Dark Souls 3 PvP screenshot

After the widespread eruption of cheating on the PC version of Dark Souls 3 From Software reacted by releasing Update 1.04.1 which managed to solve the majority of potential problems the cheaters could cause for unsuspecting players. Unfortunately, this update also brought with it numerous stuttering issues and sometimes even complete game-freezes, which as you might imagine is a tad more annoying than the occasional cheater transforming you into a dragon, and then chucking you off a cliff.

After realizing the severity of the issue From Software promptly took the patch down, so everything should be back to normal for the time being, though with the obvious negative effect of the cheaters being given another couple of days to cause mayhem. Here's the brief announcement message:

"The patch has been removed temporarily to fix the freeze issues. We hope to reinstate the patch ASAP. If you fall victim to one of the bugs previously fixed, don't worry, you won't be penalized. We will keep you posted as soon as we have more info. Thank you for your understanding."

If you're worried about cheaters possibly ruining your account, or worse yet, getting you banned by filling your inventory with hacked items, there's really no need to panic as you can simply prepare a backup and avoid pretty much every problem.

To do so you only need to make a copy of your %appdata%/DarkSoulsIII/ folder, after which you will always be able to rewind time back to when your character was completely fine. And don't worry about being banned for making a backup, although that would be hilarious in an ironic sort of a fashion, because Bandai Namco has already confirmed that backups are completely fine to use.