Ancient loader

Every Ancient product runs from the same loader, needs the same overlay, and fails in the same ways. The pages in this section cover all of that once, so your product page only has to tell you what is different about your game.

Work through these in order

Which Ancient product do I have?

Each of these adds its own game specific notes on top of this section.

• Ancient Rust External
• Ancient Fortnite External
• Ancient R6 External
• Ancient Apex Legends
• Ancient ARC Raiders
• Ancient EFT External
• Ancient DayZ External

The short version

If you have done this before and just need the sequence:

1. BIOS set up and Windows hypervisor features off, once, covered in System requirements.
2. Overlay running. NVIDIA app on an NVIDIA card, SteelSeries GG on an AMD card.
3. Antivirus off, not just excluded.
4. Loader open, licence key in, press inject.
5. Loader closes itself. That is the success signal, not a crash.
6. Launch the game, then press Insert for the menu.

Two things that catch nearly everyone

The overlay is not optional. Ancient draws its menu through a capture overlay rather than over the game directly. No overlay means no menu, and nothing else you change will fix it. AMD cards in particular only work through SteelSeries GG, and the Sonar keybind has to be pressed before you inject. Overlay setup covers both cards.

Virtualisation is on in BIOS and off in Windows. These sound contradictory and catch people constantly. Your CPU's virtualisation extensions (VT-x, AMD-V, SVM) must be enabled in BIOS, while Windows features that take those extensions for themselves (Hyper-V, Virtual Machine Platform, Core Isolation) must be off inside Windows. Two different settings with similar names.

Your licence starts when you load it, not when you buy

Ancient keys begin counting down the first time you enter the key into the loader, and then run continuously whether or not you play. Buying on Friday and loading on Sunday does not cost you two days, but pausing for a holiday mid subscription is not possible either. Extending means buying another licence.