Changelog

All notable changes to The Syndicate are recorded here. Newest version on top.

0.9.72 (2026-08-17): Clock reliability fix

Fixed

• Crime scenes and warrants no longer get stuck on a timer that never counts down. A game clock the mod read time from could report the wrong day of the month, so any deadline measured against it could drift by whole in-game weeks and never elapse. In practice that showed up as a crime scene frozen on a huge investigation time (for example "INV 171h") that never finished, which in turn held back the contract objective and payout tied to that kill, and as a warrant that never expired. The mod now reads the reliable in-game clock everywhere it tracks time, so investigations run down and close on schedule, held-back contract payouts are released, and warrants lapse when they should.
• Saves that are already stuck heal themselves on load. If a scene or warrant was frozen under an older version, loading the save on this version lets the stuck scene resolve on its own, ticks over and pays the contract attached to it, and expires any stale warrant. No new save is required.

0.9.71 (2026-08-17): Cloud-synced saves

Fixed

• Your Syndicate progress now travels with your save and through Steam Cloud. Until now the mod kept its state (rank, gear, contracts, heat, calling-card history) in a companion folder that Steam Cloud did not sync, so moving a save to another PC, or letting Steam Cloud restore one, reset you to Level 0. The mod now stores its state inside the save file itself, so it rides the game's own cloud sync and copies between machines automatically, with no manual folder-copying. Saves made before this update are migrated automatically on their next load: the old companion file is read once, folded into the save, and retired (renamed to …syndicate.json.migrated.bak), so nothing is lost.

0.9.7 (2026-08-17): The Calling Card

Added

• The Calling Card: sign your work. Buy blank calling cards from the Supplies app (from Level 1), ink a moniker of your own once at the cruncher's Syndicate app, and leave a card on a body. The city paper then names the killer by your mark instead of inventing a serial-killer nickname, and runs a "who is this?" story about the persona you are building. Grab the card back before the body is found and the claim vanishes cleanly. But if a signed murder is ever pinned to you, that moniker is burned for good: the press prints "[name] HAS A NAME", and you can never sign with it again. Unmasking a second persona links both names to you publicly ("TWO MASKS, ONE HAND") and adds heat. Your first mark is free; changing it later costs 1,000cr and never burns the old name (only getting caught does). A card left on a body also carries your fingerprint unless you wear the Second Skin gloves, and it converts a forged "accident" back into an open murder if it is still on the body when it is found.
• A home raid can unmask you. During a warrant home raid, if enforcers find your calling cards at the home they raid, every persona whose card is there is pinned to you at once: fines, an extended warrant, and the moniker burned. Only the personas on the cards they actually find fall; kills signed under a different mark, whose cards are elsewhere, stay anonymous. Do not stockpile signed cards where they can search.
• The residual-evidence file can name you. When the hidden Residual Heat meter fills to 100% and the cold cases it reopens include a signed one, that persona is now unmasked and its moniker burned along with the fines and warrant, not merely re-charged.

Changed

• A living city newspaper. The paper now reports the full arc of your work: obituaries that name who found the body, how, and the apparent cause of death; coroner rulings ("ruled an overdose", "ruled an accidental fall"); cold-case write-ups when a trail stalls; a "masked figure sought" when you are seen but not identified; a serial-killer profile once a pattern forms; your signed claims and the moment a name is burned; the manhunt (WANTED, an arrest, or a lapsed warrant); and city-wide crime-wave and repeat-address stories. You can now scroll the mouse wheel while reading to page back through older editions, and the front page stays consistent so nothing important is silently dropped.
• Throw a corpse, not just a knockout. The G heave now works on an already-dead body too, so you can pitch a corpse out a window or off a ledge to get it out of sight (no faked accident, just a physics throw).
• Every notification runs through one queue. All of the mod's pop-up messages are now spaced and grouped so they never overlap or pile up.

Fixed

• Guns work again after using a cruncher mid-rename. Opening the moniker editor, hitting a rejection, and walking away without closing the app could leave the typing guard stuck, which silently killed all firearm actions (fire, reload, ammo and slug switching) until a reload. The guard now clears itself the instant you leave the cruncher.
• Hiding through a home raid keeps the weapon you are carrying. A raid was wrongly seizing a murder weapon out of your inventory while you hid at home. Carried weapons are only taken on an actual bust now; only a weapon left lying at home is seized in the raid.
• A fast witnessed kill now prints its obituary. When a witness identified you almost immediately, the "body found" story was being suppressed in favour of the WANTED story and never printed. A fresh obituary now runs alongside the manhunt.
• Paying a murder's bounty fully settles it. Settling or fully paying a murder's fine now stops that murder's weapon and cards from incriminating you later, so you can no longer be re-fined for a bounty you already cleared.
• The newspaper no longer double-prints a story after a reload. A specific save-and-reload timing could show the same story on both the front page and the scroll-back pages.

0.9.6 (2026-08-13): Restraint tools & a riskier disguise

Added

• Duct Tape: a reusable silent restraint. Buy it from the Supplies app. Aim at someone within reach and use it to bind and gag them for a few hours: it silences their screams and barks. It works on anyone already helpless (asleep, knocked out, or already restrained) from any angle, or on a conscious mark from behind. Hold to apply (a progress bar, like handcuffs); re-tape to refresh the hold. About 10 uses per roll.
• Drag a restrained person to another room. Hold G while aiming at a handcuffed or taped (conscious, not knocked-out) citizen to walk them along with you; release to drop them. You move slowly while dragging. (Knocked-out bodies still use the existing corpse-drag / G-heave.)
• Handcuffs hold much longer: a cuffed citizen now stays restrained about 5 in-game hours (was ~1), long enough to actually move or work around them.
• People react to a bound victim left in public. Restraining someone in a public space where a witness can see them now has consequences: a passer-by panics and phones it in (enforcers sweep in shortly after), an on-duty enforcer who spots them investigates and dispatches faster, and an enforcer who catches you in the act comes after you (plus a little heat). Private rooms (apartments, back rooms) stay completely silent, so a captive stashed out of sight draws nothing. Nobody ever unties the victim; the consequence is the law arriving, not a jailbreak. New [Restraint] PublicReaction* knobs, including an enforcers-only switch if you'd rather bystanders stayed oblivious.
• Petty crime under the mask builds notoriety too. Committing a seen non-lethal crime while masked (a punch, a break-in, a theft, a trespass) now raises your masked persona's infamy, scaled by how serious it is (an assault counts for far more than a trespass). Unseen crimes and unmasked crimes don't count, a whole witnessed looting run reads as one incident, and it's capped well below what an actual killing adds.

Changed

• The mask is riskier to lean on. Masked notoriety now fades more slowly (roughly half the old rate), each sighting stings more, simply wearing the mask in a public place with people around slowly builds infamy on its own, and at high notoriety enforcers give you a "stop and look" by default. The mask is still powerful: it just isn't a free pass any more.
• Richer newspaper crime coverage. The city paper now reports more of the fallout (who found the body and how, the apparent cause of death) and, once a string of similar killings piles up, it runs a serial-killer profile that fixes on a consistent description and a nickname for the culprit. Your pattern becomes a story.
• Sync-disk shop prices & gating tweaked. The False Face mask is cheaper in the Supplies app now (3,500cr, still available from Level 1) while the Second Skin gloves are gated a little later, at Level 3 (still 5,000cr). New [Supplies] MaskDiskAppPrice knob for the mask's price.
• Landlords can now be killed. They're still never handed to you as contract targets (killing a landlord leaves a district without one), but the finite-pool protection no longer forces a lethal hit on a landlord down to a knockout: that immunity is now enforcers-only. Kill one if you must; the consequences are yours.

Fixed

• Wiping a murder weapon's fingerprints now actually works. Cleaning a weapon (especially a poison bottle) with the Fingerprint Remover before the case goes cold now prevents the print off it from identifying you: the forensic review had been reading a stale snapshot and naming you anyway.
• A restrained victim no longer works against you. A cuffed or taped citizen can't become a witness to your crime, can't red-hand you as an enforcer at your own scene, and can't file a report while they're still tied up.
• Fixed a hard crash that could occur while binding with the duct tape.
• Holding the duct tape or sedative no longer opens the "Talk to" dialog: you can't accidentally strike up a conversation with the target you're trying to subdue.
• The Dispatcher's phone-menu options no longer leak into ordinary NPC conversations.

Compatibility

• Works with DialogUIRework (PiePieOnline). The Dispatcher phone menu (including the change-base submenu) is now selectable when that mod's tabbed dialog UI is installed.

0.9.5 (2026-08-12): Firearms overhaul & reward rework

Added

• Multiple operations bases (multi-home). If you own more than one home, the Syndicate now treats one of them as your operations base: where your level-reward sync disks are couriered, where an enforcer home raid comes looking, and where auto-assigned (and Dispatcher-pulled) contract kit is delivered. Move it any time from the Dispatcher → "Move my operations base." Contract kit from the Level-3 job board instead goes to the specific home whose board you accepted the job at, and Supplies / Groceries orders arrive at whichever home's cruncher you placed the order from, so each home can run its own errands. The option only appears when you actually own more than one home, and is held back during an active warrant or an open crime scene so a move can't desync a raid in progress. Single-home players see no change.

Changed

• Guns now aim. Hold right-mouse to raise the weapon; left-click while aiming fires. Left-click without aiming is a melee strike, and the strike now plays its full swing animation (it was landing damage invisibly before). Near a surface, right-click still puts the item down / back as usual: aim only takes over where the game would otherwise let you throw.
• Snipers get a variable scope. While aiming a sniper rifle, scroll to zoom (a small 4.0x readout shows by the crosshair). Sniper shots also reach much farther: the base game caps bullet range short because guns are melee items, which had been limiting the sniper. There's a new BulletRangeFloor config (default 500m).
• Level rewards are now random sync disks. Reaching Level 1 and Level 2 each mails you a random useful vanilla sync disk from a curated, configurable pool, so an early kit differs run to run. The False Face mask and Second Skin gloves are no longer level rewards: buy them from the Supplies app (5,000cr each; mask from Level 1, gloves from Level 2), with a short "how it works" v-mail on your first order of each. Disks you already earned on an older save are kept.
• The Syndicate's own two disks no longer appear in vanilla shops: the Supplies app is the only place to buy them.

Fixed

• Enforcers no longer panic at a drawn gun. Off-duty enforcers were taking the base game's "someone's holding a weapon" fear and cowering or fleeing; trained officers now shrug it off (config EnforcersUnfazedByDrawnGuns). Civilians still react.
• Moving your operations base is blocked while a crime scene is open, so an active scene can't be orphaned.
• Save-transfer safety net. If a save is moved or Steam-Cloud-restored without the mod's companion file (which Steam doesn't sync, see the README), the cruncher inbox no longer bricks; affected Syndicate v-mails degrade to a placeholder instead of crashing.
• Sync disks bought from the app before this update that reloaded as unusable duds are now refunded automatically on load (their identity can't be recovered), and new app purchases reload correctly.

0.9.4 (2026-08-10): Bug fixes & polish

Fixed

• Reward sync disks could break after a save/reload. The mask (False Face) and gloves (Second Skin) disks are delivered to your mailbox, but on some setups, reloading a save with one still lying around left it unusable: it couldn't be installed at a clinic, and in the worst case just looking at it stuttered the game. Both disks are now repaired automatically on load, wherever you've stored them, so a disk left over from an earlier session works again.
• Sedating an enforcer (Dorma-Dix). Using the sedative on an enforcer wrongly showed the "that one's off-limits" refusal and didn't use up a dose, even though it knocked them out. Enforcers are protected from being killed, not from a clean knockout, so sedating one now works like sedating anyone else (a dose is spent, no bogus refusal). Staging a fatal "accident" on one is still blocked.

Added

• A one-time reminder on how to get paid. The first time one of your kills resolves for payout, you get a short prompt spelling out the steps (go to your case board, open the case, hit Close the contract, then Collect) so the payday doesn't slip by. It only ever shows once.

Changed

• Removed a Windows-console tweak. A small startup tweak that disabled the console window's QuickEdit mode was dropped. If you relied on it to avoid the "game freezes until I click the console" pause, you can turn QuickEdit off yourself in the console window's Properties.

Docs

• The README and wiki now state up front that you need a cruncher to play (your contracts and every shop app live only on your home cruncher) and recommend starting your sandbox save with a starting apartment.

0.9.3 (2026-08-08): Memory-leak hotfix

Fixes two memory leaks that could balloon the game's RAM over a long session. They were worst on large cities, where the game already starts near its memory ceiling: there it could climb past 8 GB and stutter badly (even while paused), and sometimes hang on exit. Smaller cities rarely showed it because they start with far more headroom. Both are fixed; a long session now holds steady.

Fixed

• HUD icon memory leak (the main one). The Syndicate HUD redraws the game's own icon sprites (the rank stars and the heat-bar eye) every frame, and the way they were being drawn leaked a little memory on every frame. Over a session that added up to gigabytes. The icons are now pre-rendered once and drawn cheaply, so the drip is gone, with no change to how the HUD looks.
• Permanent-corpse memory leak. Because the Syndicate deliberately keeps your quiet kills from being "discovered," the game never cleaned up the body, and a lingering corpse keeps every passer-by tracking blood, which the game turns into an ever-growing pile of footprint decals. Now, a few hours after a kill's case resolves, the body is quietly handed to the game's own crime-scene cleanup (only once you're not around to see it), so it and its blood trails clear out. Existing saves with a stuck body are repaired on load.

Changed

• Bodies are found sooner. An undiscovered body is now found by a welfare check in about 8-12 in-game hours (was 24-48), so a kill doesn't sit around as long before its scene resolves and cleans up.
• Away-from-home victims' apartments clear a little later: about two days after the case resolves, matching how long the crime-scene tape lingers.

0.9.2 (2026-08-07)

Added

• Clear your bounty early through the Dispatcher. If you owe murder fines, call the Dispatcher and pick Clear my bounty to settle them for a discount (default 60% of what's owed) before a capture collects the full amount. The option shows the live price and only appears when you actually owe something.

Changed

• Clearer Supplies pricing. Gear now shows its true street price and exactly how much you save buying through the Syndicate. (The old line understated it: it compared against the pre-markup base value instead of what other vendors actually charge.)
• Removed the Print Scanner from the Supplies shop. Every citizen (you included) starts the game carrying one, so buying a second identical scanner was pointless.

Fixed

• Post-load stutter on a save made near a body. Reloading a save that held an open crime scene whose murder weapon no longer exists (for example, a syringe you'd already dumped at sea) made the game hitch about once a second: the scene was scanning the entire city every tick trying to re-find the vanished weapon. It now uses the game's direct lookup, so a gone weapon costs nothing. (Same class of fix as 0.9.1; this path only triggered after loading such a save.)

0.9.1 (2026-08-06): Performance hotfix

Purely performance: no gameplay or balance changes.

Fixed

• Large-city stutter from supply/grocery deliveries. While a courier case sat in the world, the game hitched (~1-second frames) for as long as the case existed, and it got worse the bigger the city. Cause: the case was being located by a full linear scan of every interactable in the city each tick; on a large map that single scan took ~1 second. It now uses the game's O(1) id lookup. (Small cities never showed it, which is why it slipped through internal testing on a compact map.)
• The same O(city)-scan pattern, removed from three other hot paths that could hitch on large cities: the crime-scene occupant check while you're standing inside a scene, address lookups during the evidence-heist and home-vacate windows, and the fixer lookup that runs repeatedly on load / during onboarding. All now use the game's scoped or O(1) lookups.

0.9.0 (2026-08-05): First public beta

The first public release. The Syndicate turns Shadows of Doubt into a career-hitman sandbox: a fixer moves you into the city, you take contracts, put targets down, and try to walk away from the exact investigation your own kills create.

Contracts & progression

• Underworld reputation career across four ranks (Recruit, Associate, Operative, Lieutenant) with one-time promotion rewards (the False Face mask at Level 1, the Second Skin gloves at Level 2, the contract board at Level 3).
• Auto-assigned contracts by v-mail at Levels 0-2; a browsable job board (up to 3 concurrent) at Level 3.
• Target selection scored on Wealth / Security / Exposure, with Full / Partial / Cold info leads: Partial/Cold hand you a clue trail guaranteed to resolve to one citizen.
• Escrow payout: money and standing clear only after a kill's heat settles; you collect on the pinboard. No reputation for a job you get identified on.
• Optional contract objectives: Clean Kill, Deadline, Photo of the Body, Poison Kill, Forge an Accident (overdose or fall), No Violence, Dispose at Sea.
• Hit Tokens, spent on the game's native social-credit stat.
• Onboarding flow with a Dispatcher check-in gate and one-shot tutorial toasts.

Killing

• Six working firearms with ammo, magazines, reloading, shotgun spread, headshots, and gunshot alarm.
• Reusable poison syringe (silent or delayed kill), single-use overdose vial (staged overdose), sedative for a clean no-marks KO, and forge-a-fall by dragging/heaving a downed body off a height.
• Melee with a cripple-on-hit slow. Enforcers and landlords are protected (KO only) to keep the city's finite pools intact.

The investigation & consequences

• Live crime scenes fed by witnesses, security cameras (with a darkness/stealth gate), and a fingerprint/forensics system with a public-place gate.
• Warrant + enforcer manhunt, home raid with murder-weapon seizure and cruncher-exposure penalties, caught-carrying confiscation, and a fine ledger.
• The False Face mask blocks identification (never forensics) and carries its own masked-persona notoriety with a "slip" that merges your masked spree onto your real identity.
• Residual-heat meter with a "Loose Ends" evidence-heist offer, and a mole email that reports what nearly caught you.

Tools, apps & UI

• Syndicate, Supplies, and Groceries cruncher apps (courier delivery, level-gated gear, global price multipliers).
• Anonymous Tip Line and the Dispatcher phone line (pause/resume, pull work early).
• Custom newspaper front pages for your kills, manhunts, and staged accidents.
• A top-of-screen HUD cluster (level, open crime scenes, mask, heat) plus a WANTED banner.
• The Fingerprint Remover tool and an in-room "your prints here" cue overlay.

Notes

• The public build ships with debug tooling disabled and keeps citizen names and home addresses out of the log ([Debug] Enabled = false).
• Nearly every number is a config knob in Kropath.TheSyndicate.cfg.
• Beta: expect bugs and balance changes. Best played on a new sandbox save with procedural murders off, and back up any save you care about.