Keen: Galaxy Cheats

This section lists all the cheat codes used in the Goodbye, Galaxy! series of Commander Keen. This includes Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter.

Basic Cheats

Keys	Effect
B + A + T	Get all four gems, one life and all of the map items
E + N + D	"Win" the game and show the ending sequence
F9	Not strictly a cheat, but switches to text mode and displays a DOS prompt (a so-called "Boss Key")
Ctrl + Q	Instant quit
A + 2 + Enter	Enable debugging mode (see F10 Cheats below)

F10 Cheats

To use these cheat codes, you must enable debug mode first by pressing A + 2 + Enter, although this is not necessary with some earlier versions of Keen 6. In other episodes, and in later versions of Keen 6, it is also possible to activate these cheat codes during the game initialization, by putting the /NOWAIT parameter in Keen's command line. This also forces the game to start immediately after initialization instead of asking the user for a keypress.

Some of these cheats do not have any effect on gameplay, but are development tests left in the Keen engine that in some cases can crash the game.

To use these cheats, hold down the F10 key and press the letter shown in the table below.

Key	Effect
B	Change screen border color (standard EGA colors are used.)
C	Object count
D	Record/save a demo
G	God mode
E	End current level
I	Free items (four gems, 99 ammo and 3000 points; it also gives the wetsuit in Keen 4, the keycard in Keen 5, and the grappling hook, giant sandwich, and spaceship passcard in Keen 6)
J	Jump cheat: jump endlessly
M	Memory usage information
N	No clipping: fall through everything. If you try grabbing a ledge clipping will be turned back on. Keen will die if he falls through the top or bottom edges of map, and end the level successfully if he reaches the left or right edges.
P	Pause the game (this often crashes the game)
S	Slow motion toggle
T	Sprite test
V	Add extra VBLs (Vertical Blanking Loops?) This makes the game wait for the specified number of CRT refreshes at each cycle of the main game loop. Perhaps this is a mechanism used by the developers to change the FPS (frames-per-second) amount at run-time, or it could be an experiment to see if waiting for more CRT refreshes would reduce snow or flicker on certain video cards.
W	Warp to a level number*
Y	Reveal hidden paths
Z	Set number of lives to zero. When God mode is not activated, it also kills Keen (this may crash the game if the Dead Keen sprite is not in memory at that moment, for example on the world map level)

*It is worth noting that the level warp cheat often provides access to fewer levels than the "record a demo" cheat. This is only relevant in Keen 4, where you cannot warp to the high-scores level (nor access it with the TEDLEVEL command line parameter), but you can access it by recording a demo of the level. However, if you try to display the status window while in that level, the game will crash, for it cannot find the level name in the text table stored in the Keen EXE (which is also why TEDLEVEL does not work.)