Grim Dawn – How to Unlock Elite/Ultimate Difficulty (Without Playing Through Normal)

For those of you who want to unlock the higher difficulties without playing through on normal first.

Guide to Unlock Elite/Ultimate Difficulty

All credit goes to Cray!

Install GD Stash

Remember to close the game before you start (this is just good practice and keeps you on the safe side).

Moddb hosts two versions of this. The one you’ll want is probably the Windows Standalone, since it doesn’t require a Java installation to work.

• GD Stash Windows standalone.

Install it and run the program, you’ll now need to specify where the game is installed and where the save folder is at.

Locate Install Folder

The install folder is of course wherever you chose to install the game.

If you don’t have multiple steam folders it will be in:

• C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Grim Dawn

Otherwise, if you have an extra folder on D:, it’s in:

• D:\YourSteamFolder\steamapps\common\Grim Dawn

Locate Save Folder

This should be something like:

• C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\12345\219990\remote\save\

Steam stores the save folder in the Steam program files folder, so you will find the normal ‘save’ folder (within the game install folder) empty. Saves are stored within the userdata folder under your numeric user ID (as far as I know, that’s what it is), and each game is sorted in a folder named by the game’s appID number.

Grim Dawn has appID 219990, so go to:

• C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata

Find your userID number folder there (usually there’s just one).

Find the folder named ‘219990’. Within this you find remote\save, and ‘save’ is the folder you will direct GD Stash to use.

Import, Edit and Save

Remember to close the game before you start (this is just good practice and keeps you on the safe side).

Once you’ve specified the game install and save game folder, click “Import database” and wait. It may take a few minutes. Once this is done, you can start editing.

To unlock higher difficulties, click on the “Char editor” tab, and select your character from the menu under the “Save char” button.

Now just click on the “Max. Campaign Difficulty” dropdown menu and pick what you want.

Click “Save char”.

You’re done.

Happy playtime challenge!

Safety Note

When it comes to VAC and whatnot, while it’s probably a bit paranoid, I would recommend not running the game while you’re editing (this should be obvious, but.. easy to forget) since it seems to require some direct access to resources and whatnot, and what qualifies as a bannable offense varies between game publishers, I’d recommend you don’t forget to close the game first just to be on the safe side of things. Better safe than sorry.

When it comes to program safety, well.. It’s been on moddb for a while now so if anything were seriously amiss, chances are someone would’ve caught it.

Malwarebytes had no complaints about the installer exe, nor the program files folder once it was installed.

I ran the installer exe on virustotal and only one of the 63 scan engines had a complaint:

SecureAge APEX: “direct-cpu-clock-access overlay peexe runtime-modules”

These things are used by malware to achieve certain goals, but are not in themselves malware.

62 antimalware scan engines had nothing bad to say about it, and I didn’t find anything obvious when searching the web about this.

So while I’m naturally reluctant to give an ironclad guarantee that there’s absolutely nothing wrong here, from my perspective at least this program seems safe to use.