How to activate cheats and spawn heroes in Dota 2 demo mode

William Davis Published 19/09/2021

With thousands of interactions to test, every Dota 2 player should get acquainted with demo mode.

Demo mode provides a safe environment for players to test interactions in Dota 2. Valve provides the basic tools to test skill builds and different items, but there’s a lot more to learn once players take the plunge. Here’s how to set up a custom hero testing environment in Dota 2 demo mode and how to make the most of it.

How to activate cheats in Dota 2

Demo mode’s basic options lets you cast spells for free and instantly level up to 30, but there’s a lot of things it can’t cover. That’s where cheats come in.

To activate cheats, open the developer console and type in sv_cheats 1. After you hit enter, you will then be able to apply other cheats to demo mode. Open up the console again and type in the desired cheat.

Keep in mind that these cheats are made specifically by Valve for players to test things in demo mode. You can’t activate them online but there’s no penalty for trying to do so.

Must-know cheats for Dota 2 demo modes

-gold 999999 will give the player maximum gold
-wtf gives free casting for spells, removing mana costs and cooldowns
-unwtf disables the -wtf command
-trees will force all trees to respawn, which is useful for testing out Timbersaw
-hurtmebad will instantly set your HP to one, which is useful for testing healing on Dazzle or Omniknight
-disablecreepspawn will stop the lane creeps from spawning altogether.
-killwards will remove all placed Sentry and Observer Wards from the map
-dumpbots will briefly display a bunch of interesting information about Dota 2 bot AI

There are many more cheats in Dota 2, but these ones are the most important. These will cover most methods of experimentation and include some extra options for specific heroes.

How to spawn heroes in Dota 2

Once cheats are activated with the process outlined above, specific heroes can be spawned using the Dota 2 console or chat box. The chat command to spawn heroes in Dota 2 is “-createhero” followed by the name of the desired hero. For example, “-createhero templar” would spawn a friendly Templar Assassin. To create enemy heroes, just add the word enemy at the end of the command line, which would be “-createhero templar enemy” in this case.

Keep in mind that some heroes’ console names have inconsistent spelling. Queen of Pain becomes queenofpain and Outworld Destroyer is actually obsidian_destroyer. Some demons go by their Ozkavosh names. For example, Shadow Fiend is labeled nevermore for the spawn command.

For testing heroes like Chen and Enchantress, you’ll need to manually spawn jungle creeps. It works the same as spawning heroes, but replace the hero name with the creep you want to spawn. For example, typing “-createhero mud_golem” will spawn a Mud Golem.

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