out your credits to the games limit of 1 billion or something. I'm not sure if this got patched or not as I never had xbox live and couldn't receive updates after a certain point on my xbox 360

On rainbow six Vegas, we learned that, if you kill your teammate while they put a breaching charge on the door, you'll glitch the door so no one can open it.

Many o' nights locking people in the suicide room in calypso Casino.

Eventually they patched it out...after enough people complained. It it took months. Everyone talks about the toxicity of COD...but RB6 started it.

In Diablo 1 you could drop an item, walk back a few steps then click on the item to walk over and pick it up. Right as you pick it up you click a potion in your quick inventory and it would duplicate the item. There was a really strong buggy weapon called the staff of apocalypse, someone let me dupe theirs. Incredibly strong and broken weapon, could kill enemies out off line of sight/behind walls without seeing them.

Despite them being known for their difficulty, most FromSoft games I’ve played allowed for extensive cheesing if you decided you had enough dying.

In early WoW speed hacks weren't detectable. So just using cheat engine I could sprint around as fast as I wanted. Get 10 levels just from exploring xp. Saw all parts of the map that would have taken ages to reach high enough level for. I never took much advantage of it though because I didn't want my main to get banned. Just fun to mess with occasionally. It didn't take long to get patched where it would desync and disconnect, making it effectively useless. I tried years later after a long break and it was insta account ban.

In Prey (2016), within the first week or so from launch, if you put the material resources in the deconstructor then it would produce those same materials in extreme amounts. If you managed to do that for 64 stacks of each, then you would have more materials to make ammo or med packs (or even the upgrades) than you would need for the rest of the game. It completely broke the game and turned it from a semi horror survival to a complete action game. I had a blast with it before they patched it.

I happened to independently discover the Sand Hawk, Bee shield combo in Borderlands 2. It carried me through most of my second play through and about 10-ish levels.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North. You could hold LT to sell stacks of items, but you could also hold LT on gear and sell it infinitely until you release LT. Made buying the best gear stupid easy.

In the "Elite Force" UT game based on Star Trek Voyager, the medic's hypospray had an alt fire that would kill your target instantly.

The exploit part was, it worked on teammates even when team damage was disabled.

I got banned from pretty much every server and have no regrets

I found out about the Conferance Call and the Bee sheild combo bug in Borderlands 2, and shortly after I updated the wiki about it, it became meta. My CC and Bee sheild were heavily duped before people started farming better versions as well.

I remember that a long while back, playing the 1 hour trial of Dying Light (once it finished you could start over) when I didn’t have PsPlus to play online, i found a very obscure glitch that allowed you to play online without the subscription (normally even the demo asked you for the subscription). Don’t remember how it was, wonder if it works in the full game and if they ever patched it out.

Kingdom Hearts. Before leaving Destiny Islands I would spend hours grinding technical exp battling Tidus and parrying his attacks. His movement patterns were very predictable and easy to read and I would easily reach lvl 15-20 before even challenging Riku, let alone the first boss.

Mine is all the way back in Morrowind when I accidentally stumbled onto the weapon swap + enchantment bug and made a literal god character. First and only game I ever broke mostly cause it was right on the cusp of the pre/post everything on the web age.

In GTA Vice City Stories, if you placed your beaten up car into a garage, threw a grenade inside, and walked away to close the doors. Then you would receive a brand new polished car in place.

In GTA Vice City Stories, if you placed your beaten up car into a garage, threw a grenade inside, and walked away to close the doors. Then you would receive a brand new polished car in place.

In the Elder Scrolls Online there are these things called "Trials" which are 12 player dungeons that are extremely hard to pass. Back then the Maw of Lorkhaj trial was recently released you used to be able to use sorcerer characters to gap close outside of the map. Then you could basically make your way to the final boss and hit him from outside the zone so he wouldn't agro on you. Basically you could pass the trial on the hardest difficulty and get the Gold jewlery that dropped from there. I know the way has been fixed, but I still wonder if there are any similar glitches to be exploited?

I used to have a mouse that had a speedclicker-button (no clue why, I simply purchased it because it was comfortable). I found out that a speedclicker in Predator: Hunting Grounds completely broke the weapons. I could empty an entire 40rnd magazine within a single second. That was not fun for the Predator player when I found that out (I killed him in 2 bursts). I only did it in a single match tho as it was obviously broken and ruining the other players match.

Throwables in Lies Of P. Literally carried me through the entire game.

I always end up finding duplication glitches and absolutely ruining the economy in Minecraft Multiplayer servers. Especially Prison, Factions, and Survival.

Kotor 1 you could not level up until you become a Jedi then you get extra Jedi levels. You just have to survive the first planet. But then you’re a bit of a super Jedi, at least compared to what the developers expected.

Me and my friends figured out a glitch in a bar slot machine years back. We took that machine for about 20k. That's a pretty big glitch.

Pretty early on after Left 4 Dead was released, my friends and I, playing the zombies in online multiplayer, discovered an insidious form of attrition warfare. We found that it was possible to push a box in front of an elevator door before the humans could fully ascend to exit it.

So the elevator door would open, and then the humans... just couldn't leave. Their confusion at the obstacle was palpable. We took to watching them for a few moments out of sheer schadenfreude. Then we proceeded to terrorfuck those humans to death, securing their defeat. This went on for days in various matches until Valve patched the box from being a dynamic rigid body to a static one, or at least one with such high mass that we were unable to apply enough force to move it anymore.

First thing that comes to mind is that on an evil run in Baldur’s Gate 3 you can infinitely farm parasites by repeatedly adding and removing Minthara from your party.

Way before it was shared online in the witcher 3 I found out I could buy clams and dismantle them to get pearls and sell those for a lot more

Infinite resources in Black and White. I think it was patched out later

In Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2006) the Dark Side users could use the Force Choke ability. When using a force power, it depleted a meter that gave you just a limited time to use the power.

Force Choke would stop the target and drain some health for the duration. Well, we found out if you used the ability and then swapped it to a different one while using it, your ability meter would refill and you could use it indefinitely. We used it a bit in online play.

Halo 2 exploits were the shit. Superbounce, double shot, bxr, capture the flag warthog glitch, sword flying....goes on and on.

Duplication glitch in Pokemon Emerald. It didn’t just break the game, but the entire franchise. I didn’t need to feel bad about moving up my legendaries to future generations because I could have a copy in each and every game I owned.

The infinite Master balls, rare candies, and PP Max’s also came in clutch, especially to sweeten the deal when it came to trading so I could complete my Pokedex.

Everyone always talks about the alchemy glitches in the Elder Scrolls games but I rarely see mention of the Soul Bind glitches from Morrowind. By using the spell crafting and adding “Soul Bind on target” it would make the other spell effect permanent. So you could permanently increase all your attributes. Cast a levitate spell that would last forever. Or my personal favourite was permanent summons. You could have your own permanent army of summoned Golden Saints or Dremora. It also made them lootable, so you could get infinite money by looting and selling their powerful swords.

I still remember rolling up on the Vivec vaults with an army of saints. Get the guards to attack you by wearing their armour then your saints would mash them into a pulp for you and you wouldn’t even get a bounty for it. So OP

Bonus mention for the item duplication glitch from the original Pokémon games, fighting the weird matrix Pokémon that was just numbers and letters. That could break your game though

In Fallout 76 I realised that using a simple click macro on my mouse made my Gatling Gun, of which I had an incredibly rare version that already did bonkers damage, would fire at an insanely high speed.

I could solo most bosses in seconds.

There's a lot, but my favorite one was the War Chest Duplication in Dragon Age Inquisition. Just dupe stacks and stacks of legendary resources for better crafts. Saved you hundreds (literally) of hours of just pointlessly running around picking up shit

In the online game Teeworlds, when City Server were popular, i found an exploit that would crash the server.

There are spots in the server where you could buy Health, even if youre dead. I died in one of those spots, bought health, and suddenly the server crashed kicking everyone out.

i did this so often, and people figured it out, that i even got mentioned in the Forums calling me a Hacker and how i was doing it and how to prevent it, but they couldnt figure it out lol.

Glorious Days of Teeworlds, i really miss the game, sad it has gone to shits

I don't find exploits, and I'm not sure if it counts, but I remember being a kid (between 6 and 8,) and playing one of the NHL games on SNES. If you beelined down the center of the ice with the puck and swerved as you reached the goalie, it would always go in. I would win games with ridiculous amounts of goals scored.

Missingno.

NBA Jam: TE for Sega Genesis. There was a spot just near the top of the key that you could jump from and goal tend every jump shot without it being counted as goal tending. Basically anyone who played against me (my brother and sister) couldn’t score a jump shot. Ever. So obviously I ended up playing against the cpu most of the time. The cpu didn’t punch me in the arm when they lost.

Quite possibly also in Dying Light. Me and a friend did the shop area, where you had to pick up supplies and turn off the electrified water, a ton on normal mode, but then turned the game to insane mode when we actually got back to the Tower and before handing them to the supplies guy, and got a ton of experience that way, since I'm pretty sure you got more exp in insane mode

Pokémon Gold and silver duplication glitch, basically allowing you to make as many master balls as your little heart desired.

I have a couple, actually.

While common knowledge even the, I discovered quantum stockpiling in Dwarf Fortress before ever reading about it. I found out that dumping zones could be used to hold an infinite number of "marked for dumping" items. Made storing stone after big excavations way easier.

In Dark Souls 1, I realized that most enemies could be beat by holding up your shield and circle-strafing around them. Kinda boring, though.

While confirmed not to actually be an exploit, I was one of the first people to find out that, in Baldur's Gate 3, the Pact of The Blade Warlock's extra attack stacks with other classes' extra attack. This meant that a 5 paladin/5 Warlock/2 Fighter could deal out 6 attacks in a turn... not even counting haste or anything. When news got out about it, there was a lot of arguing over whether or not it was going to get patched as an exploit. However, Larian ended up confirming that it was intended.