Zookeeper Battle – Another reason to root an Android phone

It’s no secret that I have a keen interest in video games – from large-production epic console titles to casual smartphone games, and everything in between.  There’s a recent growing trend in mobile games, where a game is advertised as “free” but requires some kind of in-game purchase in order to unlock or make significant progress.  This is really starting to piss me off, but I’ve managed to get something positive from this frustration, as a result of working around the crippled functionality of just such a game.

I’m a shameless addict of so-called “match three” casual games – the most famous example of which is probably PopCap’s excellent “Bejeweled”.  However, I am currently hooked on the cute art style and naff music delivered by the Zoo Keeper collections of games, across several platforms, so I was delighted when I discovered Zookeeper Battle for Android (and iOS).  Finally I could play challenge matches with random strangers on the internet, and it was free!

Well, after the first few games, it seemed that all was not as good as I had naively thought.  Only the first few blocks of game credits are free, and then the game is crippled. The game credit indicator is a bar with 6 spaces which are initially full. You start out with a few “power bottles”, each of which will completely refill this bar.  Each game empties one of the spaces on the bar and, upon depletion, the bar refills one slot every 6 minutes, but only up to a maximum of 2 slots.

Since I enjoy this game so much, I would happily pay a few pounds for an unlimited version, but a browse of the in-game store reveals no such option.  One can buy a single “power bottle” (to refill all 6 slots) for $0.99, 6 bottles for $4.50, or 14 for $8.50 – respective rates of $0.165, $0.125 and $0.10 per game.  Really, $0.10 is the cheapest option to play this game.  I regularly come up against opponents who have played several thousand games – does this mean that they have stumped up in excess of $300 to the mobile game gods?  I sincerely hope not!

Being a little devious, I decided to have a poke around the files which this game deploys on one’s Android device (and, without getting into too much detail, this kind of thing is exactly why I chose Android over iOS for my phone) and found a very interesting XML file containing all kinds of data for the game.  With a bit of experimentation, I was able to determine that, while most of the data appears to have been written to the file following a download from the game server, some of the elements are read directly from file – including the “number of game credits” field.

Following a very brief spot of Perl scripting using the incredibly handy SL4A package, I now have a solid workaround for this game- (and wallet-) crippling “feature”, which is as follows.  Note – this does require root on your Android device.  If you do not know what this means then please Google – this particular post is not intended as a “how to root an Android device” tutorial.

  • Play until you see the dreaded “give us more money to keep playing” screen, and then hit cancel and quit the application.  It’s important that you *actually* quit, rather than just jumping to the Home screen:

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  • Using your file explorer/editor of choice (or a command shell), update the permissions on ‘/data/data/jp.kiteretsu.zookeeperbattle.google/zk.dat’ to make it world readable and writeable:

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  • Fire up SL4A and create a new Perl script as follows.  I saved this as “zkpatch.pl” – note, you only need to create the script the first time:

use Android;

my $droid = Android->new();
my $datafile = '/data/data/jp.kiteretsu.zookeeperbattle.google/zk.dat';

unless ( open FILE, $datafile ) {
 $droid->dialogCreateAlert('Error',"Failed to read file: $!");
 $droid->dialogShow();
 exit 1;
}
my @content = <FILE>;
close FILE;

unless ( open WRITE, ">$datafile" ) {
 $droid->dialogCreateAlert('Error',"Failed to write file: $!");
 $droid->dialogShow();
 exit 1;
}

foreach my $line (@content) {
 $line =~ s!<zk_cp>.*?</zk_cp>!<zk_cp>6</zk_cp>!;
 print WRITE $line;
}
close WRITE;

$droid->dialogCreateAlert('Done',"$datafile has been patched");
$droid->dialogShow();

  • Now execute this from within the SL4A app.  It will show an alert if there’s an error opening or updating the file, and a confirmation if it’s successful:

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  • Reload the game and enjoy your full credit bar!

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There you have it – a nice workaround for a stupid game payment mechanic!

Ideally, I’d like to wrap this up in a standalone application for Android, rather than using the Perl script.  Also there is word that future version of SL4A will allow performing operations as root – this would allow me to set the target file’s permissions from the script for a more elegant solution.  Until then, I’d rather take 10 seconds to perform these steps than wait 6 minutes to play another game.

17 Comments

Filed under Android, Dev

17 Responses to Zookeeper Battle – Another reason to root an Android phone

  1. Francisco

    It’s not working anymore 🙁
    There’s no zk.dat in that folder, only a few zips with images.

  2. Arslan

    there is no zk.dat anymore. do you guys see it?

    • It’s still there for me. Do you:
      a) Have root access on the device?
      b) Use a file browser that will allow access to system files? (e.g. Root Explorer, ES File Explorer, etc)
      c) Look in /data/data/, and not /sdcard/data/ ?

  3. Tony Hawk

    Hey ardavey,

    This works great, however, when I open Zookeeper, and then close Zookeeper, the permissions of zk.dat are reset back to their originals, preventing the script from working again.

    So my current process is, close Zookeeper, change the files permissions with ES File Explorer, run the script you have provided, re-open Zookeeper. Which works fine, but there must be a simpler way?

    Would it be possible to either a) permanently change the permissions on the file so that it cannot be changed back, or b) execute the script as root?

    Also, is there a way to schedule the execution of this script on app close? I could imagine this would be a time saver as well, just close Zookeeper, and the script fires off, then re-open Zookeeper, done.

  4. Alvin Ch

    So it seems like only zk_cp is the only element that works. The rest seems to just update from server. Too bad, I really looking for a way to get unlimited Power bottle, it’s useful against bosses.

  5. Nikarams

    I have two errors:

    Warnings-Errors:
    sh: stdin>[1]: use: not found
    sh: stdin>[3]: syntax error: ‘(‘
    unexpected

    help please

  6. Nikarams

    everything works, thanks you VERY much

  7. Alvin Ch

    Thanks for this, really help for boss events ^^.

    Anyway is there a way to prevent the permission get changed back for zk.dat. Kinda annoying manually change the permission again. Or can you run as root inside script?

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