What Is a Wallhack? How Seeing Through Walls Works

“Walling” is the oldest accusation in competitive shooters. Someone pre-aims the corner you are about to take, turns to face you through a closed door or rotates away from a fight before anyone could have heard it. Sometimes that is game sense. Sometimes it is a wallhack.

What a wallhack is

A wallhack is any cheat that shows you players hidden behind cover. The name covers the effect rather than one method: the walls, floors, smoke and terrain that should block your view stop blocking it.

Most shooters work this way on purpose. To animate an enemy the moment they step round a corner, your game client needs to know where they are before you can see them. A wallhack takes that information, which is already on your PC, and makes it visible.

How wallhacks work

There are two broad ways to do it, and many builds use both.

Drawing over the game

The common method today is to read where each player is and draw something on top of the game image: a box, an outline, a skeleton or a coloured silhouette. Because the drawing sits on top of everything, walls do not hide it. This is the same machinery as an ESP, and in most menus the wallhack lives inside the ESP tab. The drawing can happen on a separate overlay layer above the game window, which leaves the game’s own rendering untouched.

Changing how models render

The older method changes the game’s own drawing. Games decide what to hide using depth: if a wall is closer to the camera than a player, the wall’s pixels win. A model wallhack tells the game to skip that check for player characters, or to paint them in a flat, bright colour that shows through everything. Players call these coloured models chams, from chameleon. Historic versions went further and made the walls themselves see-through, or drew the map as a wireframe.

Drawing over the game has largely replaced model changes, because it does not alter how the game renders and gives the player more control over colours and distance.

What a good wallhack shows

A bare outline through a wall is only the start. Builds usually add:

• Colour by visibility. One colour when a player is behind cover, another when they are in your line of sight, so you know whether you could shoot them right now.
• Colour by team or threat. Enemies, teammates and AI enemies each in their own colour.
• Distance fading. Far players drawn fainter so the close ones stand out.
• Objects as well as players. In extraction and survival games the wallhack also marks loot, containers, vehicles and objectives. In Escape From Tarkov that means quest items and extracts. In DayZ it means gear and vehicles.

What a wallhack cannot show

A wallhack is limited by the data your client receives:

• Server-side culling. Some games deliberately hold back the position of a player until they could plausibly become visible to you. Valorant’s fog of war is the best-known version. Against that, a wallhack shows players late or not at all.
• Distance limits. Large games often only send positions for players within a certain range, so the wallhack has nothing to draw beyond it.
• Things the server never sends. If a game does not tell your client what someone is carrying, no wallhack can show it.

Wallhack, ESP and radar

The three overlap so much that the words are used loosely.

How players spot a wallhack

A wallhack changes nothing about your aim, so other players can only notice it through behaviour. The usual tells in a replay:

• The crosshair follows an enemy through a wall before they appear.
• Corners get pre-aimed that nobody on the team has called.
• A player never checks angles that a normal player would always check.
• Rotations happen before any sound or callout could explain them.

Players who use a wallhack for information, then play the fight with normal habits, look much like an experienced player with good map knowledge. Players who stare at enemies through walls do not.

The software side is separate. Whether an anti-cheat can find a wallhack depends on how the cheat is built and how current it is, not on the feature. Our page on how anti-cheat detects cheats explains that half.