The current state of cheating in Deadlock
What is Deadlock?
Deadlock is one of the most popular Valve released games in recent time peaking at over 263,000 active players as of 10-10-2026, While this game is receiving enormous amounts of love it is still in an early beta and technically invite only.
Deadlock is a 6v6 third person shooter/MOBA hybrid game, gaining attention from Dota and Overwatch players for its mechanics. It has been in an early beta since 2024 being updated extremely often with an enormous content update featuring an entire map redesign and six new hero's as of recent.
Why do people cheat in an unreleased game?
Cheaters exist in every game, Counterstrike, Dota, Fortnite, COD, Wardogs etc, the unfortunate truth is any game that is popular will always have cheaters - Mecca Chameleon Cheats.
It usually stems from a skill issue or a general hunger to win no matter the cost, and from those feelings a market worth $8.5 billion dollars a year was born. People from all walks of life cheat in these games, there have even been clips shown of young children cheating on csgo at lan events.
There is a few distinctive ways of cheating depending on what game you play and how you intend to play it.
Types of cheats.
Internal/External Cheats:
These genre of cheats are either reserved for games with a lackluster on-device anticheat (Counterstrike, Mecca Chameleon etc) or to be used under the assumption that you will be banned eventually.
This type of cheat is usually used under the pretense of "ill be banned regardless so might aswell make it obvious" normally including exploit based features such as magic bullets (Foreshadowing), noclip etc.
DMA Cheats:
DMA cheats are extremely popular and used almost exclusively on games that have invasive on-device anticheats due to the nature of it (Valorant, Delta force, FaceIT, numerous CN based games), DMA works by installing an FPGA board into their main PC giving a secondary device unrestricted access to read memory, This is usually paired with a HDMI FUSER to overlay esp and other cheat visuals onto the main pc without touching the main device.
Cheat sellers offer numerous different types of firmware to flash onto the board to impersonate legitimate hardware, lower tier firmware will require you to install things like blackmagic drivers but more popular ones do not. Normally people believe that IOMMU prevents dma based cheats, and while this is true most game developers failed to implement IOMMU blocks properly for a long time, FaceIT will only enforce IOMMU restrictions once you reach level 10, and valorant has had similar issues in the past.
DMA is used only in cases where you do not want to be banned and "legit cheat", meaning you utilize minor assistances to gain an advantage, these types of cheats are also paired with a MACKU or similar devices to send aim instructions for aimbot.
Colour Bots:
Colour Bots are an adaptation from the valorant community after DMA crackdowns that scan for the enemy outline hue to provide aimbot, this is usually done via an OBS capture feeding a second PC or once again via a HDMI FUSER, Fusers implement EDID spoofing to prevent detection and are currently the most popular for valorant, these are of course paired with aiming devices.
Similar methods have been implemented to develop cheats on Console such as Apex Legends, but this has also been implemented for games without outline Hue's such as R6 Seige by training a light AI model on the games character models.
Where does Deadlock sit in this selection?
The most popular type of cheat for deadlock is internal/external cheats, as is typical with valve games there is almost no on-device anticheat and everything sits serverside. While people believe this is a mistake its actually a needed step forward, any windows versions past 26H2 restrict direct kernal reads due to the Crowdstrike Catastrophy forcing developers to go through a windows API, of course cheaters dont care and will simply spoof the responses from these apis gaining elevation against an anticheat rendering it useless. Deadlock as a game has a very unique selection of mechanics along side the normal shooting mechanics, the character selection is vast combining gun carry heros requiring extreme aim skill and other characters that have almost no gunplay and revolve around their unique abilities.
The largest cheat seller for deadlock.
Umbrella is a cheat seller most notoriously known for being the largest Dota cheat provider but in recent times have branched out to support Deadlock aswell, Umbrella has an extremely indepth cheat containing 100's of prebuilt modules to assist regular gameplay but also an internal lua scripting functionality to allow people to custom build their own Umbrella vscode
The base cheat includes the normal things like aimbot, esp, in-world helpers (timers and such) Miscellaneous features such as autoparry, Dodger (Dodges projectiles / enemy abilities), Movement helpers like auto strafe, Region spoofers and general utility.
The autoparry also includes an optional Light Melee parry which was thought to be impossible previously, observing this ingame you can always tell as due to the timing of a light melee they are always frame perfect.
Hero Helpers
The main feature of this cheat is Combo settings, a vast selection of aids for every character's abilities. A hero named Bebop has an ability where he throws out a hook grabbing an enemy and pulling him back, the combo settings allow a bindable feature to auto-aim this ability with four aim variants, Default -> Regular aiming, Silent/PSilent -> this abuses viewangles to "throw" the hook from a position in which you are not aiming, and finally Magic Bullets...
Bebop's Grapple Arm aim menu with Magic Bullets selected.
Magic Bullet Exploit
Magic Bullets are a type of aiming method most popularized from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(video_game) due to an infamous clientside netcode exploit that allowed them to manipulate the hit registration of bullets, allowing them to aim at the clouds and manipulate the shots into perfect hits. Deadlock doesnt have this exact issue but we have a variation of it.
I can only speculate on the ability magic bullet setting but what i can say for certain is how the Bullet based version works, Thanks to a member of the umbrella discord who develops these scripts for the community we have a lua module for magic bullets:
Ability Magic Bullets demonstration supplied with the article.
The script abuses what i assume is a lack of viewangle/camera position validation serverside to manipulate the server into thinking the player has Line of Sight to hit the enemy, below is the code snippet:
if not wanted or vlen(vsub(wanted, base)) < 0.5 or not firing(cmd) then return end
local aim = visible_aim(target, wanted, speed, selected_bones(true))
local ang = aim and utils.calc_angle(wanted, aim)
if not ang then return end
cmd.vec_camera_position = wanted
cmd.ang_camera_angles = ang
fix_movement(cmd, ang.yaw)
vec_camera_position supplies the manipulated origin, then ang_camera_angles points from that origin to the target enemy, observing the example video provided with the script you can see a noticable curve of the bullets, but this is simply a clientside artifact, on the enemies side the bullets and most likely the abilities simply go straight.
Gunfire Magic Bullets demonstration supplied with the Lua example.
Exploits
There have been numerous exploits for Deadlock in the past, most notable one where cheaters could flip their character model to be under the ground, essentially making them invulnerable while also being able to deal damage. This exploit was being sold for as little as $20 on a few exploit marketplaces but was reverse engineered and published for free, It was published as a Polarity shift exploit / Model Flipper. Being an extremely overpowered exploit the lua module is only nine lines:
local flipper = Menu.Create("Miscellaneous", "", "Other", "Main", "Main")
local ZOV = flipper:Switch("Model Flipper", false, "\u{f362}")
ZOV:ToolTip("Flips your model upside down. Enable, then charge heavy melee to flip under the map.")
callback.on_createmove:set(function(cmd)
if not ZOV:Get() then return end
cmd.viewangles = Angle(cmd.viewangles.pitch, cmd.viewangles.yaw, -190)
end)
When enabled it forces the roll component of every outgoing viewangle command to -190 and caused the playermodel to flip under the map. But what about unpatched exploits?
Footage associated with the Model Flipper exploit.
On 24/07/2026 a semi well known script maker published the Coordinate Overflow Exploit, attatched was a video of the character Dynamo using his 2nd ability which normally teleports you a short distance, but instead of moving 10m forward he teleports from one side of the map to another, as of 11/10/2026 this is still reportedly working, due to it still apparently working i wont share code snippets but it simply sets an extreme teleport location overflowing the regular destination.
Footage presented as a coordinate overflow demonstration.
The Crash Exploit
On 05/09/2026 another well known script maker published a player crasher and anti crasher module with a configurable Burst Speed module, From knowledge after it being fixed we know this script relied on an oversight in how large and how often you can send messages within deadlock, Reading from a text document containing a large number of unique symbols and spamming them as fast as possible would result in anyone who didnt have game chat disabled getting crashed, when attempting to rejoin you would simply crash again. This exploit was patched extremely fast due to it also inadvertently causing extreme loads on the game server itself.
Footage associated with the chat flood exploit.
Whats next?
Thats it! i could showcase the thousands of features and modules this cheat embeds naturally or is community built but it would simply be free promotion and take a long time, cheating in deadlock isnt going anywhere and will only continue to get worse, speaking to a few members of the cheat there is numerous people utilizing umbrella who are in the top 100 respective to their regions, while the feature set for umbrella is vast you can gain a significant advantage no matter what you use. Deadlock is a beautiful game and continues to outshine itself time and time again, unfortunately the cheats are only going to become better.
Thank you for reading :3 - Snowy.
