A hardware ID, usually shortened to HWID, is not one number. It is a fingerprint assembled from many identifiers your machine exposes, and understanding that it is plural is the single most useful thing to know about it. When an anti-cheat builds your fingerprint it typically reads some combination of: Motherboard and system identifiers from SMBIOS — the board serial, the system UUID, the manufacturer strings. These are burned in at the factory and are among the most stable values on the machine. Disk serial numbers for every drive attached, read directly from the storage controller rather than from the filesystem. This is why formatting a drive changes nothing. MAC addresses for every netwo
, usually shortened to HWID, is not one number. It is a fingerprint assembled from many identifiers your machine exposes, and understanding that it is plural is the single most useful thing to know about it. When an anti-cheat builds your fingerprint it typically reads some combination of:
Motherboard and system identifiers
from SMBIOS — the board serial, the system UUID, the manufacturer strings. These are burned in at the factory and are among the most stable values on the machine.
for every drive attached, read directly from the storage controller rather than from the filesystem. This is why formatting a drive changes nothing.
for every network adapter, including virtual ones created by VPN software and Bluetooth radios.
Windows installation identifiers
such as MachineGuid, which lives in the registry and is generated when Windows is installed.
on modern systems, including the endorsement key, which is cryptographically bound to the module and cannot be changed at all.
, which are less unique individually but narrow the field. The anti-cheat hashes several of these together. That has an important consequence:
changing one value usually does nothing
, because the fingerprint still matches on the rest. People who swap a hard drive after a ban and find themselves banned again have discovered this the expensive way. The disk serial guide covers that specific case.
A spoofer sits between the anti-cheat and the values it wants to read, and returns different ones. What separates a good implementation from a useless one is where it sits. User-mode spoofers patch API calls in the process that asks. They are easy to write, easy to detect, and largely worthless against kernel-mode anti-cheats, because those read the values from below the layer being patched. If a spoofer does not require a driver, be sceptical. Kernel-mode spoofers load a driver and intercept the requests at the point where the operating system talks to the hardware. The anti-cheat asks the disk for its serial and receives whatever the driver reports. Because the interception happens beneath
A spoofer sits between the anti-cheat and the values it wants to read, and returns different ones. What separates a good implementation from a useless one is
patch API calls in the process that asks. They are easy to write, easy to detect, and largely worthless against kernel-mode anti-cheats, because those read the values from below the layer being patched. If a spoofer does not require a driver, be sceptical.
load a driver and intercept the requests at the point where the operating system talks to the hardware. The anti-cheat asks the disk for its serial and receives whatever the driver reports. Because the interception happens beneath the anti-cheat's own vantage point, the substitution is not visible as a substitution. Most spoofers are also
, and that is a feature rather than a limitation. The spoofed values live in memory and are discarded at reboot, so the real identifiers are never modified and nothing is permanently written to your firmware or your drives. Permanently rewriting a board serial is possible in some cases and is a genuinely bad idea — it can brick hardware and it leaves evidence. The practical rhythm is: boot, run the spoofer, launch the game, play. Reboot, and you start again. The setup guide walks through the sequence and the mistakes people make in it.
There are three distinct situations, and they call for different things. You have already been hardware banned. This is the obvious case. Your account is gone and new accounts are banned quickly or immediately, because the ban follows the machine. A spoofer is the only realistic route back short of replacing components. See the ban bypass guide. You are about to start cheating and have not been banned. This is the case people underestimate, and it is the more important one. Running a spoofer before your first session means that if a ban lands it is recorded against identifiers that were never real. Your genuine hardware stays clean and recovery is trivial. Running one only after a ban means
There are three distinct situations, and they call for different things.
You have already been hardware banned.
This is the obvious case. Your account is gone and new accounts are banned quickly or immediately, because the ban follows the machine. A spoofer is the only realistic route back short of replacing components. See the ban bypass guide.
You are about to start cheating and have not been banned.
This is the case people underestimate, and it is the more important one. Running a spoofer
your first session means that if a ban lands it is recorded against identifiers that were never real. Your genuine hardware stays clean and recovery is trivial. Running one only after a ban means the anti-cheat already holds your real fingerprint, and you are now working around a record rather than preventing one.
You share hardware or buy second-hand.
A machine bought used may carry someone else's ban. So can a shared family PC. In both cases a spoofer separates your account from a history you did not create. The cost asymmetry is what makes this an easy decision. A spoofer costs a few pounds a month. Replacing a motherboard, drives and network adapter costs several hundred and a weekend — a comparison we work through in spoofer versus new PC. If you use any cheat in any game with kernel anti-cheat, run a spoofer from the first session. Not after something goes wrong.