The spontaneous breaking of an approximate discrete symmetry is consid
ered, with the resulting protodomains of true and false vacuum being s
eparated by domain walls. Given a strong, symmetric Yukawa coupling of
the real scalar field to a generic fermion, the domain walls accumula
te a gas of fermions, which modify the domain wall dynamics. The split
ting of the degeneracy of the ground states results in the false vacuu
m protodomain structures eventually being fragmented into tiny false v
acuum bags with a Fermi gas shell (Fermi balls), that may be cosmologi
cally stable due to the Fermi gas pressure and wall curvature forces,
acting on the domain walls. As fermions inhabiting the domain walls do
not undergo number density freeze out, stable Fermi balls exist only
if a fermion anti-fermion asymmetry occurs. Fermi balls formed with a
new Dirac fermion that possesses no standard model gauge charges provi
de a novel cold dark matter candidate.