I started playing Candy Crush yesterday and immediately found out just how frustrating it can be. Every time I’d fail a level I’d instantly hit retry, and soon I ran out of lives. I came so close to beating a level I decided to fork over $0.99 to instantly refill my 5 lives (otherwise you get one life per half hour, or you can get lives from Facebook friends). Before long those five lives were gone as well and a Google search for “how to get Candy Crush lives” brought me across an article that describes an exploit in the game that allows you to refill your lives for free, and without waiting.

All you have to do is go to your device’s date and time setting and advance the time forward a few hours. This tricks the game into refilling your lives and you’re good to go, without waiting and without spending any money. If you reset your device’s time back to the current time, however, the game will still show you need to wait until after that future time to get a refill (so essentially the game will show a wait of several thousand hours before long).

There is a way to avoid this, however. After you change your device’s time setting to a time in the future open Candy Crush. You will show 5 lives, but before you start playing you need to close Candy Crush, set your time back to the current time, and then continue playing. This way when you spend a life you’ll only have to wait 30 minutes from the current time, rather than 30 minutes after the time in the future. You can also uninstall and reinstall the app to reset the wait time if you happen to end up with a thousand hour wait. You will not lose any of your progress if you are synced to Facebook.

I hope this has helped. I’m sure they will patch this in the future so that you either have to wait or spend money to refill your lives, but for now this will help you play on through the night, because really, who needs sleep?