Death and Taxes – Tips and Tricks

Tips and Tricks

An Introduction to Your Workspace

Pictured below is our Cosmopolis City subdivision #4 Main Office

Our historic offices offer ample space and resources for ANY aspiring Reaper. Let us tour the various floors and services made available to you during the course of your employment (and existence).

• Fate’s Office (Yellow)

Home to middle management and Fate, you should report here after your work day for a review of your performance.

• Employee Residence (Blue)

Reapers are to rest ONLY within their assigned living space. Report here at the end of each day to “sleep”. the dressing room is available after purchasing the Aphotic Reflector.

• The Grim Office

The cornerstone of your existence as part of the bureaucratic afterlife. This is where you will define the fate of hapless souls at the mercy of you will, and that of Fate.

• Quartermaster Mortimer’s Plunder Emporium

The in-house Widget and Clothing dispensary, ran by a rather eccentric skeletal pirate. Come here to spend your hard earned cash on various aides to your afterlife, including desktop accessories and accoutrements to streamline the balancing of the ethos

Your Desk-Space & How to Optimise It

Ah, your desk. The marble from which you shall carve the fate of humanity! Such potential! Upon arrival your desk will be rather sparse, home only to the bare essentials. You may notice a pair of drawers at the face of the desk, you may place various items within these drawers at your will.
The lost and found department remind reapers that drawers peer into the infinite and items can become lost within them. A good ‘reset’ will have them back in place.

Profiles, Marker & Fax Machine

Every day, management will dispense a series of profiles for you to mark (more on that process later). They appear on the left-hand side of the desk below the Fax Machine. The Fax Machine is positioned in the top left of the desk, and is used to submit all marked profiles.

Please remember the Fax Machine is company property and utilising it to send inappropriate imagery of oneself is grounds for dismissal

Use the marker to mark Profiles in 3 steps!

1. Click your fingers once to pick up the marker
2. Click your fingers once over the ‘Live’ or ‘Die’ section
3. Confirm your choice, and click once on the desk to de-posses your marker

The Red Book Of The Ether

Mysterious voices echo through these pages to the chosen Reapers with the power of ‘Twitch’! To tap into this power, press escape (or be on the main menu), navigate to settings, and then to Streamer Settings. In there you can find all the configurations any aspiring Reaper could desire! Pogchamp sourpls lul.

Standard Issue Telecommunications Device

This handy device placed on the bottom right of your desk is the primo method for examining the outcome of your choices and information gather-ation to aid you in balancing the cosmos. It’s recommended you check it’s status daily to aid your decision making process.

Hello there Grim. I’d like to remind you that my instructions are tantamount to your success as a reaper, heed them before any misinformation spread over social media. Such incessant whinging is sure to meddle with that pristine skull of yours. And we can’t have that now, can we?

Good Practices & Guidelines for Reaping

So, you are acquainted and settled in your new surroundings! Perfect! Now it’s on to the nitty gritty details of your day-to-day responsibilities as a Reaper!

Daily Guidelines

Every day Fate will send you a set of specific instructions to be carried out. It’s tantamount that you carry out these instructions TO THE LETTER! or risk dis-balancing the cosmos in entirety. They may be rather specific or somewhat vague, remember that it’s your job to mark your allocated profiles within the ruleset as accurately as possible.

Where you have free reign over your decisions, heed information afforded to you via your mobile phone, and act accordingly for the “good” of humanity. After all, if they all perish, who’s going to be paying your salary?

It’s good practice to read Profiles in detail in order to ascertain the optimal fate for each individual.

It’s highly un-recommended to deviate from the daily instructions to often. Doing so may place your career in a compromised position

Performance-Based Salary Adjustments

With each set of Daily Instructions (detailed in the previous section) you will receive one ‘main’ instruction and any number of secondary ones. Main instructions are almost always a strict allocation for profiles to be marked for death.

• Failing to adhere to a primary instruction will result in a 100% pay cut for your day’s work.
• Failing to adhere to a secondary instruction will result in a proportional pay cut as calculated here:
  Daily income – (Daily total income x (Total secondary instructions – S.I. completed))
• Repeated adherence to guidelines over a 1 week period may result in a pay rise.

In-House Dispensary

Quartermaster Mortimer’s Plunder Emporium

This store is home to the only resident pirate of our fine offices, now a salesman of various goods! Money earned throughout the course of your employment may be spent here on various goods to enhance your quality of death. They come under 2 main categories:

Widgets – Functional items that aid in your job
Clothing – Ways to forget you’re dead

Widgets and You, a Guide to Post-Mortem Hording

With your hard earned cash, you may purchase a variety of items to aid you.
Every day, the stock within the shop refreshes. Clothing is purely cosmetic and rather unimportant, as such this section will only detail the Widgets on offer.

• Threnody To Desolation – A snowglobe that shows the affects of your decisions in a vague way
• Infernal Illuminator – Displays the real-world ramifications of your actions. And remembers them
• Lethean Obliviator – lets you erase ONE mark on ONE profile per purchase
• Aphotic Reflector – A mirror that enables you to use the Dressing Room to change clothes
• Ephemeral Mortality – A coin with spare/kill in lieu of heads and tails. Flip it
• Annals Of Transience – A calendar with 28 days on it
• Athereal Resonator – A radio you can use to toggle music
• Boo The Gerbil – I believe Fate’s cat may take rather kindly to this.
• Tenebrous Curiosity – It spin
• Kaktus – It spike

Uniform Guidelines

The other optional good on sale, as noted above, are clothing items. These are purely cosmetic and have no bearing on your job. Some reapers deem it an ‘Achievement’ to don certain clothing combinations.

To change your clothing configuration, you’ll need to have purchased the mirror from the in-house dispensary. Once you have done so, you’ll have access to the Dressing Room where you can alter your appearance at will. You may also hear ghostly whispers whilst staring into the empty void of your gaze. We advise you not to li – We are the writers of our own stories Grim. Be seeing you. – ste… Forgive me, the manual appears to be mildly possessed, please ignore that transgression.

Passing Your Evaluation Period

Congratulations Prospect Reaper #1! You are ready for your evaluation!

Now you are fully prepared and acquainted with the basics of your career, you may engage within the 7 day evaluation period! If you have not already, it is STRONGLY recommended to experience AT LEAST the 7 day evaluation period before reading onwards as information henceforth in this manual may disrupt your decision making process within said evaluation period.

Originally posted by Christopher Bullock (1716):
’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes

Good luck reaper

– Fate

SPOILER WARNING

THE REST OF THIS GUIDE CONTAINS SPOILERS

Please carry out AT LEAST one full existence before reading on, as doing so will harm your first experience of the afterlife. If you don’t care for spoilers, or have completed a futile existence already, please carry on. Otherwise, please merely observe the fanciful lineart, then get back to the office.

Originally posted by Author:
In all seriousness things are going to get Meta herein, and you REALLY should play the game through AT LEAST once just using the resources you’ve read thus far. Both myself and the creators of DnT can agree on this.

Balancing The Cosmos

You may have noticed by this point that following the instructions handed down by fate may not always be optimal. This next section of the guide will showcase how to most effectively balance the cosmos in your favour.

Visualising Your Influence

Within the confines of the game, there are 3 ways to visualise and largely influence the balance of the cosmos outside of the parameters set by Fate. In order to carry out this next section of the guide you will need to have purchased the following items from the in-house dispensary:

• Threnody To Desolation
• Infernal Illuminator
• Lethean Obliviator (optional)

With these items, you can see the affects of your decisions in real time, both on profiles and in the snow-globe. You should use this information in lieu with information provided by your mobile phone to inform your decisions.

It should be noted that profiles marked while these items are active will have their statistical affects saved, so that if you ever encounter them again you can see the outcome of marking the profile for life or death. In the situation marking a profile has a profound negative affect, the Lethean Obliviator can be used to erase that mark, at which point you can easily mark the alternate option and avoid disaster.

You should also note that specific profiles or chains of profiles may be related, and marking them in certain ways may allow you to explore various ‘Subplots’ currently happening within the human world. Keep a vigilant eye, mark profiles with care, gather information from all sources and you stand a decent chance of being middle-management material.

Statistical Performance

Still curious about the specifics of your performance as a Reaper? Here’s a table of all the factors that affect your performance, and that your performance affects.

Statistical Chart:

Meeting Your Monthly Quota

So, you have ‘survived’ a whole month on the job. Congratulations!

You may like the outcome you received, you may not. I can assure you there are many possible outcomes depending on your choices as a Reaper. Sometimes it’s best to adhere, sometimes it’s best to sway. Your outlook is ultimately the deciding factor on whether any given outcome is desirable.

This section will be updated in future with detailed guides on how to obtain each ending
Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to see the future. Perhaps you can show it to us?

Transcending Reality

Congratulations on completing your job! Now, Reaper, do it again.

If you’ve successfully completed a month’s work here, you may notice a button like this crop up on the main menu. You may wonder what that enticing + is all about? Well here’s a rundown for you.

All profiles are remembered
This means your Infernal Illuminator will show you the outcome of any decision you have previously made on any given profiles. This lets you really min-max and work on saving, or dooming, humanity in a plethora of ways.

• All of your items stick around

ALL of them. Including clothing, widgets, your ‘best newcomer’ award… Everything.

• You may become self aware

And find yourself saying things to Fate or others within the office that you wouldn’t normally find yourself saying. Should those things be said? ‘Tis up to you, Reaper.

You can use the things you learn through the course of your career to perfect your craft, find intricate stories unravelling on earth, and a plethora of other things. Have fun Reaper, the world truly is your oyster.

External Influences on Work Etiquette

Want to influence the reality surrounding the reality you control?

Welcome to the fledgeling world of modifications for Death & Taxes.

The only current external tool available to the public is the DnT Watcher tool, developed by myself.
It utilises the logging runtime parameters in Unity in order to watch game data and visualise it in complete statistical detail to the user in a nice, easy-ish to read way. You can find the tool here:

https://panley.co.uk/dntwatcher

The tool requires Python 3 in order to run, all the details for using the tool are on the website, on your first run of the tool it’ll also give you a quick introduction and give you some options to get some extra information about it, it’s developer and the developers of Death & Taxes as well as some insight into how the game functions!