Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Prerequisites
    1. VPN
    2. qBittorrent
  3. Downloading
  4. Installing
  5. Final notes
  6. Performance
    1. Ascendio
    2. SLPF

Introduction

So, you want to play Hogwarts Legacy for free? Here is complete guide to sailing the high seas for the game. Please use an adblocker when browsing any sites relating to piracy. The ads on these kinds of sites can be vicious.

Prerequisites

This step is entirely optional, only if you know what you are doing. That means that you know if your internet service provider will send you a copyright infringement notice when torrenting copyrighted material. If you don’t, then you might as well save yourself some time as a notice can end up costing you more than just paying for the game! The choice of VPN is up to you, but here are some good picks for privacy and affordability. Notably all of these are cheaper in a month than buying the game outright, and support a better cause this way.

  • Mullivad €5 euros a month. The best in privacy, they collect absolutely nothing about your traffic
  • ProtonVPN €5 euros a month. Good in privacy, fast and lots of locations
  • PIA $12 dollars a month. VERY cheap when buying more than a year ($2 a month). Good privacy as well. (This is what I use)

After you have purchased a VPN, you will want to enable it. To verify it is working, open your torrenting application (qBittorrent) and go to this website. Clicking the almost sketchy looking download button will download a file your torrent application can open. Once you have, verify that the IP on that website does not match your normal IP, which can be seen by googling “what’s my ip” or clicking this shortcut with your VPN off

qBittorrent

This is the program you need to use to download the files. You can you any other torrenting program if you have one installed already but you have to download through a torrenting program. You cannot download it through your browser. Here are the links relevant to qBittorrent:

Download the Windows x64 file. Do not download any of the files with parentheses in the name. I will assume you know how to install a program with an installer. All of the options within the qBittorrent are fine on their defaults. If you don’t understand what an option does, you can either leave it alone, or Google it! It doesn’t hurt to know more about computers.

Downloading the game

If you purchased a VPN this is where you enable it

This is the link to download the game. But before you get ahead of yourself, the way you add it to your torrent program is important. The easiest way to start downloading the game is to click the green button with the test “Magnet Download”. This will ask you if you want to open a link in an external program. qBittorrent should be listed. If it is, click OK. If it isn’t there, click the “Torrent Download” button. This will download a .torrent file which you can either drag into the main interface of qBittorrent or by clicking File > Add Torrent File in the top bar.

After do it either of those ways, you will be prompted as to where you want to download the files. This will be a huge download (90 GB), and may take a long time. Make sure you have at least double the size + a little extra as to have room to install it (200 GB should be enough). Now wait for the game to download.

Installing the game

After the game is done downloading, leave the downloaded files where you put them. Go to them in file explorer. You should be able to double click the .iso file to mount the file virtually. If this does not mount the file virtually, right click the file and go to Open with > Explorer and it should mount as a new drive letter on your PC.

Go to this new virtual drive, and run the setup.exe program (Turn off the music in the bottom left if you want to). The installer will guide you through the install process. Make sure to note where you are installing it, as it might default to your C: drive. Make sure you enable `Copy crack files after installation otherwise you will end up with an unpatched game (It is enabled by default, just be aware that unchecking this is a bad idea).

Now, let the installer run its course and once it is done, you can click play and you will be able to play the game! Be aware that this is the first release of the game (pre-order build), and not the most recent version, so any bugs that were present in that build are not patched.

Final Notes

And, once you are done you can delete the installer files, but if you can spare the storage and your ISP bandwidth if you have a cap, keep qBittorrent open in the background and keep seeding! Contribute back to those that you downloaded it. You will just need to keep your VPN and qBittorrent open in the background. You can stop when your ratio is 1.0, this means that you have shared as much as you have downloaded, although it doesn’t have to stop there. I currently have a ratio of 14.3 as of writing it doesn’t hurt to go even higher. (Edit: 36.6 as of 2023-02-26, when I removed the installer files from my PC)

Performance modifications

If your computer has problems running this game (many do), here are a few performance mods that you can install and how it differs from the normal install instructions.

Ascendio

This one is a little tricky, as the cracked version of the game saves its configs and save to the %localappdata%/Pheonix/ folder instead of the default %localappdata%/Hogwarts Legacy/ folder that I assume newer builds use. To correctly install this, when the installer prompts you for a file, go to %localappdata%/Phoenix/Saved/Config/WindowsNoEditor/ and select Engine.ini. You can use the installer like normal. The uninstall process is the same, you will need to manually select the file, and it will not be auto detected.

SLPF

This one is a little easier. Go to where you installed the game and navigate to \Phoenix\Plugins\ChromaSDKPlugin\Binaries\Win64. Now rename the CChromaEditorLibrary64.dll file to CChromaEditorLibrary64.dll.bak as it using a pirated version it becomes a hassle to get the original files again, so just keep a backup of it. Now copy the file from the mod archive to the same folder, and that is it.