MarginCity

v1.0.4·Updated 2026-10-04

A hand-planned city: rich north, poor south, the Ledger at its centre. Downtown towers, the Commons, Chinatown, a Red Light strip, the Bricks and the Stacks, every street and district laid out on purp

Screenshots 1 screenshots

About this mod Author’s original text

Margin City

The ruling class watches the profit margins. Everyone else lives in them.

Margin City is a hand-planned city for Shadows of Doubt. Instead of a random layout, every district, landmark and main street sits where it does for a reason: money in the north, the civic heart in the middle, and the poor packed against the southern waterfront. From almost anywhere, a glance at the skyline tells you where you are.

A copy of this map (Margin City map.png) is in the mod's folder.

The city

| District | What it is |

|---|---|

| The Heights and Park Terrace | Old money. Quiet town-houses and apartment towers on clean streets, split by Founders Avenue. |

| Downtown | The skyline: the Ledger (City Hall, where the city keeps the books on everyone), flanked by the spired Credit and Debit towers, with the Dividend and the Equity beside them. |

| The Commons | A park belt across the whole city, right in front of the Ledger. Cross it and you're in the other half of town. |

| Chinatown | Shop-houses around the old Jade Mansion tower: Golden Lotus, Jade Garden, Wing Lee Noodle House, Kam Fung Pawn. Paifang gates mark the ways in. |

| Red Light | A neon strip running south from Lantern Square: The All-Nighter diner, the back rooms on Velvet Street and Neon Row, and Hotel Lowtide at the bottom, by the water. |

| The Bricks | The worst block in town: the Fathoms slum stacks, back-alley workshops and a few shops that shouldn't be open. |

| The Stacks | Chemical plants and workshops along the waterfront, west and east of the Hotel. |

Some streets to know: Ledger Row and Treasury Street along the Commons, Margin Street (the line between the rich and poor halves), Velvet Street and Neon Row down the strip, and Smokestack Row and Wharf Road on the waterfront.

Behind the layout:

  • Wealth follows the district. Homes in the Heights are genuinely richer than homes in the Bricks: furniture, finishes, grime and the people who live there.
  • Clean streets uptown, grit downtown. Shacks, barrel fires and junk stay out of the wealthy districts.
  • Themed streets. Chinatown's gates and the Red Light's dressing follow the streets that actually run through those districts.
  • About 1,000 residents in a 9 × 10 block city: bigger than the game's largest size, but tuned to stay smooth.

How to play

  • Install with r2modman or Gale (BepInExPack is installed for you).
  • Launch the game from the mod manager (Start modded). Margin City is copied into your cities.
  • Start a new game and pick Margin City from the city list.

Keep this mod installed while you play Margin City. The city is a size the game doesn't offer by itself, so it needs the mod to load.

Manual install (without a mod manager)

  • Install BepInEx (once).
  • Download BepInExPack_IL2CPP 6.0.755 with Manual Download.
  • Copy the contents of its BepInExPack folder into the game folder, next to Shadows of Doubt.exe (in Steam: right-click the game › Manage › Browse local files).
  • Launch the game from Steam once. The first launch takes a few minutes while BepInEx sets itself up (a console window fills with text). Quit once you reach the main menu.
  • Install Margin City.
  • Download this mod with Manual Download.
  • Create the folder BepInEx\plugins\MarginCity in the game folder and copy everything in the zip into it, including the Cities folder.
  • Play. Launch from Steam as usual and pick Margin City under New Game.

Good to know:

  • Updates are manual: download the new version and replace the files.
  • Turning mods off: rename winhttp.dll in the game folder (for example to winhttp.dll.off) and the game starts without mods.
  • Steam Deck / Linux (Proton): also set the game's launch options to WINEDLLOVERRIDES="winhttp=n,b" %command%, or BepInEx won't load.
  • Don't mix the two ways: if you use r2modman or Gale, launch from the manager and don't also install BepInEx into the game folder.

Margin City isn't in the city list?

  • Start the game from your mod manager (r2modman or Gale: Start modded). Starting

Install & use Install: follow the bundled instructions

  1. Unzip the archive from playbuff and read the bundled readme / instructions first.
  2. Most mods rely on the game's mod loader — the usual route is a community mod manager (such as r2modman): pick this game, install, and it handles the loader and dependencies.
  3. For a manual install, put the mod files into the matching Mod / plugins folder inside the game directory.
  4. Launch the game to confirm it loaded; mods with listed dependencies need those installed as well.

Install locations vary a lot between mods — the bundled readme is the most reliable guide.

Dependencies

Install these first, or the mod will not work:

BepInEx-BepInExPack_IL2CPP

File & checksum

Filename
MarginCity-1.0.4.zip
File size
11.0 MiB