The Syndicate — Wiki

A deep-dive reference for The Syndicate, the career-hitman mod for Shadows of Doubt. The mod description is the pitch; this page is the manual — every system, every number, every formula, written down so you can plan a job instead of guessing at it.

This page assumes you've read the description and installed the mod. If you haven't started a save yet, go do that first — the tutorial toasts will teach you the basics faster than this page will. Come back here when you want to know why something happened, or exactly how much a job is going to pay before you commit to it.

All numbers below are the shipped config defaults. Nearly every one of them is a BepInEx/config/Kropath.TheSyndicate.cfg key — if a number here doesn't match what you're seeing in your own game, someone (you, a modpack, a previous version) has already tuned it.

Table of Contents

1. Overview & the Core Loop
2. Onboarding & the Dispatcher
3. Reputation, Levels, Tiers & Hit Tokens
4. Getting Contracts
5. Targets & Leads
6. Contract Objectives
7. Payout Math
8. Kill Methods
9. The Investigation
10. The Mask — False Face
11. Warrant & Manhunt
12. Residual Heat & the Loose Ends Heist
13. Apps, Shopping & Phone Lines
14. Tips & Tricks
15. FAQ
16. Configuration

1. Overview & the Core Loop

You're a hired gun working for a fixer who moved you into the city clean, no questions, one condition: you owe them now. Shadows of Doubt normally casts you as the detective solving a murder. The Syndicate flips it — you commit the murder, and the game's entire investigation machinery (witnesses, cameras, fingerprints, forensics, warrants, enforcers) turns around and tries to solve you.

The loop, every time:

1. Get a contract. Told to you directly at low level, picked off a job board once you've made a name for yourself.
2. Find the target. Sometimes you're handed a name and address. Sometimes you're handed a clue trail and have to do actual detective work to land on the one person in the city it points to.
3. Put them down. Gun, blade, poison, a staged accident — whatever fits the contract and your nerve.
4. Survive what you started. Every kill opens a live crime scene the second it happens. Witnesses have to report. Cameras have to be reviewed. Fingerprints have to be tallied. You are racing all three, usually without realizing it, until the case resolves one way or the other.
5. Collect. Payment sits in escrow until the heat around that job settles — cold case or a positive ID, either way, then you close it out on your pinboard.
6. Climb. Clean work builds your Underworld Reputation, unlocks a mask, then gloves, then your own job board, and the money gets bigger the whole way up.

Everything from here down is the mechanical detail behind those six steps.

2. Onboarding & the Dispatcher

The intro. The moment your save is playable, the fixer sends a v-mail — "The Offer." It explains the arrangement (you were moved in clean, you owe them, there's a "retirement" waiting down the line at City Hall) and ends with one instruction: call the Dispatcher. The number is already sitting in your phonebook under The Dispatcher, so there's nothing to hunt for.

The hard gate. Nothing accrues — no auto-assigned contract, no timer, nothing — until you actually dial and pick "I'm ready — check me in." This is deliberate: it's the one thing standing between a brand-new save and a permanent deadlock. If you never call, you never get work. Two reminder toasts nudge you if you sit on it (roughly 30 and 60 in-game minutes after the intro v-mail), then the game stops nagging and leaves it up to you.

The Dispatcher's menu. Dialing 900-7378 opens a state-aware conversation, not a fixed script:

• "Any work for me?" pulls a contract immediately instead of waiting out the auto-assign cooldown. It's refused if you're already holding a contract, refused while a warrant is active ("Not while they're hunting you. Lay low."), and refused once you're Level 3+ ("You're senior now — pull jobs off the board.").
• "Go off the books" flips a flag that pauses the entire auto-assign/job-board pipeline: no new contracts land, the L3 board stops refilling and stops accepting ACCEPTs. Any contract you're already holding is completely unaffected — it keeps running, keeps its deadline, keeps paying out normally. This is the "I need a break, don't send me anything" switch, not a case-freeze.
• Picking any option auto-hangs-up the call a moment later.

After check-in. Your first contract lands about 2 in-game hours later (config [Onboarding] FirstJobAfterActivationHours), and it's deliberately softballed: the game searches specifically for a "gentle" target — someone who lives alone, has no partner, and has zero home security (no locks, no cameras, no echelon floor) — before falling back to a normal pick if no such target exists anywhere in the city. This bias is a one-time thing; the instant your first contract is delivered, it's gone for good and every job after is scored normally.

Tutorial toasts fire exactly once each, right when they're relevant: buying your first Fingerprint Remover, entering the proving-hit target's building, your first kill, your first time equipping the mask. If you've already got an established save (rep > 0, a contract already in progress, a level reward already banked, etc.), the mod detects that and silently marks you as already activated and already past the tutorials — updating the mod on a save in progress never re-traps you in onboarding.

3. Reputation, Levels, Tiers & Hit Tokens

Underworld Reputation is a single integer that only moves when the game explicitly grants or docks it — it never decays on its own, and it never goes negative.

Levels

Rewards fire exactly once per level, on a high-water-mark latch — if your rep is later docked back down and climbs past the same threshold again, you get an acknowledgement toast ("Back in the Syndicate's good graces...") but no second payout, no second mask disk.

Tiers

Your Tier (1–3) is simply max(1, Level) — a Level 0 Recruit still only ever sees Tier-1 work; hitting Level 2 or Level 3 also raises the difficulty ceiling for what the fixer will offer you (Level 2 rep and Level 3 rep double as the Tier-2 and Tier-3 boundaries). Harder tiers pay substantially more — see Payout Math.

Rep gains and losses

• Gain: closing out a contract on your pinboard grants 10 × Tier rep — at collection, not at the kill, and only if you weren't identified for that murder. Get made for it, and the rep for that job is forfeited outright (you still get paid, and you still get the token — see below).
• Cancel an active contract: −5 rep.
• Get identified for a murder (independent of the contract-payout forfeiture above, and it applies even to a freelance kill that was never a contract): −25 rep if the victim was a Syndicate target, −10 rep if it was a random kill.
• A contract whose target dies to something other than you (an edge case where a target retroactively becomes a protected citizen, say) voids with no penalty — "the client pulled the job."

Hit Tokens

Every contract that reaches payout collection pays exactly 1 Hit Token — clean or caught, it doesn't matter, the token rewards "the job got done." Tokens are spent at the Syndicate app's BUY SOCIAL STANDING row: 1 token + 500cr buys 350 of the game's own native Social Credit stat (the real progression track that gates echelon-floor access and similar perks — those perks are vanilla, not something this mod invents). The purchase requires Syndicate Level 1+ and is fully transactional: if anything fails mid-purchase, both the token and the money are refunded, so you can never lose a token to a bad roll.

4. Getting Contracts

There are two completely different acquisition modes, split by your Syndicate level.

Levels 0–2: auto-assign

The fixer hands you one contract at a time, no browsing, no choice of target — delivered as a v-mail the moment it's ready. Mechanically:

• Checked roughly every 1.5 seconds; a new contract is only handed out while you have zero active contracts.
• After a contract closes (for any reason), the next one lands after a 12-hour cooldown (ContractCooldownHours).
• The very first auto-assigned contract of your career instead waits on the onboarding timer (2h after check-in — see Onboarding), which supersedes the general first-contract delay.
• Auto-assign is completely suspended while you have an active warrant — the fixer isn't going to hand you a job while the law is actively hunting you. It re-arms with the normal cooldown once the warrant clears.
• You can skip the wait by calling the Dispatcher and asking "Any work for me?"

Level 3+: the job board

At Level 3 the fixer stops babysitting you — the Syndicate app's contract board opens up:

• Up to 8 offers live on the board at once (OfferBoardSize), each showing tier, info level, base fee, objective count, and the fixer's lead text.
• You ACCEPT the ones you want, up to 3 active contracts simultaneously (MaxConcurrentContractsL3) — below Level 3 you're always capped at 1.
• Un-accepted listings age out and get replaced after 48 hours (OfferLifetimeHours), staggered a few hours per-listing so the whole board doesn't refresh in lockstep.
• REFRESH BOARD rerolls the entire board for free, but only once every 6 hours (RefreshBoardCooldownHours) — enough to stop you from refresh-spamming to fish for a specific objective combo.
• If a job's Deadline objective was rolled while it was still sitting unaccepted on the board, accepting it re-anchors the deadline clock to the moment you accept, not to when it was generated — you're never handed a deadline that's already half-elapsed.

Cancelling and pausing

• Cancel an active contract any time: −5 rep, the case is deleted outright (not archived).
• Go off the books via the Dispatcher to pause new work without touching what's already in progress (see Onboarding for the exact menu flow).

5. Targets & Leads

How a target gets picked

Every citizen the game considers gets scored on three 0–2 "buckets," and the contract's overall difficulty score is 1 + max(Wealth, Security, Exposure) — so a target only needs to be extreme in one dimension to be a hard job.

• Wealth bucket — the higher of two sub-scores: their societalClass (≥0.66 → 2, ≥0.33 → 1, else 0), or their employer's top salary band (≥5 → 2, ≥3 → 1, else 0).
• Security bucket (capped at 2) — checked against their home (falling back to their workplace): an echelon floor is an automatic 2. Otherwise, no-access housing is also an automatic 2; resident- or employee-only access adds +1; a password-protected address adds +1; any active security (alarms, sentry guns, cameras, other security) adds +1.
• Exposure bucket — a points total: up to +3 for co-habitants, +2 for having a partner, +1 or +2 for coworkers (depending on company headcount), and −2 for working a night shift (fewer people around to see anything). ≥5 points is bucket 2, ≥2 is bucket 1.

Homeless targets are always forced to Tier 3 — no fixed address makes them the hardest kind of job in the game, and they're never offered below that tier.

The fixer then rolls a desired tier weighted by your current ceiling (a Tier-2 ceiling player sees 35% Tier-1 / 65% Tier-2 jobs; a Tier-3 ceiling sees a 20/35/45 split) and searches up to 60 random citizens for the closest match to that difficulty — an exact match wins immediately, otherwise the closest-scoring candidate found in those 60 draws is used. Dead citizens, enforcers, protected citizens, your fixer, and anyone already targeted by an active contract or a live board offer are excluded from the pool.

Info levels — how much you're told

(InvestigationBias, default 0, lets you globally shift this mix toward or away from Full leads if you want more or less detective work baked into your career.)

• Full hands you the target's name, address, and job outright.
• Partial/Cold hands you a procedurally-built clue trail instead: a surname to search the city directory for, an employer, physical descriptors (hair, build, eye color, height, glasses, facial hair), or records like blood type, age, or shoe size. Every clue set the fixer generates is guaranteed to point at exactly one living person in the city — if no unique combination can be built for a given target, the generator quietly falls back to handing you Full info instead rather than shipping an unsolvable job.
• How you actually solve one: treat it like the reverse of a vanilla murder investigation. Cross-reference the clue against the city's phone/citizen directory, ask around a described workplace, stake out a physical description at the right kind of venue, or pull records that narrow it by blood type/age/shoe size. The tools are the same ones the game already gives you for solving other people's mysteries.
• Kill the wrong person and the contract pays nothing — the payout evaporates and every bit of heat from that kill is yours alone, with no client to blame it on. Every lead's text ends with the same warning for a reason: "wrong body pays nothing."

Partial and Cold leads pay a real premium for the extra legwork (see the payout formula below) — a Tier 3 Cold lead is by far the single best-paying job type in the game.

6. Contract Objectives

Roughly half your jobs carry optional bonus objectives on top of "kill this person." A contract rolls 0 objectives 45% of the time, exactly 1 objective 40% of the time, and 2 objectives the remaining 15% — drawn without repeats from whichever types are enabled in config. Missing an objective never fails the contract — you only forfeit that objective's payout adjustment.

A single contract can layer several of these — check the "Terms" text on any offer or active job before you commit; a Tier-3 job with a required disposal term, a rolled Deadline, and a Forge-an-Accident objective is entirely possible, and misreading one line can cost you a third of the payout.

7. Payout Math

The base formula

A contract's base fee is fixed the moment it's generated:

Base Fee = ContractBasePayout × Tier Multiplier × Info Multiplier   (rounded to nearest 5cr)

• ContractBasePayout = 900cr.
• Tier multiplier: Tier 1 = ×1.0, Tier 2 = ×1.7, Tier 3 = ×2.8.
• Info multiplier: Full = ×1.0, Partial = ×1.5, Cold = ×2.2.

That puts a Tier-1/Full "proving hit" around 900cr base, and the single best-paying combination in the game — a Tier-3/Cold lead — around 5,545cr base, before a single objective bonus is added.

Objective bonuses at collection

When you actually close the case, every objective that resolved Met adds its bonus fraction, every one that resolved as the Dispose-at-Sea penalty subtracts its fraction, and the whole thing rounds to the nearest 5cr:

Final Payout = RoundTo5( Base Fee × (1 + Σ met bonuses − Σ missed penalties) )

The confirm popup you get when you close a case shows the itemized math, e.g. base 525 · deadline +105 · clean +130 = 760cr.

The state machine

Getting paid is a three-stage process, not a single event:

1. The kill. The contract flips to Completed. Any objective that can be judged instantly (Deadline, Poison Kill, the forge-method check, Dispose-at-Sea) latches right here. No money, no rep, no token yet — the game tells you outright that pay clears once the heat settles.
2. Forensics resolve. The moment the crime scene the kill created either goes cold or you get identified for it, the escrowed objectives (Clean Kill, Forge an Accident) lock in — Met if you were never identified, Missed if you were. The contract becomes Payable.
3. Collection. Walk up to the contract's pinboard case and close it. This is the only place the money, rep, and token actually change hands, and it's the only place any objective still sitting Pending gets force-finalized (Photo/Dispose default to Missed; anything else voids harmlessly).

The "no rep when identified" rule

You always get the base fee and every bonus you actually earned — money is never withheld for getting caught. But rep (10 × Tier) and any level-up it would have triggered are granted only if you were never identified for that kill. Get made, and you still bank the cash and the Hit Token ("the job got done"), you just don't build your career off it. This is why a truly clean run matters more than the raw payout — money buys gear, rep buys rank.

Safety nets

• Auto-collect: a Payable contract left sitting on your board for 24 hours gets auto-wired by the fixer anyway — you're told exactly how much, and you never actually lose money to forgetfulness.
• Forensics timeout backstop: in the rare case a scene somehow never resolves (roughly 80 hours after discovery-eligibility), it's force-settled as if it had gone cold.
• The Anonymous Tip Line (900-8477) doesn't change any of this math — it only calls in a hidden body sooner, which just moves stage 2 earlier. It's the tool for pulling a forged-accident or hidden-body payout forward without changing whether you get caught.

8. Kill Methods

With one deliberate exception (below), essentially any citizen in the city can be killed by essentially any method. All lethal actions run through one shared choke point, so the rules below are consistent no matter which tool you pick.

Firearms

Six working guns, all built on vanilla weapon assets: pistol, silenced pistol, revolver, shotgun, battle rifle, sniper rifle.

• Ammo & magazines. Each gun draws from its own ammo type and has its own magazine size (pistols/revolver hold 6–12, the battle rifle holds 30, the sniper rifle holds 5 — unlisted guns default to 8). Reload with R, a 2.5-second animation; switching weapons mid-reload cancels it for free. If you never bind a reload key, an empty gun becomes permanently useless once its reserve ammo runs out too — always keep one bound.
• The shotgun fires a 6-pellet buckshot spread by default, or a single true-flying slug — swap between them with B. Switching shell types ejects whatever's still chambered.
• Lethality. The shotgun and sniper rifle kill in one body shot outright. A headshot with any gun always kills. Otherwise it's the standard two-hit rule: the first hit knocks the target out, a second finishes them. For the shotgun's buckshot specifically, a headshot pellet also counts, or landing 3 of the 6 pellets on one person — meaning point-blank buckshot kills, but the same spread at range only wounds.
• Noise. Every gunshot alarms anyone who hears it and gets remembered — except the silenced pistol, which is exempt from both. Merely drawing any gun drains nerve from bystanders nearby, whether you fire it or not. A non-lethal hit also turns the victim's entire room hostile.
• Casings. A spent shell is left for any gun that actually ejects one (the revolver doesn't — it's the quiet, careful killer's gun for exactly that reason) and carries your fingerprint unless you're gloved.

The syringe (poison, reusable)

Three doses per syringe. Aim and use within reach:

• On an already knocked-out target: instant, silent kill.
• On a conscious target: not instant. They stagger like they're drunk, stay alive and fully mobile, and collapse dead about 5 in-game minutes later. Walk away — they can be seen wandering around by other people in the meantime, which is either a risk (a witness) or a feature (an alibi-building distraction), depending on how you use it.

The vial (forged overdose, single-use)

Force-feed it to an already knocked-out target only — it refuses on anyone conscious, and refuses a second time on someone who already has a dose pending. Their death is staged as a self-inflicted overdose roughly 10 in-game minutes later, with the empty bottle left behind as the "evidence." The verdict depends on the body: a target who was only ever sedated reads as a genuine accidental overdose; a target who was beaten or shot first still shows signs of violence and resolves as a murder investigation with extra heat on top, no matter how you staged the death after the fact. Put them down clean first.

The sedative (silent, non-lethal takedown)

Three doses of repurposed sleeping pills. Requires you to be directly behind the target (or for them to already be asleep) with no other living citizen currently able to see you. On success it's a direct, damage-free knockout — no violence flag is ever set, which is exactly what you need for the No Violence objective and for a genuinely clean forged accident. Any knocked-out body — from this or any other source — stays down roughly 3× longer than a normal vanilla takedown, plenty of time to drag it somewhere.

Forge a fall

No item required. Drag a knocked-out body to a stairwell, rooftop, or window ledge, then either walk it off the edge or press G to heave it forward. It needs to genuinely free-fall at least 6 metres to die on impact, and the death (and the crime scene) is anchored to wherever the body actually lands, not where you dropped it — ruled an accident, provided you're never identified for it.

Melee & cripple

Blunt weapons knock a target out faster than bladed ones (blades cut rather than stun, so they take more hits for a non-lethal takedown). Any non-lethal hit — melee or gunshot — also cripples the victim: they're slowed to a fraction of their normal speed for about 90 seconds, which is the difference between a target who limps helplessly and one who sprints off to find help.

Who's protected

Enforcers and landlords never die — any lethal action against them degrades to a knockout instead, because both are a finite, non-replenishing pool in the city and killing them off would permanently break the save (fewer cops forever, a landlord-less district). This protection can be switched off in config if you want the risk, but the game is explicit that doing so is "permanent save damage... on you." Separately (and unrelated to killability), the last living employee of a business is never offered to you as a contract target — though you can still freelance-kill them if you really want to; only the job board won't hand them to you.

9. The Investigation

Every kill opens a live crime scene at the instant it happens, scoped to the victim's whole home/address. From here, three independent systems are racing to identify you.

Witnesses

There are two kinds, and both are locked in at the moment they occur:

• Kill witnesses — anyone with a clear line of sight on the act itself.
• Sightings — anyone who later sees you physically inside the victim's home, even if they don't yet know a crime happened.

Whether you were masked or not at that exact instant is stamped permanently onto that specific witness — a witness who saw a masked figure can never later "remember" your real face.

Witnesses don't report immediately. It takes roughly 2 in-game hours for a witness to come forward (a sighting that happened before the body was even found waits until discovery, then starts its own 2-hour clock). Silence them before that timer expires — kill or knock them out — and their account is dropped entirely, no partial credit either way. Once the body is officially reported, any witness still pending is pulled forward to be "interviewed" within about 2 more hours.

• An unmasked witness whose report goes through is an automatic positive ID — a name beats every masked description in the same batch.
• A masked witness only ever files a "masked figure" description: it adds a flat chunk of heat once per scene and can force the scene to be discovered if it wasn't already, but it never identifies you on its own.
• Getting caught red-handed by an enforcer inside an already-discovered scene works the same way: unmasked means an instant ID and an immediate hunt; masked means pursuit with no warrant, plus the same masked-description heat.

All of the above requires you to be physically inside the scene's apartment, not the lobby or a different floor — a sighting from the stairwell doesn't count.

Security cameras

Cameras are witnesses that can't be knocked out, and their reach is scoped to the scene's own floor — the apartment plus that floor's common areas, nothing further. Your own home's cameras are always exempt.

• A camera that catches the kill itself, or catches you inside the scene apartment, unmasked, is an instant guaranteed ID with an immediate warrant — the camera footage itself is the discovery, no waiting on a body to be found.
• The same, masked, adds the masked-description heat and triggers a brief enforcer sweep to your location — no ID.
• A camera that only catches you in the hallway near the scene (never inside it, never the kill) doesn't identify you at all — it's treated like a pre-discovery witness sighting instead: the heat is deferred until the body is actually found and the footage gets "reviewed," and it only counts if that review happens within about 2 hours of the kill. A stale hallway sighting reviewed a day later adds nothing.

Darkness genuinely defeats cameras — the mod replicates the game's own stealth-lighting model, clamping a camera's detection range down using the same personal-light value that hides you from NPCs. There's a floor, though: point-blank (roughly 0.75 metres) always gets you spotted regardless of how dark it is, and turning on your flashlight, or simply running, defeats the darkness gate completely and puts you back at full visible range.

Fingerprints

Two separate systems exist under the hood, but only one of them matters to you as a player:

• The game's own built-in, always-on fingerprint feature (the one that ignores gloves entirely in vanilla) is neutralized outright on anything you own or carry by default — a pure fairness fix so an unbeatable vanilla print doesn't sit on every mod item regardless of what you're wearing.
• The system that actually decides your fate is the dynamic print the mod itself tracks: virtually any world interaction — a door, a switch, the murder weapon itself — stamps a print the instant you touch it, logged with a random "heat" value (3–12) the game tallies up later.

Public places don't count. Streets, building lobbies, floor landings, and any shop floor open to customers (whether it's currently open or not) generate too much foot traffic for your prints to mean anything — you leave no trackable print there at all. A home is always private, even with a guest pass, and any password-protected or genuinely secured back room always matters, no matter where it is.

Second Skin (the Level-2 gloves reward) suppresses every print you'd otherwise leave, including the murder weapon's, unconditionally, the instant it's installed at a sync clinic — there's no toggle, no on/off; installed means active, full stop.

The Fingerprint Remover is a cheap can (available from Level 0) that wipes prints off anything you've touched within arm's reach — 50 wipes per can, only consumed on an actual successful wipe, and it only ever removes your prints, leaving anyone else's intact. The vanilla Print Scanner and an on-screen cue both show you exactly what in a room is tainted.

Positive ID at cold review fires if any one of these is true: your surviving fingerprint heat at the scene totals 25 or more, you left prints on 4 or more distinct objects still physically at the scene, or the murder weapon itself carries your print and is confirmed still at the scene when the case resolves. Carry the weapon away, dump it at sea, or wipe every print before the case resolves, and none of it can incriminate you.

Forensics & cold resolution

An undiscovered body sits for 24–48 hours before a routine welfare check finds it on its own (or you can call it in yourself with the Tip Line to speed that up). Once discovered, the scene stays open and "under investigation" for 8 hours — the HUD flips to "Going Cold" for roughly the last 40% of that window. If nobody's named you and the fingerprint thresholds above weren't met by the deadline, the case goes cold: every fingerprint tied to that location is wiped clean, and the murder weapon stops incriminating you, permanently, for that case.

10. The Mask — False Face

Your Level-1 reward, delivered to your mailbox automatically. It's a sync disk, not a wearable item — you have to bond it at a sync clinic before it does anything, then toggle it in-game with N.

What it actually does. While worn, no witness, enforcer, or camera that sees you can ever name you — the most any of them can report is "a masked figure." A scene stays at Suspicious forever from a masked sighting alone; it can never escalate straight into a warrant that way. Getting caught red-handed while masked still triggers a chase, just never a warrant.

What it doesn't do. It fools eyes, not physical evidence — fingerprints and a printed weapon still point straight at you regardless of whether your face was covered. And a mask isn't invisible: covered faces make bystanders nervous, which is its own small tell.

The one real trap: taking the mask off while a witness or camera of a currently open case can still see you retroactively upgrades their account into a full positive ID — you're effectively signing your name to whatever the masked figure was already seen doing. Once no case involving that witness/camera is still open, unmasking is completely free.

Notoriety — the cost of the mask

Wearing a mask isn't free forever. Every masked crime that's actually seen builds a hidden 0–100% "notoriety" meter attached to your masked persona:

• Each incident adds a base chunk of notoriety, scaled up for extra witnesses, scaled up further if it happened in a public place or in daylight, capped at 30% from any single incident.
• It decays on its own while you lie low — roughly 15% per in-game day, so a maxed-out persona clears in about a week of staying quiet.
• The higher your notoriety climbs, the more bystanders visibly dread the mask on sight, and (if enabled — off by default) enforcers start giving you a suspicious once-over at high enough notoriety, without actually stopping you.

The slip. Getting busted while masked, or getting unmasked in view mid-case (the trap above), merges your entire accumulated masked spree onto your real identity — a real warrant covering a notoriety-scaled share of your unresolved masked incidents (worse the more notorious you'd gotten), plus fines per merged incident. The meter zeroes out afterward; the persona is spent. Getting busted while masked also confiscates the mask disk outright by default, so you'll need to buy or otherwise acquire another.

A Persona Wipe (Supplies app, 2,500cr) resets your notoriety to zero on demand without waiting out the decay — handy before a job you know is going to be seen.

11. Warrant & Manhunt

Getting positively identified for a murder — by an unmasked witness, an unmasked camera, or forensics catching up with you at cold review — puts the whole city machine into motion.

The warrant. A murder charge issues a warrant lasting 48 hours by default, shown as a persistent WANTED banner with a countdown. A new murder committed while already wanted simply refreshes the countdown to full rather than stacking. There's a short (2-hour) grace window after an ID before the hunt actually engages — this is explicitly not an escape opportunity; the warrant issues wherever you happen to be once it expires.

The hunt. By default, only enforcers who actually see you (a real line-of-sight check, not a psychic citywide alert) give chase — break line of sight and they lose you. A stricter, vanilla-style "wanted city-wide" mode exists in config for players who want the harsher version.

The home raid. Once per warrant, enforcers hit your home:

• Find a tracked murder weapon sitting there? It's destroyed and adds a fine surcharge.
• Is your home cruncher powered on and logged in as you? That's an extra fine surcharge and a rep hit — log out and shut it down before you go on the run.
• A guard gets posted on your floor landing for the rest of the warrant afterward.

Caught carrying. Get knocked out while wanted with a tracked murder weapon still in your inventory, and it's confiscated with its own surcharge on top of everything else.

"Getting busted." Shadows of Doubt has no arrest animation — getting knocked out while wanted (by an enforcer's damage, or while actively being chased) is the bust. You wake up in a hospital, your outstanding fines are collected (leaving you a small minimum balance so you're never wiped out completely), and the warrant clears entirely. Anything you can't pay persists forever as an unpaid balance — you can always settle early, before capture, for 60% of what's owed.

Safehouse breach. Fleeing into your own locked home while actively being chased triggers exactly one enforcer breach of your apartment — it isn't a magic safe room. If they don't find you, they leave, but the landing guard (if a warrant's already active) stays posted regardless.

The warrant also just expires if the full duration elapses without a capture — cleared the same way, minus the fine collection.

12. Residual Heat & the Loose Ends Heist

Not every kill that goes cold is actually clean. A separate, hidden Residual Heat meter (0–100%) tracks murders that resolved cold but still left evidence close to the line — a near-miss the game remembers even though it didn't catch you at the time.

• Each qualifying "close call" cold murder adds up to 20% of the meter, scaled by exactly how close it actually came to a positive ID.
• At 80%, the Syndicate offers you a heist to clear the slate: a pinboard case called "Loose Ends." Locate a stealable evidence folder — usually stashed in an enforcer division's secure back room, occasionally just left on a desk — steal it, and physically throw it into the sea. Pull that off and the entire meter zeroes out, contributor list included, no questions asked.
• Ignore it, and at 100% every murder that fed the meter gets hit with a flat fine, and a fresh warrant is issued on top — "your old cases finally landed on the right desk." There is no way to see this coming murder-by-murder; the only warning is the heist offer itself.

The mole email. When a case goes cold but left something worth mentioning — surviving fingerprints, a forged death staged over a body that was actually beaten, a hallway camera sighting that landed heat — you may get a v-mail from a rotating, never-named contact ("a friend in Records," "your ear in Dispatch") itemizing exactly what almost got you caught on that job. It's purely informational — there's no mechanical follow-up — but it's the clearest signal the game gives you about your own sloppiness. Read it and tighten up.

13. Apps, Shopping & Phone Lines

Every Syndicate-related app lives on your home cruncher only — it will never appear on a public terminal, an ATM, or anyone else's computer.

The Syndicate app

Your career hub. Always available: BUY SOCIAL STANDING (spend a Hit Token + cash for native social credit) and SYNDICATE STATUS (a read-only summary of your rank, tokens, money, and active jobs — note that Partial/Cold leads deliberately withhold the target's identity even on this screen, so you can't peek). At Level 3+, the contract board appears alongside them (see Getting Contracts).

Supplies app

The arsenal. Guns, ammo, blades, poison items, tools, and spare mask/gloves sync disks, priced at a 20% discount off the (globally raised) street price and gated by your Syndicate level — a silenced pistol or the long guns, for instance, don't unlock until Level 3. Checkout debits you immediately; a courier drops a case at your door about 1 hour later (ordering again before you've opened the first case just merges the new items into it rather than sending a second one).

Groceries app

Food, drink, and — notably — all medical items live here rather than in Supplies, priced with a small delivery markup instead of a discount, and completely ungated by level.

Global pricing

The mod raises the street price of every gun (×7 by default), all ammunition (×3), and all other gear (×3) — at every vendor in the city, not just its own shop — then discounts its own shop below that raised baseline. This means the Syndicate's own Supplies app is always the cheapest place in the city to buy this stuff, by design. If a number here annoys you, [Supplies] GunPriceMultiplier / AmmoPriceMultiplier / GearPriceMultiplier are the knobs.

Phone lines

• The Anonymous Tip Line (900-8477) — call in a body you've hidden or forged to get it discovered sooner. Accelerate-only: it doesn't clean up anything or change your odds, it just moves the discovery clock forward, which is useful for pulling a forged-accident payout in sooner.
• The Dispatcher (900-7378) — your one line to the fixer: check in, pull a job early, or pause/resume the whole contract pipeline. See Onboarding for the full menu.

The newspaper

The city paper runs your work as real news, with real names and real districts baked in — a manhunt in progress, a body found, a death ruled an overdose or an accident, a "masked figure sought," records stolen from an enforcer office, or a "crime wave" round-up once enough bodies pile up in a short window. Bigger, fresher stories bump smaller ones off the front page.

HUD

A cluster along the top of the screen: your Syndicate level and a running table of your open crime scenes sit top-left (undiscovered, under investigation, or going cold); your mask status is top-right (the badge visibly doubles in size while it's actually worn, with your notoriety meter beneath it once you've installed the mask disk); and the heat meter runs across the top-center. A WANTED banner and an outstanding-fines line stack on top whenever either applies. The whole cluster can be switched off in config if you'd rather play without the extra information.

14. Tips & Tricks

• Buy the Fingerprint Remover before your first job, not after. It's cheap, available from Level 0, and the single highest-value purchase in the game — cleaning a scene properly is the difference between "cold" and "identified" on almost every close call.
• Darkness is a real tool, not a gimmick — but respect the floor. Killing in an unlit room genuinely shrinks a camera's detection range, but point-blank range always gets you caught regardless, and your own flashlight (or just running) throws the advantage away instantly. Approach dark, stay dark, don't sprint past a camera you're trying to avoid.
• The revolver and gloves are the print-conscious killer's combo. No casing left behind, no fingerprint anywhere once Second Skin is installed. Until you have the gloves, favor the revolver for exactly this reason.
• Sedate before you stage. A forged accident (overdose or fall) only reads as a genuine accident if the body was never actually beaten or shot — always put a target down with the sedative first if you're planning to fake their death, both for the No Violence bonus and to avoid the extra "signs of violence" heat.
• Log out of your home cruncher before you go on the run. A logged-in session found during a home raid is a guaranteed extra fine and a rep hit for something that costs you nothing to avoid.
• Settle fines early. Once you owe money, paying it off voluntarily costs only 60% of the total — waiting for a bust to collect it costs the full balance (minus a small minimum you're always left with).
• Watch your Residual Heat, even on cases that went cold. A string of "almost got me" cold kills is quietly filling a meter you can't see directly. Take the Loose Ends heist the moment it's offered — the alternative (letting it hit 100%) is a guaranteed fine and warrant with zero warning.
• Read a mole email as a lesson, not just flavor text. It tells you exactly what nearly burned you on a specific job — if it keeps mentioning the same weapon type or the same kind of room, that's the habit to fix.
• Dispose of an issued weapon if the contract says to. The penalty for keeping it (−45% of the base fee) is steep enough that it's almost always worth the short walk to the water.
• Read every contract's "Terms" before accepting off the board. A job can stack a required disposal term with a rolled Deadline and a Forge-an-Accident objective all at once — know what you're actually signing up for before you commit one of your limited concurrent slots to it.
• On a Partial or Cold lead, don't guess. The wrong body pays nothing and dumps all the heat on you for free. Cross-reference every clue you're given before you commit to a kill.
• Never waste ammunition on an enforcer or a landlord. They can't be killed by design — you'll only knock them out and burn resources doing it.
• Cancelling a contract you can't solve is often the correct move. A 5-rep penalty is nothing next to a wrong-target zero payout plus a self-inflicted crime scene with no client to blame.

15. FAQ

Q: I killed my target and nothing happened — no money, no rep. Is the mod broken? No — that's by design. Pay sits in escrow ("awaiting forensics") until the crime scene you just created actually resolves, one way or the other. Close the case on your pinboard once it flips to "Payable" to collect.

Q: I got identified for the kill. Do I still get paid? Yes, always — the base fee and every bonus you actually earned. What you lose is the rep for that job (and the Clean Kill/Forge-an-Accident bonuses, if the contract had them) — the money and the Hit Token are yours regardless.

Q: What's the actual difference between a Full, Partial, and Cold lead? Full hands you the name and address outright. Partial and Cold instead give you a clue trail (a surname, an employer, a physical description, a blood type) that's guaranteed to point at exactly one real person in the city — you do the legwork yourself. Both pay noticeably more than Full for the same target.

Q: Can I kill an enforcer or a landlord? No, not by default — both are protected and any lethal hit on them just knocks them out instead. It's a save-integrity safeguard, not a balance restriction, and it can be disabled in config if you're willing to accept permanent consequences to the city.

Q: How do I actually avoid a camera? Stay unmasked-but-unseen if you can, or lean on darkness — it genuinely shrinks a camera's detection range, down to a hard floor at point-blank range. Turning on your flashlight or running defeats the darkness advantage completely, so approach slow and dark.

Q: Does the mask stop me from leaving fingerprints? No — the mask and fingerprints are completely separate systems. The mask only stops eyewitnesses (people and cameras) from naming you; it does nothing about the physical evidence you leave behind. Gloves (Second Skin) are the fingerprint answer.

Q: I left a print or two but the case still went cold. Am I actually safe? For that specific case, yes — once it resolves cold, its fingerprints are wiped and it can never come back to bite you. But leftover "almost got caught" evidence quietly feeds a separate Residual Heat meter across your whole career; enough near-misses eventually forces a reckoning (see Residual Heat).

Q: What happens if I forget to collect a payment? Nothing bad — a Payable contract left uncollected for 24 hours gets auto-wired to you by the fixer anyway. You're told exactly how much, and you can never lose money you've earned by simply forgetting to walk to your pinboard.

Q: Can I run more than one contract at a time? Below Level 3, no — one at a time. At Level 3+, up to 3 concurrent contracts once the job board unlocks.

Q: What should I do before a home raid hits me? Log out of and power off your home cruncher (an active logged-in session is an automatic extra fine and rep hit), and get any tracked murder weapon out of your home entirely if you can — a raid that finds one destroys it and adds a surcharge.

Q: How do I get Second Skin gloves faster than waiting for Level 2? A spare copy is sellable from the Supplies app once you hit Level 2, but it's also occasionally available from the game's native Blackmarket Trader vendor — which isn't gated by your Syndicate level at all, if you happen to find one early.

Q: Does killing the wrong person on a Partial or Cold lead still pay? No — it pays nothing, and every scrap of heat from that kill is on you with no client to answer for it. Always be certain before you commit.

Q: What's the Hit Token actually good for, beyond bragging rights? It's the sole currency (alongside cash) for buying the game's real, native Social Credit stat through the Syndicate app — the same stat that unlocks things like echelon-floor access.

Q: Can I take a break from the mod without abandoning my current job? Yes — call the Dispatcher and go "off the books." It stops all new contracts and board refills but leaves anything already in progress completely untouched.

Q: Why did my mask notoriety spike so hard from one job? Notoriety scales up with how many people saw you, whether it happened in a public place, and whether it happened in daylight — a masked kill witnessed by several people on a public floor in broad daylight is close to the worst-case scenario for a single incident.

16. Configuration

Every number in this page lives in BepInEx/config/Kropath.TheSyndicate.cfg (or the in-game BepInExConfigManager UI) — the mod's full reference is well over 200 individual keys, so it isn't reproduced here. The complete table lives in the Configuration section of the mod's Thunderstore description page.

The knobs players actually reach for, first:

For absolutely everything else — every timer, every percentage, every objective chance, every price bucket — see the full configuration reference in the mod description.