verb (used with object), cheesed, chees·ing.
1. (in a game, especially a video game) to win by using a strategy that requires minimal skill and knowledge or that exploits a glitch or flaw in game design:
He cheesed the fight by trapping his enemy in the environment and attacking without taking damage.

Before we begin: please note that this is a cheesy guide. We're going to use every dirty trick and tactic in the book short of using unlocking tools or editing game files. This is not the intended way to play the game, and I'm going to make no attempts to avoid spoilers or preserve the game experience. If you want a natural experience of the game, this is not the guide for you. Also, this is pretty rough and ready - it should be helpful, but I make no claim that it's perfection. That being said, if you see something totally wrong in here, let me know so I can correct it, and if you find the guide useful, drop me a good rating. All right, let's get down to business.

The Shrouded Isle is a relatively simple game mechanically with straightforward achievements. However, it is deceptively difficult to complete due to two factors: first, a relative lack of in-game information about important game mechanics, and second, the game being heavily influenced by RNG, making the feasibility of several achievements vary wildly from run to run. In this guide, I'm going to try and help mitigate these challenges and hopefully as a result give you a significant leg-up in achieving 100% completion.

For the first point, I'm not going to delve exhaustively into the nuts and bolts of the game's mechanics since I think a lot of that information is secondary to just having a good strategy/knowing what kind of actions to take, however here are the essential things to know:

• This is a resource management game first and foremost. As the village leader, you need to survive a set number of seasonal cycles in order to reach the final evaluation that determines what ending you get. To survive, you need to consistently keep five different virtues above a certain threshold - if a virtue dips below it's threshold in one season, having it below that threshold again in the next season becomes a loss condition. The exact threshold varies from season to season. Each of the five virtues has an associated family that is in charge of maintaining it, and every season you select a member of each family to serve as an advisor. Advisors can be used to increase the virtue associated with their family, however every villager has their own virtues and vices which can increase or decrease any of the five virtues whenever they are used.
  
• The positive and negative traits of each villager are the most important pieces of information in the entire game. They will both have an associated virtue, as well as a magnitude that is either positive or negative, ranging from -30 to +15. You need to keep an eye out for the -30 villagers: these represent major vices, and you need to kill all ten villagers having these vices before the end of the game to win. How do you kill them? That brings us to our next point.
  
• At the end of every season, you must select one of your five advisors to sacrifice. Whenever possible, this should be someone with a -30 trait for two reasons. First, as mentioned above you need to churn through these guys before the end of the game to win. Second, while sacrificing a villager will always make their family angry, they will be slightly less angry if the kill is "justified".
  
• While we're on the subject, your relationship with each family is another important factor, and in fact poses a much larger challenge than managing the virtues. Each family's attitude towards you is measured on a scale from -100 to +100. In addition to sometimes being effected by the occasional decision events the game throws at you, these relationships change based on the actions you take each season. In short: using an advisor from the family improves relations (if you use them by themselves it improves greatly, if used alongside other families it improves slightly), not using them slightly degrades relations, and sacrificing the advisor from their family either moderately or severely decreases relations based on a few factors. Again, I don't want to delve into every specific, but in general you want to avoid 1) sacrificing people without a -30 trait and 2) sacrificing from the same family twice in a row. If a family's relationship with you dips too low, they will become rebellious, and similar to a virtue, once a family becomes rebellious you must improve your relationship to them by at least one level by the end of the next season or you will lose the game.
  
• Another thing that is affected by your relationship with each family is your ability to investigate members of that family to uncover traits. Families that like you more will let you make two inquiries during every season's downtime, while families that are neutral will only allow one inquiry and families in the negative won't allow any. Remember, information on villager's traits is hugely important, so this is somewhat of a big deal. You'll also have the opportunity to investigate the traits of any advisors you pick when you use them during the season. It generally takes two inquiries to fully uncover one trait, the first to figure out what virtue it affects and the second to determine magnitude. At the start of each game, some villagers will have the first part already revealed.
  
• Every season is split into three months, essentially representing three turns. Each turn you can pick 1-3 advisors to use. The advisors you pick will affect the five virtues based on their family and their traits, and you'll have the opportunity to inquire about them as well. Family relations will be impacted according to who you use, and at the end of the three months you pick one advisor to sacrifice. Additionally, sacrificing an advisor will effect your five virtues: the virtue associated with their negative trait will increase, but the virtue associated with their positive trait will decrease.

As you can see, there's actually a surprising amount of different mechanics to keep track of, and that's even with me glossing over some of it. There's some pretty subtle stuff to consider that can be very important to a run. For now though, the above is enough to at least get started - I'll discuss other mechanics and considerations as they become relevant to different achievements.

Now onto the second point: this one is a bit trickier, and this is where your individual ethics as a gamer are going to need to be considered. By design, The Shrouded Isle does not allow for saving/loading aside from an auto-save - this can be frustrating because when RNG has such a substantial influence on the game, save-scumming is a big convenience. Nobody wants to lose a perfect run on a coin flip, which can easily happen in this game. There is a way around this though, which is to manually copy the save file data from the local folder to a back-up location. You could do this at key points during certain runs, or if you get starting conditions that are very advantageous and you want to preserve that "seed".

Some people might have take issue with this approach, and if you do I totally get that. Many of the general strategies discussed in this guide will work even without save-scumming, it will just take a lot more brute-force attempts than otherwise. Either way, bring your patience with you on this one. Personally though, I would highly recommend using save copies - the game is very light on actual content, and there's just not enough interesting stuff going on for it to be entertaining in the long run, making any time save welcome. I actually started writing this guide because the game got so repetitive after a few hours that I needed a secondary activity to hold my attention. Another note: you can crack open the auto-save file using a text editor of choice. It's in an easily readable format and will tell you all kinds of important information, including the exact traits of every single villager. Scummy? Perhaps. Useful? Undeniably. You can find your save file here: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\LocalLow\Kitfox Games\The Shrouded Isle\SaveData.

That's enough preamble, let's get talking about some actual achievements.

There are 5 achievements for gaining favor with each of the five families in the game.

Befriend House Kegnni.



Befriend House Blackborn.



Befriend House Iosefka.



Befriend House Efferson.



Befriend House Caldwell.

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All of these are extremely easy, you just need to hit 100 favor with each house. A single use of a house's advisor without any other advisor being used gives a huge favor bump, so just start a new game, appoint advisors, and spam the advisor from one house until you get the achievement. You'll almost certainly lose the game after but it's an easy way to knock out 5 achievements and not have to think about it anymore.

There are 6 achievements associated with base game endings, one for victory and five for the fail conditions associated with each trait.

Below Fervor threshold at end game.



Below Obedience threshold at end game.



Below Discipline threshold at end game.



Below Ignorance threshold at end game.



Below Penitence threshold at end game.



Beat the base game.

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All right, these are all related to the different endings it is possible to get to the game, one for failing each individual virtue, and one for finishing with all virtues in the positive and thus successfully summoning Chernobog. Again, we're going to do something tricky here: go to Steam, find The Shrouded Isle, and opt in to the 'original' beta branch. This disables the 'Sunken Seas' DLC content and reverts the game to its original state. There's a good reason for us doing this: in the original game playthroughs are around 40% shorter, there are fewer major sinners, houses have a uniform family size (i.e. less randomness so more reliable strategies) and you avoid the game's mental illness mechanic entirely. All of this combines to make the original game significantly quicker for unlocking all of these achievements. Additionally, the "Detective" achievement in the miscellaneous section below is way easier in this branch (potentially not even possible in the main game branch).

Once you've opted in to the correct branch, boot up the game and start a new playthrough. The goal here is for us to get as far as possible in the game in a state where we can back up our save file and restore it several times, taking slightly different actions each time to quickly unlock as many endings as possible. Now, because of the unpredictable nature of the game, I can't provide an exact guide on how to accomplish the desired state or promise how many different endings you'll be able to do in one sweep but the general strategy is as follows.

• Start a new game. Immediately crack open the autosave file to take a peek at your villagers. There are two specific things you are looking for. First, you want to identify all of the villagers with major vices who you need to sacrifice. The traits to look out for are Embezzler, Pervert, Cowardly, Morbid, Artist, Scholar, Kleptomaniac, Rebellious, Liar, and Swindler. At the start you want at least a couple major sinners in the houses that start out as 'Satisfied' to be sacrifice fodder in the first couple of terms since you have more leeway with them before you get into the danger zone. Next, you want to look for people with the most benign vices - these are Gluttonous, Complacent, Curious, Scarred, Teen, Stubborn. The reason for this is that you are inevitably going to need to adjust virtues, and characters with these traits (especially if paired with a highly positive trait) can usually be safely used without too much adverse effect.
  
• Important: the easiest way to prevent house favor decay is to use the maximum number of advisors, so make sure at least 3/5 houses have at least one person each with a minimal vice. An easy way to keep track of all of this: the game allows you to rename individual villagers, so as you go through the info in the save file, annotate villagers with major vices with '-' and useful villagers with a '+' next to their names, or some variation so you can easily tell who to do what with at any given time.
  
• Quick reference:
  
  • +: Complacent, Curious, Gluttonous, Scarred, Stubborn, Teen
    
  • -: Artist, Cowardly, Embezzler, Kleptomaniac, Liar, Morbid, Pervert, Rebellious, Scholar, Swindler
• Another time-saving tip: if you scroll down to the very bottom of the save file, there's an EventFlagDict that should have most of the negative traits of different villagers laid out compactly so you don't need to Ctrl+F and hunt through the entire document. It won't always include all the major sinners, but it will have most and Chernobog will start asking for specific sacrifices so you'll know what traits to search for when you do have to go digging. If you don't want to save file peek, you are still trying to accomplish the same thing (have a pool of sacrifices and a pool of useable characters), it's just going to take a lot more trial and error and repeated attempts.
  
• If you have ended up with a solid starting point, BACK UP YOUR SAVE. This upfront part is by far the most labor intensive.
  
• One you have your villagers identified/annotated, appoint a - from a house that starts Satisfied as an advisor, pack the rest of the slots with as many +'s as possible (at least three). Before the first turn, use your Inquiries on the person you intend to sacrifice. IMPORTANT: when you sacrifice them, you must have their negative trait fully discovered in-game, otherwise their family will be super mad at you for sacrifing them without definitive knowledge of wrongdoing. Go ahead and start the season now - use your sacrificial lamb alongside two +'s 1 to 2 times in order to fully discover their negative trait and bolster relations with that family. Doing so will greatly hurt one of your traits, but remember you get a lot back when you kill them and you'll have the next season to course correct. Once their negative trait is discovered, spend any other available turns using three +'s at a time to minimize favor decay.
  
• Continue in this fashion, sacrifing known sinners with discovered major vices every season (never sacrificing from the same house twice if possible) and the rest of the time spamming your + advisors three at a time. Stay on top of loss conditions as needed: remember, it only takes a couple solo uses of an advisor to bail a rebellious house out of the danger zone. Honestly, the initial set-up is by far the most important part of success here. That being said, RNG can and will screw you (for example the random favor threshold just happens to pick the trait you just tanked to keep a house afloat), so back up your save regularly when things go well. At minimum, I would suggest backing up at the end of every successful year, if not every successful season.
  
• When you've got 7/8 major sinners sacrified, we need to change strategy slightly. If we want to finish as quick as possible, we need an endgame save where at one season to go we have one major sinner left, so that we can either sacrifice them (unlocking Awaken) or tank each stat to unlock the other achievements. Rule of thumb: sacrifice non + members from families where you have at least one + (meaning you can run them solo on turns to course correct favor) and alternate families as much as possible to avoid big penalties. Mostly you are over the hump here though. You can safely ignore Chernobog's sacrifice requests now. Keep going as before, just with the new criteria for sacrifices and you should be able to make it to the end.
  
• When it says Winter: 1 Year Remaining, BACK UP YOUR SAVE. You can now restore to this point and you should be able to get all of the above achievements without too much trouble. Personally I was able to get all of them and only one was a little dicey. On the off chance that your situation really has locked out any of them on this save, you can go back and use the same tricks for a more focused playthrough.

There are 5 achievements left for us to mop up, some related to the DLC and couple one-offs.

Kill an entire house.



Have someone awaken.



Discover every living villager's virtue/vice.



Kill everyone.



All living villagers awakened at DLC endgame.

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All right, we'll start with Detective since that's the only one that requires us to remain on the original game beta branch. After this we can revert back to the normal branch. For Detective, we need to uncover all traits on all living villagers. Remember that we can uncover traits in three ways, by using inquiries, through decision events, and by appointing people as advisors and using them during the season. The key to this achievement is to be intentional about how we do each. First, start up a new game. As with the ending achievements, the first thing we want to do is take a peek at the fresh save to figure out who is naughty and nice. Now, we're not actually trying to win this run, but our strategy will be similar. We just want to make sure we're doing a few things: first, we're using our inquiries to uncover the traits of sacrifice victims (so we don't lose prematurely due to bad favor), second, that whenever possible we are appointing/using advisors with mostly unknown traits, third, we're using three advisors as much as possible, and lastly we're prioritizing dialogue options in decision events that lead to information about villagers. Aside from that, I don't have a lot of specific advice, other than to just save scum as needed to stay afloat long enough to get everyone and don't be afraid to kill villagers with double ??? if you have the approval leeway. Personally, this took my almost to the end of the game, so back up your save regularly. Once you've unlocked Detective, time to revert to the normal build.

Our next order of business is Extinction. This one is pretty self explanatory - the key thing to know here is that in the expansion, houses have a random number of members with some having as few as four. So, play as normal and just try to survive long enough to sacrifice all four members of one family. In fact, this can be a useful strategy since a house with no surviving members cannot rebel so it gives you a little more wiggle room with your resource management.

All right, we're onto our last three achievements, so let's talk a little bit more about the new Sunken Sins mechanics. Essentially, in the expansion pack villagers will start to get spreadable mental disorders, and you can confine up to three villagers in a tower where you can either examine them to get information about their illness or other traits, or you can "purify" them, which can potentially cause them to ascend or can kill them. In addition, the game goes for longer, there are more major sinners, and some other small changes. In terms of achievements, Sunken Sins you will get incidentally working on The Shoal, so let's talk about the big boys: The Shoal and Completionism. These are the two rarest achievements in the game and for good reason. On paper, both are a big pain in the neck and heavily, heavily dependent upon RNG. That being said, our strategy for both is going to be similar to what we've already been doing: use the save file to get early access to information we need and figure out who we should sacrifice and who we should use from each house, then save scum our brains out. Both of these achievements depend on what is going on in the tower - for Completionism we need the tower to be killing people regularly, and for The Shoal we need it to be ascending people.

Let's start with Completionism. Essentially, villagers have a chance to die when purified if:

1. They are not currently sick.
   
2. They do not have a major virtue.

Thankfully, we can use our save file peeking to determine who is sick and who has major virtues at any given time, so every season we are going to pack our tower with people who purification could kill and try to purify them. If nobody dies, just reload the save. We're going to use all the same survival strategies as before to make sure we can survive long enough to achieve our goal. We need to kill 30 total villagers. Another strategy note here: you want to hard focus one family at a time rather than spreading it out. This is for the previously mentioned reason that a completely eliminated house cannot cause you to lose via rebellion. Aside from all that, it's just patience: back up your save after every advantageous event, reset as needed, and persevere until it unlocks. Before you go for it though, let's talk about The Shoal.

If you are feeling bold, you can actually try to go for Completionism and The Shoal at the same time similar to how we did the different endings. It's going to take you a while to kill everyone, so just pace yourself so that you can arrive at the second to last season in the game with have 3 villagers left to kill, one of which can be killed by purification and one who can be ascended. Ascend one of them, then make a backup save. In one run, kill the non-ascended one by sacrifice and another one by purification in the last Autumn. Now finish the last season and kill the ascended villager, Completionism should unlock. Restore the save, and this time don't kill anyone via purification. Kill both non-ascended villagers as sacrifices, and The Shoal should unlock.

Fun tidbit: technically multiple purification deaths at the same time is possible, but I only had it happen once over probably 200-300 reloads on purification and it actually caused me to overshoot close to the end of my run and not have enough villager left to unlock The Shoal. Proof:



Probably not useful info, but I thought it was funny after all the time I spend desperately trying to get even one person to die each turn. Otherwise, if this seems too finicky, just do a separate playthrough for The Shoal, using the same general strategy as Completionism but save scumming for ascensions rather than kills. Personally I used the combined strategy above, and it took me about five hours of attempts to unlock both. Whatever you decide to do, congratulations, you should now have your 100%.