OpenFront Host Cheats: How to Use the Host-Only Lobby Modifiers

The short answer: host cheats are four host-only lobby modifiers — infinite gold, infinite troops, a gold multiplier, and a custom starting gold — that you switch on in the host settings of a private or single-player lobby. They apply to the host, not to everyone, the lobby is automatically kept out of the public list, and every player who joins is told exactly which cheats are on through a yellow “Host Cheats” chip. Use them to practice, to sandbox a map, or to run a scripted scenario; do not expect them to show up in a publicly listed match.

Direct answer: what host cheats are and when you can enable them

The single most important thing to internalize before you touch the setting is that host cheats are a host-only, private-lobby feature, not a global power button and not a ranked feature. They live inside the configuration of a lobby that you host, and they can only be enabled when that lobby is not publicly listed. In a public, matchmaking-style lobby the host-lobby cheat panel simply is not available to you, because the rules that keep a lobby clean for random strangers require that no host-side advantage be in play. The moment you flip any one of the host cheats on, the game treats your lobby as a closed sandbox: it will not appear in the public lobby list, and if you try to list it anyway the server rejects the action with a conflict response that explicitly names the reason. This is not a soft guideline and it is not something the host can talk their way around; it is enforced on the server side, so the lobby cannot be “cheated but public” the way some casual games quietly allow.

The feature itself has exactly four knobs. There is infinite gold, which removes the gold cost of anything the host builds; there is infinite troops, which removes the troop-cost ceiling that would otherwise stop the host from fielding more than the cap allows; there is a gold multiplier, a number the host sets anywhere from a fraction up to a very large value that scales the gold the host earns; and there is a custom starting gold, where the host sets the opening gold balance. Notice the deliberate asymmetry in the wording: these are things the host gets, not things everyone gets. That distinction is the whole reason a separate “host cheats” block exists in the lobby configuration at all, and it is the reason the other three sections below exist. If you are asking “how do I get infinite gold in OpenFront,” the honest answer is: you get it only when you are the host of a private or single-player lobby, and the people joining you will be told you are using it. If you are a player trying to get infinite gold in a public match, the answer is that the game does not offer that to you, and anyone claiming otherwise is describing a private lobby they set up, not a feature you can switch on in matchmaking.

The scope of the feature also matters for how you think about it. Host cheats are a practice and experimentation tool, and the community treats them that way. Players open them to rehearse a build order, to test what happens if they start with a huge gold pile, to script a specific opening for a stream, or to isolate a single variable — “what would my economy look like if my income were doubled from the first second?” — without having to grind a real match. They are not a competitive tool, and there is no ranked or public mode where using them is a legal way to gain an edge. So the question you should answer before enabling them is a simple one: am I the host of a lobby that is not going into the public list, and is my reason one of the practice, sandbox, or content reasons this guide lists? If yes, the next section walks through the four knobs one at a time.

The four host cheats, one by one

The lobby’s host-configuration panel exposes the four cheats as four separate controls, and each one changes a different resource axis. They are independent: you can turn on exactly one, a specific combination, or all four at once, and the lobby’s “host cheats are on” flag is set the instant any single one of them is enabled. The table below is the reference to check against any wiki or video, because the circulating numbers for these controls drift away from the actual source, and the table is taken directly from the pinned version this guide was verified against.

Cheat	What it changes	Scope	Practical effect	Range and limit
Infinite gold	Gold cost of host’s actions	Host only	Host builds and spends without a gold balance running out	On or off
Infinite troops	Troop-cost / ceiling ceiling	Host only	Host can field more than the standard troop cap allows	On or off
Gold multiplier	Host gold income rate	Host only	Scales the gold the host earns on every tick	0.1 up to 1000
Starting gold	Host opening gold balance	Host only	Sets the gold the host holds at the start	Up to 1,000,000,000; host input in millions, placeholder 5, max 1000

Reading the table carefully, two rows deserve a second look because they are where most players go wrong. The gold multiplier is not binary. It is a continuous value the host sets anywhere between 0.1 and 1000, which means the host can cut their own income to a tenth of normal as well as push it a thousand times higher. That upper range is the number behind the “host ran a 30x gold multiplier to wreck the other players” stories that come up in community discussion: the control genuinely allows a host to multiply their income by dozens or hundreds of times, so a private lobby where the host sets a large multiplier is a sandbox, not a fair fight. The multiplier is the knob to watch when a friend’s “normal” private game suddenly feels lopsided, and it is also the knob a content creator reaches for when they want to compress a long economy into a short video.

The starting-gold row is the other one that trips people up because of its unit. The lobby input is measured in millions, not in raw gold. The placeholder shown in the field is 5, which means 5,000,000 gold, and the field is capped at 1000, which means 1,000,000,000 gold. So when you type 50 into that box you are not giving yourself fifty gold, you are giving yourself fifty million, and the value is internally stored as the typed number multiplied by one million. This unit detail is exactly the source of the “I started with 5 million gold” videos: the creator typed 5 into the field, or 50, and the game handed out millions. If you want a modest head start, type a single digit. If you want to test the game’s ceiling behavior, push toward the top of the field. Either way the number you type is in millions, and the join-side chip the other players see will display it as a number followed by an “M,” so a start of 50 appears to everyone as 50M.

Two final clarifications on scope. First, every one of these four affects the host and is deliberately asymmetric; they are the “host cheats” precisely because they advantage the person running the lobby. Second, because the “enabled” flag turns on with any one of them, there is no such thing as a partially-cheated lobby that looks clean — the instant one knob is non-default, the lobby is flagged, hidden from the public list, and announced to joiners. There is no way to enable infinite gold silently. The next section explains why that asymmetry is a separate thing from the global settings that affect everyone, which is the distinction most guides get wrong.

Host cheats versus global lobby settings

There is a second family of lobby controls that looks almost identical to the host cheats, and confusing the two is the most common error in this whole area. At the top level of the lobby configuration there are global modifiers with the same names — infinite gold, infinite troops, a gold multiplier, and a starting gold — and these apply to every player in the lobby, not just the host. That is the whole point of a global setting: it retunes the match for everyone at once. A global gold multiplier of 2 means every player’s income is doubled; a global starting gold of 5 means every player opens with 5 million. These are the controls behind the “what happens when everyone starts with 5 million gold” style of experiment, and they are fundamentally different from the host cheats because they do not create an asymmetry.

The host cheats block is a separate object in the configuration, and it exists so the host can give only themselves an advantage while the other players play on the normal rules. That is why the game keeps the two families apart instead of just having one set of toggles. When you set the global gold multiplier, you are changing the physics of the match for everyone; when you set the host gold multiplier, you are changing your own income while everyone else keeps theirs. The first is a shared experiment; the second is a private advantage. The visual distinction in the lobby panel is that the host-cheat controls are grouped together under a clearly labeled host section, separate from the global controls, and the moment you enable any of them the “host cheats” flag fires, the public listing is blocked, and the yellow chip appears for joiners.

This separation also answers a question that comes up a lot: can the host use the global settings in a public lobby? The global modifiers are the ones that shape a public or ranked-style lobby’s character, because they treat everyone equally and therefore do not give the host a hidden edge. The host-cheat modifiers are the ones that are reserved for closed lobbies, because they are asymmetric by design. So the mental model is: global settings are fair-weather levers you can use wherever the mode allows them, and host cheats are the host’s private levers that are only legal in a lobby that is not publicly listed. The game enforces this by refusing to publicly list a lobby that has any host cheat active. If you want to test “does a higher gold multiplier change the meta,” do it with the global multiplier in a normal private game. If you want to test “what happens to me personally if I have infinite gold,” do it with the host cheat in a private game, and expect the yellow chip to make sure your friends know what they are walking into.

How to enable them, step by step, in the host lobby

The concrete path is short, and every step is the same whether you are on desktop or in the mobile web view. The one thing you cannot do is enable host cheats from a public lobby, so the procedure always starts from the closed side of the game. First, do not start a public match and do not use the quick solo entry if you want the full host panel with friend access; instead, open the create-lobby flow. When you create a private lobby, the lobby is, by definition, not in the public list, and that is the precondition that unlocks the host-cheat controls. If you are playing single-player, the same host configuration is available, because a single-player game is a lobby you host with no other humans in it.

Once you are in the host view of your private or single-player lobby, scroll to the host section of the lobby settings. This is the section labeled for the host, distinct from the global settings block. You will see the four controls: the infinite gold toggle, the infinite troops toggle, the gold multiplier field, and the starting-gold field. Turn on or off whichever toggles you want, and type a value into whichever fields you want. Remember the unit convention from the previous section: the gold multiplier accepts a value from 0.1 to 1000, and the starting-gold field is in millions, with 5 as the placeholder and 1000 as the maximum, so a 50 in that field is 50 million. Set the values you want, and the lobby now has host cheats active.

From this point the game does something automatic that is worth understanding rather than fighting. Because at least one host-cheat field is now non-default, the lobby’s “host cheats enabled” state is true. That state has exactly two consequences, both enforced. First, the lobby is not and cannot be shown in the public lobby list; if you try to make it public, the server returns a conflict that specifically says the host cheats are enabled and you must disable them to list the lobby. The in-game text is direct: it tells you to disable host cheats to list your lobby publicly. Second, the host-cheat controls behave as if the lobby is a closed sandbox, and the host-side summary of which cheats are on is now what joiners will be shown. If you want to keep the lobby private for a session and then make it public afterward, you must turn every host-cheat knob back off; you cannot keep a cheat on and list the lobby. This is not a penalty for using the feature, it is the feature working as designed: the cheat and the public listing are mutually exclusive by construction.

What the other players see: the Host Cheats chip

The transparency side of host cheats is the part most players never encounter, because it only appears when someone joins a lobby that actually has cheats on. When a player is choosing whether to join your private lobby, the lobby card shows a yellow “Host Cheats” chip whenever the host-cheats-enabled flag is set. The chip is not a vague warning; it lists exactly which of the four cheats are active, so a joiner can see, before committing, whether the host is running infinite gold, or a gold multiplier, or a huge starting gold, or some combination. If you set a starting gold of 50, the chip will show a value that reads as 50 million, matching the millions unit of the input field, so there is no hidden scale that the joiner is supposed to reverse-engineer.

This chip is the entire fairness mechanism, and it matters for two different reasons. The first reason is honest expectation: a friend who sees the yellow chip before joining knows they are walking into a sandbox where the host has advantages, not a fair 1v1 or 2v2, and they can decide to join for the fun of it or walk away. The second reason is that it removes the specific complaint that dominates the community discussion of this feature. A recurring thread of player frustration is about hosts who quietly make their lobby private so they can enable cheats, then play as if the match were normal. The chip is the answer to that: the game will not let a host hide that cheats are on. The lobby is flagged, the listing is blocked, and the joiners are told. The only scenario where a joiner is surprised by cheats is a scenario where they joined a lobby the host was already running with cheats on, and even then the chip was visible in the lobby list before they clicked join. So the disclosure is not optional and not cosmetic; it is the line between “a private sandbox that everyone opted into” and “a player getting tricked in a match they thought was fair.”

There is one practical note on the chip’s scope. It is a join-time and lobby-listing disclosure; it tells you what the host has enabled before and while you are in the lobby. It does not, and is not meant to, narrate every in-match advantage in real time. So if you join a lobby with a large gold multiplier, the chip tells you the host is running a boosted economy; what you do with that information — play around it, focus on a different lane of the map, or just enjoy the chaos — is your call. The chip’s job is to make sure the game is not secretly unfair; the playing is still yours. That combination, a hard server-side rule that cheats and public listing are mutually exclusive plus a visible chip that names the active cheats, is the whole design philosophy of the feature, and it is the reason you should treat host cheats as a tool for people you are playing with, never as a way to quietly gain on people who think the match is even.

Good uses: practice, sandboxing, and scripted scenarios

Because host cheats are a private, host-only, disclosed tool, the legitimate uses are all uses where you are the host, the lobby is closed, and the people in it know what is going on. The good uses fall into three shapes, and each one changes what you would actually do in a real match, so they are worth learning deliberately.

Practice and build-order rehearsal. The cleanest use is rehearsing. Turn on infinite gold and infinite troops for a single private game and practice the actions you want to be fast at — building specific lines, positioning, queueing orders — without the resource pressure of a real economy slowing you down. The infinite toggles remove the wait, so you are training the execution, not the economy. A concrete shape for this: run a solo game with infinite gold on, replay your intended opening three or four times, and focus only on whether your actions land cleanly and in order. When you turn the cheat off and run the same opening for real, the difference is that your hands already know the sequence. This is the same reason a player would practice a build in a training map in any real-time strategy game: the cheat is the training map.

Sandboxing a variable. The gold multiplier and the starting-gold field are experiment tools. A concrete scenario with numbers: you want to know how your economy behaves if your income were doubled from second zero. Set the host gold multiplier to 2 in a private lobby, play a full game, and record what you could afford at the five-minute and ten-minute marks compared to a normal game. Set it to 0.5 in the next game and see the opposite. Because the multiplier is a continuous value from 0.1 to 1000, you can run the whole range and find where your strategy bends. Another concrete scenario: set the starting gold to 5 (that is 5 million) and see how much earlier you can field a meaningful army than in a normal start, then set it to 50 (50 million) and see where the game’s own ceiling behavior starts to change the plan. These are the two knobs that turn a private lobby into a lab, and they are the reason the control is a continuous slider rather than a simple on-off for the multiplier.

Scripted and content scenarios. This is the use the community reaches for most often, and it is the one behind the “everyone starts with 5 million gold” and “start with 1 billion gold” style videos. If you are making a video or a stream segment where you want a specific starting condition, you set the starting-gold field or the multiplier to that condition and record the game. The yellow chip does not hurt this use, because in a content scenario the joiners are your friends or viewers who already know the premise. The multiplier is especially useful here because it lets you compress a long economy into a short, watchable match: a high multiplier means you hit your milestones fast, so the video does not spend twenty minutes on an economy nobody wants to watch. The honest framing for these scenarios is that they are not a fair match and not a demonstration of a winning strategy; they are a controlled setup for a specific question or a specific piece of content, and the disclosure chip is the feature that keeps that framing honest.

Where host cheats fail and how to counterplay them

Host cheats are easy to enable and easy to misuse, and the failure modes are exactly the ones that produce the angry threads in the community. Knowing them is part of using the feature responsibly, because the counterplay is the same whether you are the host or the joiner.

The first failure mode is trying to use them in a public or ranked lobby, and the answer is that you cannot. There is no host-cheat panel in a public lobby, and a lobby with any host cheat on is refused public listing by the server. If you see someone claim they “use host cheats in ranked,” the claim is either about a private lobby they set up or simply wrong; the ranked and public rules are what keep those modes fair, and the feature is deliberately not available there. The counterplay as a player is simple: if you are in a fair match and it suddenly feels lopsided, the first thing to check is whether you are actually in a private lobby with a host running a big multiplier, because that is the only legal way a match gets a host-side advantage.

The second failure mode is the multiplier runaway, which is a failure you can cause in your own sandbox. Because the gold multiplier goes up to 1000, a host who sets a very large multiplier can push their own economy so far ahead of the other players that the match stops being a game and becomes a demonstration of a number. The counterplay as the host is to pick a multiplier that still leaves the other players in the match: if you are testing an economy, 2 or 3 is enough to change the feel without ending the game; if you are making content, the high end is fine precisely because you want the milestones fast. The counterplay as a joiner is to read the chip, see a large multiplier, and play around it — concentrate on the parts of the map where a boosted host economy has not yet reached, or focus on the long-game objectives rather than the early fight you cannot win.

The third failure mode is the trust failure, and it is the one the disclosure chip exists to prevent. The scenario is a host who makes a lobby private, enables cheats, and plays as if it were a fair match, catching a friend off guard. The chip is the answer: the game flags the lobby, blocks its public listing, and shows the active cheats to anyone in the lobby list. The practical counterplay is to always check the lobby card for the yellow chip before you join a private lobby, especially when a friend invites you to a “quick game.” If the chip is there, you know what you are walking into and you can decide on purpose; if a host claims the game is fair while the chip says otherwise, the chip is right. The feature is designed so that the only way to be tricked by cheats is to ignore the one visible signal the game gives you, so the responsibility for that failure mode sits with the player who did not read the chip, and the honest use of the feature is to respect that signal in both directions: as a host, do not pretend a cheated lobby is fair, and as a joiner, do not walk into one blind.

Mode and map adjustments, and the version boundary

The final part of using host cheats well is matching the cheat to the mode and the map, because the same multiplier or the same starting gold does not mean the same thing on every map and in every mode. The adjustment is a judgment call, but there are consistent directions.

Start with the mode. In a one-versus-one private game, a host gold multiplier is a blunt instrument: the one boosted player tends to just win, so the multiplier is best used for content or for a very specific economy question rather than for a “fair-ish” contest. In a free-for-all private lobby, a boosted host is a moving target that the other players can focus on, which changes the whole shape of the game; that is the mode where a large multiplier actually produces interesting play rather than a foregone result, and it is the mode to look at if you want to understand how the community thinks about a host with a big economy running. If you are specifically interested in what a runaway leading economy does to a free-for-all, the companion guide on how a runaway FFA leader behaves and how to catch them is the focused read, because host cheats are one of the fastest ways to put a single player in that runaway position on purpose. In a single-player game against the AI, host cheats and the difficulty setting interact, because the AI Nations are retuned by the difficulty while your own resources are retuned by the cheats; the guide on what each nation difficulty actually changes covers the AI side so you can reason about both dials at once.

Next, the map. A host starting-gold or a host multiplier is worth more on a map where early economic advantage compounds quickly, because the boosted income turns into territory that turns into more income. It is worth less on a map where the early game is a scramble for a fixed set of chokepoints, because a bigger starting pile does not buy you a position you cannot already contest the normal way. The practical rule is to pick your map and your cheat together: if you want to see what a big economy does, choose a map with open expansion space so the extra gold has somewhere to go; if you want to see whether cheats even matter, choose a tight, contested map and watch how little a number changes when position dominates. The broader set of modes and the private-lobby setting that these cheats live inside is documented in the game modes and private lobby settings reference, which is the page to cross-check the listing rules and the mode-by-mode behavior against.

Finally, the version boundary. Everything in this guide is verified against the current pinned version, v0.35.9, and the four-knob shape of the host-cheat block, the 0.1 to 1000 multiplier range, the millions-unit starting-gold input, the host-only asymmetry, the public-listing block, and the yellow join-time chip are all present and consistent in that source. The host-cheat system is a stable, long-standing part of the private-lobby configuration rather than a feature that changes between recent point releases, so the guide should remain accurate across the current release line; if a future version adds a new host-only knob or changes the multiplier ceiling, the table in the second section is the place to update. The one boundary to keep in mind is that nothing in this guide applies to ranked or public matchmaking, because the feature is, by design, unavailable there; it is a private and single-player tool, and the disclosure chip is the reason it stays that way.