Mobile game Hungry Shark Evolution has two in-game currencies – coins and diamonds.
While you can earn coins relatively easy throughout the game, you can only get 3 diamonds per game round. Cool stuff and new sharks cost hundreds of gems, meaning you have to jerk the game off at least 150 times to unlock this awesome looking beast. This limitation has a very plain ground. The game is free, and you are supposed to purchase in-game currency for real money. This game just asks to be cracked for free gems. At least three utilities exist to crack Android games. There is another one, but it’s in Chinese, and could not be used for obvious reason. Forget Cheat Droid at once – the utility scans shared variables, which has little to do with cracking. The over two – GameCih and GameGuardian are the ones we need. Basically, they scan memory for certain values, responsible for score, money, resources and other in-game parameters. This is exactly the same approached used by ArtMoney – the most known PC game trainer creator tool among modern gamers. However, oldfags like myself remember similar program for MS-DOS from early nineties, which stayed resident in the memory and allowed to view text files without quiting the game, as MS-DOS did not support multitasking. The utility was Russian made, and the guys mentioned in the description that they just liked to play quests with tutorials, and they were too lazy to print them out. So they created this text file viewer to read the tutorials while playing the game. Later, the program acquired more functions, like searching and freezing certain values in memory and create trainers for games, and thus was renamed Players’ Tools. There was a similar utility called Hacktools and an American creation named Game Wizard. As you can see, today this kind of utilities came to Android. Well, let’s try them out. First of all I want to make clear that all of the tools require root access, so root your device and don’t forget to grant root permissions for the utilities. I also pin you attention that even if these utilities work, they work for offline games only. Online games store game critical values on remote servers, and will just reset changed values to the original state. That’s the best outcome, the worst is you will be banned for cheating. Let’s start with GameGuardian. Playstore doesn’t offer this tool, so you have to download it from official website and install as apk. Launch the program and remember to allow root access for it. Set temp path. Enter something like /SDCARD Now launch the game. Please note the transparent icon in the center of the screen – taping this launches GameGuardian from the game. So, we have some amount of diamonds, search for it in GameGuardian. As I said, you may enter any value you want to alter. Get back to the game by taping the upper right rectangle, and in the game, change the amount of gems by earning or spending them. Then go back to GameGuardian and search for the updated amount. This time GameGuardian will find much less matches for the value entered. In theory, you must repeat this process until the list of values found stops shrinking. These are the memory values responsible for your in-game parameters, you may change or freeze them to increase in-game parameters or make them infinite. That’s in theory. In real life, after third or forth search the list returns empty. I tried everything – earning and loosing gems, nothing helps. Fuzzy mode, which searches all changing values for you, didn’t help to cheat either. Let’s try the other utility – GameCih. It has a rather strange install. First you download installer from Playstore, launch it, and this installer downloads and installs the main app. You may remove the initial installer afterwards. If you are on MIUI and other similar mods, they will block the popup the installer shows, and the utility won’t work. This is because these mods has the hosts changed, so you will have to edit hosts to stock Android values to make it work. Do not forget to grant root access to the app. Unlike GameGuardian, GameCih is launched by hotkey, which you have to set up in the options. After that launch the game and repeat the same actions. Press the hotkey to open GameCih, search for current gems value. Then change the values, and search again. Rinse and repeat until you find your value. But like in GameGuardian, the list returns empty after a couple of searches. So I failed to create the cheat. There is yet another app, GameKiller, but I didn’t even give it a try. The failure is expectable though. The game publisher earns money from in-game purchases, so it is obvious to protect this part from cracks. Protection is easy enough – just store first digit separate from the other, and finding correct value will be much harder. Lets try another way to crack games – savefile editing. The saves are stored at this location, so get certain amount of gems, copy the savegame to another folder, change the amount of gems, make another copy, and so on. In the end you will get several savegames with different amount of diamonds saved. Copy these files to you computer and use a HEX editor to analyze them. The editor was good enough to offer portable mode. I really like when programs do this. Well, I spent like half an hour trying to compare the files, but couldn’t figure out the value. Maybe the diamonds are hashed here as well. Anyway, this method of comparing memory values or savegames to find where game parameters are store are the most common way to cheat and create trainers. So give it a try, may be your game could be cracked. But what’s with Hungry Shark Evolution? Well, the internets is full of savegames with maxed out sharks and gems, so you may replace you savegame with this one. That’s not what I wanted though – I only need gems, and want to unlock everything else myself. Hungry Shark Evolution Hack Tool is also worth mentioning, as there are lots of links to it. Unfortunately, they all want you to complete some survey, and as with all links with surveys this is fake just to lure you to some site and increase traffic. Do not fall for that. There is also a way to get in-app purchases for free, which I will cover later.