Hacking Ultra Strikes in Ingress without a Motorola phone

September 18, 2013 Chilling_Silence How-To's / Guides / Tech info

So the Ultra Strikes have been out and about for a bit. They’re not really “game-changers” like an ADA or Jarvis Virus is. It’s more of a kind of concentrated XMP Burster, so when you hack one, think of it kind of like hacking a couple of that same level XMP.

Modifying your phone so that you can get the initial equipment drop of 125 items is easy, and then if you leave your phone reporting that way then you will continue to be able to hack them. They have roughly the same drop rate as a Power Cube.

It’s easy to do, it takes just a couple of minutes, but it requires your phone is already rooted. If you’ve already got that sorted, then here’s how to get Ultra Strikes.

Modifying your phone via ADB with a PC

NOTE: For Linux or OSX, you may need to change into the directory with adb in it and prefix any line that starts with “adb” with “./” to give you “./adb”

This step assumes you’ve got your phone setup to work with your PC through ADB. It’s the quickest and easiest method:

First of all, fire up a command prompt / terminal and run:

adb devices

This should come back and show you that you have one device. If it doesn’t, go and enable USB Debugging on your phone and start again.

Then you’re going to copy off the build.prop file (Which contains information about your phones make / model / build):

adb pull /system/build.prop

You’ll want to make a copy of this file as a backup for later.

Edit this file which is now on your PC with the following details:
NOTE: If you’re running Windows, open it in Wordpad, not Notepad. This way it keeps the line breaks

Find:
ro.product.model=***
ro.product.manufacturer=***
ro.product.brand=***
ro.product.name=***
ro.product.device=***

Change parametrs to:
ro.product.model=XT1080
ro.product.manufacturer=motorola
ro.product.brand=motorola
ro.product.name=obake_verizon
ro.product.device=obake

Now that you’ve modified and saved that file, we’re going to push it back on to the phone.

For Jellybean:

adb push build.prop /sdcard/0/build.prop

However if you have Ice Cream Sandwich or older, you’ll want to run:

adb push build.prop /sdcard/build.prop

This moves the file on to the SD Card / internal storage of your phone.  We do this because it’s the only place we have “permission” to place it right now.

Next, we’re going to run a few commands to move the file to the correct location:

adb shell
su

This means anything we now do in the Terminal, we now do as root. It may or may not prompt you on-screen on your device after running “su”, so check. If it does, you want to allow it.

Next, we make the certain part of the system where the build.prop lives writeable:

mount -o rw,remount /system

Then if you’re on Jellybean you’ll want to run:

cat /sdcard/0/build.prop > /system/build.prop

Otherwise if you’re on Ice Cream Sandwich or earlier run:

cat /sdcard/build.prop > /system/build.prop

This has now moved the file to the correct location on your system. We will just tidy it up now and make it read-only again:

mount -o ro,remount /system

Finally, you want to reboot your phone for the changes to take effect:

exit
exit
adb reboot

Once your phone reboots, fire up Ingress and you should be greeted with the following items:

50x XMP Bursters
10x Shields (Very Rare?)
50x Resonators
10x Power Cubes
5x Ultra strikes

From there, you can either leave your phone as-is to continue hacking, or you can revert back to the original build.prop to return your phone to normal.

 

Modifying on your phone using Root Explorer

If you have Root Explorer it’s not too difficult to do on your phone.

Simply fire up the terminal and run:

mount -o rw,remount /system

Then load up Root Explorer and edit /system/build.prop, changing the values mentioned earlier.

Afterwards, run:

mount -o ro,remount /system

And you’re done. Reboot and fire up Ingress!

 

Modifying on your PC without using ADB

This can be done using the Terminal app on your phone.

Simply fire it up and run:

cp /system/build.prop /sdcard/0/

Plug it in to your PC as a USB drive and copy the file off.

Modify the build.prop accordingly, copy it back, then from the Terminal on your phone, type in:

su
mount -o rw,remount /system
cat /sdcard/0/build.prop > /system/build.prop
mount -o ro,remount /system

After you’ve done that, reboot, load up Ingress and you’re done!

ADB, Android, Ingress, root, Ultra Strike,