We’d been playing a silly game on the FireTV cube — Hovercraft Battle Arena. It’s what my former boss would call good, stupid fun. But you’ve got to wait to open these crates to get stuff — gems, money, and components to upgrade the hovercraft. We wanted to be able to play with maxed out hovercraft. So I poked around a little bit and found a cheat for insta-upgrades. Game components are stored as files. For Android installations, the files are under /Android/data/com.highscorehero.battlearena/files … but it’s a lot easier to write a batch to copy files in Windows. The Windows app data files are under %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages\ … then the trick is finding the right HighScoreHeroLLCHoverfractBattleArena folder.

Once you find the files, there’s no validation on the files. Now it’s binary stuff that would take a good bit of effort to manually edit (i.e. if I wanted to just give myself 10k gems, I’d have to figure out which exact bits to flip) but you can grab an entire file when the game is in a state you want. That is — when you have four crates ready to open, copy out the Crates* files. When your near the end of the season and at level twenty-something, copy the XP_Int.data file. When you’ve not claimed any of the season rewards, copy out the SeasonReward_Bool.data file. Drop those files into the live folder used by the game & launch the game. Now you can open four crates, claim the gems from each level, and close the game. Copy the season rewards and crate files back and do it again. And again. And again. Eventually, you’ll have all of the blueprints, upgrade parts, gems, and money that you would need. You can make a backup of the entire folder at this point. Use your money and gems to upgrade a hovercraft, then copy out the files for that craft. Snap the backed up files back so you’ve got all of the gems and money, then upgrade a different craft. Repeat until you’ve got upgraded files for all craft.

It does, unfortunately, kind of ruin the game. There’s no point — you’re not accumulating points to upgrade anymore. Anya and I still like it … but it’s absolutely not the same 🙂