TheSyndicate

The Syndicate

Become a career hitman in Shadows of Doubt. A fixer moved you into the city clean, and now you owe them. Take contracts, put targets in the ground (with a gun, a syringe, a staged "accident") and get away with it while the investigation you just created closes in: witnesses, security cameras, fingerprints, forensics, a warrant, and a city full of enforcers who'd love to find you. Climb from a nobody Recruit to a made Lieutenant of the underworld.

This is a full career sandbox layered on top of Shadows of Doubt's murder mystery, except this time you're the murderer, and the game is the one trying to solve it.

⚠️ This is a BETA (v0.9.77)

The Syndicate is a large mod that hooks deep into the game's crime, evidence, enforcer, and economy systems. It has been played through end-to-end many times, but it is still a beta:

• PLAY ON A NEW SANDBOX SAVE with PROCEDURAL MURDERS OFF and a starting apartment. You can begin homeless, but every Syndicate app (contracts, both shops) only ever appears on your home cruncher: no home means no way in until you rent or buy one.
• Expect bugs. Edge cases in a game this systemic are endless. If something breaks, see Reporting a bug at the bottom.
• Expect the balance to move. Payouts, prices, timers, and difficulty are not final. Almost everything is a config knob: if a number annoys you, change it (see Configuration).
• Back up your saves. As with any mod that writes save data, keep a copy of a save you care about.
• Your progress travels with your save (and Steam Cloud). The Syndicate stores its state inside your save file (the .sodb), so it rides Steam Cloud and moves between machines automatically, exactly like the base game's save. Move a save to another PC, or let Steam Cloud sync it, and your rank, gear, and contract history come with it, no extra steps. (Saves made before v0.9.71 carry a small …_mod_savestore/syndicate.json companion file; the mod reads it once on the next load, folds your progress into the save, and retires the file, so from then on it travels too. If you're moving a pre-0.9.71 save to a new PC before ever loading it there, bring that _mod_savestore folder along once.)

Feedback is genuinely wanted. That's what a beta is for.

How this was built (an honest note)

I built The Syndicate by joining my experience in software development with working alongside AI. The AI charted the game's inner workings, the decompiled systems a mod like this has to hook into, and helped implement a number of the features. Projecting those features from that map was my work, and so was every design call, review, playtest, and bugfix along the way. I don't believe either of us could have made this alone because it takes real experience to know what to build and to catch what the machine gets wrong, and it takes a machine's patience to map a codebase this size.

I am also aware that AI has flooded a lot of mod spaces and hosting platforms with low-effort, poorly tested work, and I have no interest in adding to that pile. This is not a one-shot-prompt mod. Nothing here ships just because a machine wrote it and every feature is reviewed, played, debugged and improved by hand until it earns its place. The AI was a tool I drove hard, not a shortcut around the work, and the last thing I want is to waste your time with poorly reviewed slop or incentivize more of it.

Most of all, none of it would exist without the modders who came before. Shadows of Doubt has an incredible community of people who poured sweat and countless hours into the tools and mods that inspired this one and showed what was possible. I owe a particular debt to a few of the scene's OGs, Venomaus, Piepieonline, TeamSpyraxi, IgnizHerz, Arsonide and others whose work lit the path, set the bar for everyone who came after and gave me so many extra hours enjoying this game with their great mods. This work stands on their shoulders, with a lot of gratitude.

Requirements & install

• Shadows of Doubt (current build). Keep the game on its latest version: each mod release is compiled against the current game build, so a mod update will not run correctly on an older game build (and an older mod build breaks when the game updates). If the game just updated and something looks off, update the mod too.
• BepInEx-BepInExPack_IL2CPP: the IL2CPP BepInEx pack.
• SODCommon (Venomaus): the shared modding library.
• A cruncher (in-game computer) of your own. The Syndicate has no interface outside the game: your contracts, the Level-3 job board, and all three shop apps (Syndicate / Supplies / Groceries) are cruncher apps that install only on your home cruncher. Start your sandbox with a starting apartment; with no home there's no cruncher, and no way to read a lead or buy gear.

With a mod manager (recommended): install through Thunderstore Mod Manager or r2modman and the two dependencies come with it. Launch modded.

Manual: install the BepInEx IL2CPP pack, run the game once, drop SODCommon into BepInEx/plugins, then drop TheSyndicate.dll into BepInEx/plugins. A config file (BepInEx/config/Kropath.TheSyndicate.cfg) is generated on first launch.

Getting started

You start as a Level 0 Recruit. The moment you load in, the fixer sends you a v-mail ("The Offer"). Read it on any home cruncher.

1. Read the intro v-mail. It explains the arrangement and gives you the Dispatcher's phone number (it's saved in your phonebook as The Dispatcher from the start).
2. Call the Dispatcher and pick "I'm ready, check me in." Nothing happens until you do this. It's the hard gate that stops a brand-new save from ever deadlocking.
3. Your first contract lands a couple of in-game hours later, biased toward a gentle "proving hit":