Phanuel HWID Bans — How They Work & How to Bypass

Phanuel is the anti-cheat system developed by Bad Guitar Studio for FragPunk, the hero-based competitive shooter that combines card-based abilities with fast-paced FPS gameplay. As a custom anti-cheat built for a single title, Phanuel is tailored to FragPunk's specific technical requirements and competitive integrity needs.

Bad Guitar Studio built Phanuel to address cheating from FragPunk's launch. The game's competitive ranked mode and unique card-based mechanics make fair play essential to the experience. Phanuel monitors for aimbots, wallhacks, and other cheat tools, and it issues hardware bans to repeat offenders to prevent them from returning on new accounts.

While Phanuel is a newer and less widely documented anti-cheat compared to systems like EAC or BattlEye, it implements the same fundamental hardware fingerprinting approach that makes HWID bans effective. Players banned in FragPunk face permanent hardware restrictions that require all tracked identifiers to be spoofed.

Phanuel collects hardware identifiers to build a machine fingerprint that persists across account changes and OS reinstalls. Like other modern anti-cheats, it targets identifiers that are difficult to change without specialized tools. The identifiers Phanuel tracks include:

Disk drive serial numbers — firmware-level serials from connected storage devices. Phanuel queries storage controllers for the actual hardware serial, not software-assigned volume labels.

Motherboard identifiers — board serial number and system UUID from SMBIOS tables. These persist across OS reinstalls and are primary anchors in the fingerprint.

Network adapter MAC addresses — physical adapters are enumerated and logged. Phanuel records MAC addresses from Ethernet and Wi-Fi adapters.

Windows installation identifiers — MachineGUID, product ID, and related registry values are collected as supplementary fingerprint signals.

Steam platform data — because FragPunk is distributed through Steam, Phanuel can access Steam-specific machine identifiers and local client data.

Phanuel's enforcement model is straightforward. Hardware bans are permanent, issued after confirmed cheating violations. New accounts on flagged hardware are detected and banned. Since Phanuel only protects FragPunk, there is no cross-game propagation — but the ban is strictly enforced within the game. Phanuel checks hardware fingerprints at each login session, so returning on banned hardware without spoofing is not possible.

TraceX rewrites all identifiers Phanuel collects before the anti-cheat can read them. The process is the same as for any supported anti-cheat:

Hardware serials — disk drives, motherboard, network adapters — are replaced with randomized, format-valid values that Phanuel's validation accepts as genuine.

Windows installation identifiers are rotated to match a clean system.

Steam-specific machine data is handled, ensuring no platform-level fingerprint links the session to a banned profile.

Phanuel reads the spoofed values, builds a clean fingerprint, and finds no match in its ban database. The machine appears new, and a fresh account connects without triggering any ban. TraceX has been undetected against Phanuel since FragPunk's launch.