Memory editing is the oldest trick in PC cheating. It is also why Valorant is so hard to cheat. A running game holds its state (health, ammo, position) in RAM, and a second program can read or write that RAM if the OS allows it. On a 1998 shareware game, that was a Saturday afternoon. On Valorant, it is a multi-year project, and not the kind one person finishes alone.
What memory editing actually is
When a game runs, the executable allocates memory and stores values there. Your health might be a 4-byte float at some address. Your ammo count, a 4-byte integer somewhere else. The address shifts every launch (Address Space Layout Randomization), but the structure stays the same.
A memory editor attaches to the game process and asks Windows for permission to read and write that process's memory. If granted, the editor scans for a value (say, 100 health), waits for the value to change (you take damage, now 87), scans again, narrows the address, and lets you overwrite it. Set health to 999. Set ammo to 9999. Freeze the value so it never decreases.
Cheat Engine is the famous example. It has been around since 2000. It is a teaching tool, a speedrun toolkit, and historically the gateway drug for anyone curious about how programs work under the hood.
Why this works on some games
Older or single-player games trust the client. The game running on your machine is the source of truth. If your health says 999, the game believes it. There is no server holding a different number to compare against. There is no anti-cheat process watching memory access. The OS just hands out a handle when you ask politely.
That world still exists. Plenty of indie titles, retro re-releases, and offline games are fully editable. Speedrunners use memory editing to practice. Modders use it to prototype mechanics.
Why it does not work on Valorant
Two problems, both severe.
Server-authoritative state
Riot's servers hold the real values. Your client only displays them. If your local memory says you have 999 health and the server says you have 87, the server wins. Your next shot lands, you die at 87, and you look ridiculous. Editing health, ammo, or position client-side does nothing visible to other players. It might even desync you instantly and kick you from the match.
This is true for almost every competitive multiplayer game built after 2010. The interesting cheats (aimbot, ESP) are not about editing values at all. They are about reading the world state the server has already sent your client (enemy positions, bone data) and acting on that information faster than a human can. Memory reading, not memory writing, is what matters in modern FPS cheating.
Vanguard
Riot Vanguard is a kernel-mode anti-cheat. It loads at boot, before any user-mode program. It sits in Ring 0 alongside the Windows kernel itself. When you try to open a handle to the Valorant process from user-mode (the exact thing Cheat Engine does), Vanguard's kernel driver sees the request and denies it. No handle. No read. No write. The OS will not give you what you are asking for, because something more privileged than you said no.
You cannot beat a kernel driver from user-mode. Full stop. To even read Valorant's memory, the cheat has to operate at Vanguard's level or below. That means writing your own kernel driver, signing it (which Microsoft will not do for cheats), bypassing Driver Signature Enforcement, hiding from Vanguard's enumeration, and surviving Vanguard's integrity checks that run continuously while you play.
What a real Valorant cheat looks like under the hood
It is not a Cheat Engine script. It is a Windows kernel driver, a user-mode component that talks to that driver over a private channel, a feature set built around reading exposed game data without writing to it, and an aimbot that moves the mouse at the input level rather than touching the game process.
Each piece is a specialty. Driver exploitation. Kernel programming. DirectX or Vulkan rendering for an external overlay. Mouse input emulation. Hardware ID spoofing for after the inevitable ban. The teams that do this well have years of in-house tooling and testers running daily to spot detection updates.
Why providers exist
People do not pay for cheats because the features are exotic. They pay because the kernel-level scaffolding underneath is genuinely hard, and because Riot pushes updates that break things on a regular schedule. The market is essentially renting access to a team that keeps the plumbing working.
Vantage handles this for Fortnite right now. Easy Anti-Cheat is not Vanguard, but the same principles apply. Kernel-mode driver, render hooks, streamproof overlay, updates within hours of every patch, built-in HWID spoofer for when something does go wrong. Valorant support is on the roadmap. Until then, the Fortnite product is the live offering, and the engineering effort behind it is the same kind of effort any serious Valorant provider has to invest. The Cheat Engine tutorial on YouTube is a fun afternoon. Shipping a working Valorant cheat is a company.
So can a beginner do this
Realistically, no. Not at the Valorant level. A beginner can absolutely learn memory editing on offline games, and should, because the concepts are valuable far beyond cheating. Reverse engineering, debugger usage, understanding how programs lay out data, all of it transfers to legitimate work in security research and game development.
The jump from that to a working Valorant cheat is the same jump as from writing a Python script to shipping a commercial operating system. The skills overlap on paper. The scope does not.