First, let me start off by saying that although I know how to cheat the game, you will never see my name on the leaderboards with a game that I cheated on. It's not fair to others.

Now, I'll tell you that I have never cheated the game by setting the clock forward. I have been cheating the game only to experiment. One of life's small joys is figuring things out.

I am an amateur hacker, a hacker is somebody who writes good code and should not be mistaken for a cracker, somebody who writes code for malicious intent.

The save files for VV are very easy to figure out and to change with a hex editor once you figure out where data is saved.

One of the things that would have made this file more difficult to change would have been a CRC check of some kind. I'll admit, that only as an amateur, I have run into game files before that use a CRC scheme and I could not figure out the formula that was used to generate the CRC. It meant that even though I could read the data in the file, I couldn't change it because the CRC wouldn't match and the game would throw the file out as bad data. So what would happen if the save file CRC didn't match the CRC the game expected to find, the village would be lost...which would be the penalty for trying to cheat.

I know it wouldn't stop everybody...but it would stop quite a few.


Timewarping would be a little more difficult to stop.