It's becoming more common in gaming, particularly with mobile and free-to-play games, for an action or activity to be limited by real-world time, usually in order to provide a 'nudge' to players to nag them into purchasing loot-boxes or other pay-to-win premium extras.
Moral arguments about the ethics of pay-to-win and loot boxes aside, I find this really annoying. These days, the amount of time that I have available for gaming is ever lower, and arguably, time is the most valuable and scarce resource for everyone - after all, we only have get a certain amount, and can't buy more.
So while I was waiting for some in-game nonsense to finish, I started thinking about how feasible it would be to create a fast-forward for these types of activities in-game.
Yeah, I know, there's a certain irony in getting annoyed at having my time wasted and then spending a good deal of time trying to work around it - but sometimes once I get an idea in my head, I have to see it through.
The game I'm using for this demo is Fallout Shelter. I'm well aware that there are already plenty of documented save file hacks for this game, similar to the Saints Row 3 one that I did a while ago.
However, that's not the approach that I want to take here. I still want to play the game, more-or-less as intended. I just don't want to be kept waiting.
A quick experiment by changing the time on the system the game is running on, shows it to be quite tolerant of the time changes, the screen briefly blacking out while the game mechanics catch up.
The first thing to do is to disable NTP (automatic system time synchronization).
In Windows, this can be done by right-clicking on the time in the task bar, selecting "Adjust date/time", and then setting "Set time automatically" to Off. This will stop the system resetting the clock back to the correct time. Just remember to turn it back on when you're done playing.
To do the time adjustment, I'm using AutoHotKey. AutoHotKey (AHK) is an incredibly versatile scripting language for Windows systems, allowing commands and key macros to be bound, system-wide, to keyboard shortcuts.
The idea is to create a global hot key on the system that I can trigger without leaving the game, whenever I want to speed things up by a certain amount.
As the game is mostly touch/mouse controlled, I've bound the macro to the modifier and arrow keys.
* Ctrl-Shift-Right advances time by 1 minute
* Ctrl-Shift-Left advances time by 15 minutes
* Ctrl-Shift-Down advances time by 30 minutes
* Ctrl-Shift-Up advances time by 1 hour
The script is available on GitHub.
Limitations
The script needs to be run as administrator, as elevated privileges are needed to change the system time. There are ways that this can be avoided, but they require more system changes, so for the purposes of this, it's easier to just right-click and select "Run as Administrator".
The script is pretty basic, and operates simply by adding the numbers - so it's not smart enough to cross hour-thresholds - ie. if you advance by a minute at 11.59, it will attempt (and fail) to set the time to 11.60 - but this is simply overcome by, well, waiting a minute.
