Valve's engine has been powering games for over twenty years, and in that time one thing has not moved: cheats are switched on with sv_cheats 1 and they are switched on by the server, not by you.
That single fact explains most of what confuses people about cheating in these games. Below is what carries from one Source game to the next, and what does not.
What is the same everywhere
Three commands work in every Valve-engine game we have documented, from Counter-Strike in 1999 through Dark Messiah of Might and Magic to Left 4 Dead 2:
sv_cheats 1— the gate. Nothing else is accepted until this is set.god— no damage.noclip— walk and fly through walls.
A fourth, buddha, shows up in the single-player games: your health drops to 1 and stops there, so fights still play out but you never die. It is the more interesting of the two invulnerability modes and almost nobody uses it.
The part that catches people: it is not your server
sv_cheats is a server variable. On a server you host — a local game, a listen server, a private match — you own it and it works. On matchmaking, or on somebody's community server, you do not, and typing it does nothing at all.
This is not a bug and there is no workaround. In CS:GO in particular, repeatedly trying is a good way to be kicked, and attempting to actually cheat in matchmaking is what VAC bans exist for. If you want to practise smokes with sv_infinite_ammo 1 and a sixty-minute round, start your own offline server first. Every command on our CS:GO page assumes you have.
Where the games stop agreeing
Once past the shared three, the differences start, and they are the reason a code copied from one game's guide fails in another.
Adding bots is different in every single game
- Counter-Strike:
bot_add - Counter-Strike: Source and CS:GO:
bot_add_ct, andbot_add_tfor the other side - Team Fortress 2:
tf_bot_add 4
Same engine, three different commands, because bots are a game feature rather than an engine one.
give needs that game's own item names
The command is universal; what you can hand yourself is not. give weapon_ak47 works in Counter-Strike. give weapon_crowbar works in Half-Life 2 and Garry's Mod. give autoshotgun works in Left 4 Dead 2 — note it does not even use the weapon_ prefix. A weapon name from the wrong game is simply a name the game has never heard of.
impulse 101 is not a Source command
This is the one worth remembering, because it looks like part of the engine. It sits next to god and noclip on every Half-Life page, so it reads like a sibling of theirs, and it is not. It is a Half-Life command that hands you Half-Life's weapon list. In a Source game that has no such list — Dark Messiah, Left 4 Dead, Garry's Mod — it does nothing.
The rule underneath: an engine's cheat commands travel between its games. Its content commands — weapon names, map names, item lists — do not.
Small mismatches that look like failures
- Left 4 Dead 2 wants
god 1rather than a baregod. - Garry's Mod already has noclip bound to V, so people type the command and assume it failed because nothing appeared to change.
- Dark Messiah will not open its console at all until you add
-consoleto the launch shortcut. The commands are fine; the way in is closed by default.
The one-minute version
- Turn the console on in Options → Keyboard → Advanced, then press the key left of 1.
- Start a game you are hosting. Not matchmaking.
sv_cheats 1.- Now
god,noclipandbuddhawill all work. - Anything past that — bots, weapons, maps — check the specific game's page, because that is where the engine stops being the same.
We hold cheat pages for a dozen Valve-engine games, and the tables are strikingly similar for the first three rows and diverge completely after that. That divergence is the whole story.
