Better Leads and Motives

Better Leads and Motives

A vanilla+ mod for Shadows of Doubt

Murders are now built around believable, traceable motives, with bespoke clues and NPC gossip that the player can interrogate through the game's dialog system. I made this because I wanted the generated cases to grow deeper narratives the player can piece together and follow as leads. I hope this brings the vanilla experience to its full potential.

Please leave a comment on the Steam guide. Feedback and bug reports are very welcome.

I'm keeping this vague on purpose so as not to spoil the experience. The rest of this page is structured to reveal more and more about how the mod works the further down you read, so you can choose how much you'd like to know. Each section says how spoilery it is, so stop wherever you're comfortable.

How to play

Some things to know before starting:

• Asking "Do you know this person?" now tells you more. On top of the usual reply, an NPC will also share what they know about that person's involvement in events around town. This is your main tool for building a suspect list, and it is easy to miss, so lean on it.
• You can ask to speak to someone's partner. When talking to a resident at their home, a "Can I talk to your partner?" option sends them to fetch their partner so you can question them too.
• By default every murder, kidnapping, and sniper case is a motive case. You can configure this in the overlay (` `` key) to mix motive cases in with the classic vanilla ones; under Motive Mix, separate sliders set the share for murders, kidnappings, and snipers.
• "Procedural Murders" in the Gameplay settings must be turned ON (default) for the mod to generate motives, with "Regular Murders" enabled for murder cases, the "Kidnapping" case type enabled for motivated kidnappings, and the "Sniper cases" type enabled for motivated snipers.

Requirements

• Required: the BepInEx pack for IL2CPP (mod managers install this for you automatically).
• Recommended: BepInExConfigManager, an in-game settings overlay you open with the ` `` (backquote) key. (If it does not open, that overlay's own toggle may have defaulted to F5; you can rebind it to backquote in its settings.)

Compatibility

This mod has not been tested alongside other mods yet. It should coexist with most, but if you run into a conflict (or confirm it works well with something), a quick report is very welcome and helps me make it a good neighbour in your mod list.

Installation

Easiest is a mod manager (r2modman or the Mod Manager): install the mod and launch through the manager. Manual install works too: put the plugin in BepInEx/plugins.

Works with existing saves, no need to start a new game.

That is everything you need to play. If you want to discover the rest yourself, stop reading here.

Mild spoilers: what changes

Normally a murder in the city is an anonymous killing by a roaming serial killer. With this mod the game instead chooses a victim who has real, human reasons for someone to want them gone, and a killer who is one of those someones. Everyone else with a reason is a genuine suspect, not a fabricated one, so the culprit never stands out as obviously guilty. The game's normal forensic evidence (fingerprints, cameras, alibis) still decides the case, and the motive layer sits above the physical evidence, so you can now know why a murder happened and use that as a lead toward solving it.

More spoilers: lead types

Traces left behind by the motivated murder:

• Physical clues. Bespoke notes and documents turn up among the victim's things, written in a real person's hand and carrying links you can pin to your case board.
• Emails. Emails are now useful leads too.
• Questioning people. As noted above, the "Do you know this person?" option now surfaces gossip about that person's involvement in events, so you build your suspect pool by asking around.

The mod deliberately does not hand you the answer.

Full spoilers: the mechanics

Motives come from simulated social ev