Minor update to Treehouse Stampede cheater

If you read my blog yesterday you’ll know that I coded a simple application that lets you cheat at the Windows 8 sample application Treehouse Stampede by coming up with the five best possible words that will earn you the most points. I have coded a minor update to the cheater so that it will know allow you to set a maximum without recompiling the program by launching it as:

java wordCheat 10

Obviously, you would replace 10 with the maximum number of letters you would like to use. I’ve also now GPL’d the source code (and recompiled the program to match it). Here are the files you need to download:

• (Optional) Source code - only download if you want to mess around with it and change some settings
• English word list - just a small text file you’ll need to use otherwise the program will crash. It is an unmodified version of this word list.
• Java Executable - this is the actual executable. Navigate to the appropriate directory in CMD and then type “java wordCheat” (case is important) to start running it. To quit it just type the word exit instead of the three letters

I had considered writing a Metro app to fit along the side so that you could cheat that way, but I decided it would be cheating too much. I got my massive high score by having it run on another computer and getting someone else to type in the three letters and tell me the word.

Cheating at Treehouse Stampede (Windows 8 sample app)

I’ve been playing around on Windows 8 for a few days now and I’ve had a look at the sample Metro apps it comes with – all developed by college interns at Microsoft over the summer. The apps are varied in quality but my favorite so far has to be a little word game called Treehouse Stampede. The idea behind the game is to protect yourself (in your treehouse) by spelling out words that use three given letters. For instance, if I were given the letters NTI I could spell the word interesting – and I’d probably get lots of points because it is quite long.

The game can be a bit of a nightmare when you can something like QZX, but I’ve found a very simple way of cheating (see my highscore!). I found a word list of English words on the internet and then wrote a very simple Java console application to load up the words. I then simply typed in the three letters I was given and it would identify the five best words for me to use within the limit set in the code:

This essentially makes the game incredibly easy, but it is still quite good fun. If you want to try this out yourself, just download the three files to the same directory:

• (Optional) Source code – only download if you want to mess around with it and change some settings
• English word list – just a small text file you’ll need to use
• Java Executable – this is the actual executable. Navigate to the appropriate directory in CMD and then type “java wordCheat” (case is important) to start running it. To quit it just type the word exit instead of the three letters