How to Edit a Game’s Memory on Android
Some numbers never reach a file. Health during a fight, ammo, a timer, the score while a round is on: they exist in the game’s memory while it runs and nowhere else. The memory scanner finds them the way you’d find anything you can’t name. Search for the number you see, let it change, search again, until one address is left.
Try it on the home page first, against a slime, without installing anything.
What you need
- A rooted phone. Without root, no app can read another app’s memory.
- The game running. Open it, then switch to CheatDroid. If it isn’t running, the scanner says so; start the game and tap Re-check.
- The right type. Int, the default, fits almost every counter: coins, HP, ammo, lives. Try Float when nothing turns up, especially for bars and values with decimals. Long and Double are for the rare game that uses bigger numbers.
Finding a value you can see
- In CheatDroid, tap the game, then Memory under Tools.
- Type the value the game shows and tap Scan. Thousands of matches is normal: a number like 100 is all over a game’s memory.
- Back in the game, make the value change. Take a hit, spend a coin.
- In CheatDroid, type the new value and tap the = button with it. Every address that didn’t follow drops out.
- Repeat until a handful are left. A wrong step is one tap on undo away.
The floating window saves the switching: the button at the top of the scanner puts it on top of the game, so you take the hit and scan in the same place. Android asks once whether CheatDroid may draw over other apps.
When the game shows no number
A health bar, a fuel gauge, a timer drawn as a circle. Turn on I don’t know the value before the first scan, and CheatDroid takes a snapshot of everything instead. Then narrow it down by how the value moves: More, Less, Changed or Same. Scanning for Same a few times while nothing happens in the game throws out a lot. Bars are often Float.
On a big game the snapshot can have more matches than the scanner can keep. Then it tells you, and a known value is the better start, if there is one anywhere on screen.
Set it, or freeze it
Tap a result to set its value. Freeze after setting, or the snowflake on a result, keeps it there: CheatDroid writes it back twice a second until you stop, and a notification shows that a freeze is running. Stop it from the notification, or with Unfreeze in the scanner.
Scanning is free. Setting and freezing memory are part of Pro.
When the value snaps back
If the number on screen doesn’t change after you set it, you changed a copy and the game keeps the real value somewhere else. Two things usually work:
- Freeze all remaining matches together: Select all, then the snowflake, instead of one at a time.
- Freeze what drives the number instead. A puzzle game that counts moves used, not moves left, stops counting with that counter frozen at 0.
A value the server checks, or one the game recalculates every frame, can’t be changed from memory at all.
Memory or file?
A value set in memory lasts as long as the game keeps it there. If the game saves it later, coins for example, the new number ends up in its save file too. If it doesn’t, it’s gone when the game closes. For anything a game writes down, editing the file is quicker and permanent; the guide to hacking Android games starts there, and where games keep their saves tells you which file.
Used GameGuardian before? Here’s how the two compare.