Crazy Times

There is a mobile game I had been playing for a while. One of those idle games where numbers go up while you are not looking. I am not going to name it.

I liked it enough to put some money into it, mostly to support the developer. Then the grind got to me. Every upgrade wanted more waiting, more tapping, more of my time. I'd had enough.

So one night I asked Claude to take it apart.

I pulled the app off my phone and handed it over. Claude went through the whole thing: a 40 MB compiled binary and the names of every function inside it. It found the developer's debug menu still sitting in there, with buttons like "Give Everything". It found that the save file was not encrypted at all, just plain text dressed up as hexadecimal. Then I told it to set up a rooted Android emulator on my PC and a man-in-the-middle proxy, and to check every packet: every server the game talks to and everything they say to each other. With all that, it wrote the tools to edit my save.

Resources, chests, twelve hours of offline progress whenever I wanted.

Then the game caught me. The cheat flag was hidden in an unrelated section of the save, disguised as a harmless value, and right next to it sat a counter literally called doomsday, ticking down. Features started disappearing from my account.

So I asked Claude to unban me. It found the flag, set it back to clean, reset the countdown and uploaded the repaired save straight to the game's cloud, without going through the app. Everything came back.

I am not a reverse engineer. I don't read compiled code. I did all of this from my desk, late at night, explaining what I wanted in Italian.

Moments like these make me realize how fast this is moving. And that most people have no clue what the actual fuck they have on their hands.