Cheapie Guide - How to Create Cheapies in MUGEN & IKEMEN

A beginner-friendly guide based on the current community ranking system.

What is a Cheapie?

Cheapies are fun, often overpowered or meme-style characters that prioritize humor, simplicity, or extreme power over balanced gameplay. They’re great for learning coding and making quick, entertaining content.

Cheapie Tiers (General Ranking)

Tier 1: Weak / Average (Beginner Level)

Basic characters that can fight but struggle against normal ones.

• Use existing templates
• Simple sprite swaps or edits
• Basic moves and AI

Goal: Finish a working character quickly.

Tier 2: Strong / Evil (Intermediate)

Characters with strong attacks, good AI, and annoying pressure tools.

• Better animations and hitsparks
• Chain combos and supers
• Stronger AI behavior

Tier 3: Mad / Crazy (Advanced)

Extremely fast, spammy, or hard-to-kill characters.

• Hyper armor, fast recovery, insane projectiles
• Difficult AI that pressures constantly

Tier 4: God Tier

Extremely powerful but usually doesn’t directly break the engine.

• Life drain, instant kills, massive damage
• Strong defense + offense

Tier 5: Null

Characters that use engine bugs (Null Overflow, %n, Void, etc.) to win.

Warning: These can be unstable and are often frowned upon in normal play.

Tier 6: Secretary

Special executable files capable of remotely controlling the M.U.G.E.N's internal state to allow the author's character to defeat their enemies effortlessly. Generally bundled with the character's files.

➤ Low Tier: Uses MUGEN's parameters to control MUGEN's internal state, even slightly.

➤ Top Tier: Uses external files, such as BATs, EXEs etc. to create external processes in order to change MUGEN's internal state, executing the engine normally.

Tier 7: Postman

Script files are used to load the engine program with a determined configuration from the author, which are typically programmed to either defeat the enemy or swap the latter for a dummy. Batch files (BAT) or HTML Applications (HTA) are used.

Tier 8: SuperNull

A batch of vulnerabilities in the StateDef, State Expression, and State Controller parsers is used to overflow their memory data in order to execute arbitrary code. Authors use these vulnerabilities to create their exploits, some of which replace the selection roster with characters that do nothing while defeating them, and others protect their character from data tampering, creating threads, or directly executing the shellcode. (Examples: Characters creating threads via assembly)

Tier 9: HyperNull

An incorrect ZLib library build and ZIP File Handler's programming flaws are used to execute arbitrary code, which can be used to either load an external library from the character path or directly modify the engine's code memory.

Tier 10: Ethos

Formerly called Omed. Modified versions of said engine are used in this case. These have a set of additional routines that are used to load the author's character before the rest of them and some of those routines can interfere with the engine's control flow.

➤ Isolato: Formerly called Frost. Deeply modified "engine" versions that use additional executable/library files to implement new features besides defeating the enemy, and some specialized routines could alter the computer behavior in the process.

Tier 11: UltraNull

A Windows vulnerability that can be used to load a custom library from the author to modify the engine's behavior in order to perform determined actions besides defeating their enemies. It can also be used to add new features to the engine, add external effects and more. (Examples: Oblivion, Mebius)

Now, here's a tier that is excluded for, it goes beyond tampering of files, modifying engine behavior and etc..

Anti-Malware

These type of characters that can merge from low tiers to a higher one to inject their code into a target engine build. Capable of executing their payload at the moment the operative system is started while obfuscating anti-virus detection, so not sure if we can provide such a guide for people to make one.

Dragon Tier

Characters whose task is to damage the computer. There are simple characters, which simply erase the System32 folder, and slightly more advanced ones that overwrite/delete the MBR sections. Despite how outlandish this tier is, examples (mostly made by noxxy) do actually exist. However; They will never be made public and haven't been distributed to anyone

That being said, don't be too disappointed at the last parts since, we will still technically touch on extras that ig you can consider cheapies such as:

Joke/Satire (冗談)

Characters that are made as a joke or for satire. These cannot be ranked since these can have varying degrees of killing power.

Defeat Challenge (撃破挑戦)

It refers to a character that is designed to play against god characters. They cannot be defeated by madness or lower, but can be defeated with special countermeasures.

Whale

Coding term referred to characters who use the web browser to display a video of them defeating the enemy or to download the character's special MUGEN engine program before executing it on the user's computer.

Recommended Tools

• Fighter Factory Studio
• Notepad++
• 7-Zip
• Your own creativity and ig humor

If you want more information on cheapies, authors who work strictly on cheapies, or learn the technology in which popular cheapies use check out the mugen cheapie wiki here

https://mugen-cheap.fandom.com/wiki/MUGEN_Cheap_Community_Wikia

— DJB Staff