How to achieve the "balance" ending and "rulebender" achievement

Information on how to achieve those two.

Intro

26.01.2022: PLEASE NOTE!!!: this guide has been written for earlier versions of the game. The info might be outdated.

Obligatory: DO NOT READ THIS GUIDE IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILERED.

Quick rundown on how to achieve the "balance" guide and "rulebreaker" achievement. It is recommended to buy the snowglobe and the lamp in Mortimer's shop and having played through the game several times before attempting these.

Balance ending

- Aim to reach Utopia for the first 14 days. THIS IS IMPORTANT since I noticed that if you keep the sky grey until day 14 and more or less follow Fate's instructions, the sky in the will turn red afterwards and there's nothing you can do about it to change the situation in the last two weeks. No matter how much you will further improve the stats, it will result in a dystopian ending.

- You're on the right track if the sky in the snowglobe stays blue after day 14. Now you can begin to lower certain stats so the sky will change to a faint blue, grey or dark grey. Be sure to keep the world balanced until day 28, and that is how you achieve the "Balance" ending. Like I mentioned, the snowglobe and the lamp are super helpful for that.

- If you made it: Congrats, you now belong to the lucky 11,6%! (Or whatever percentage of people got this ending when you're reading this guide)

Rulebender achievement

Here is one way to do it that worked for me.

- ALWAYS mark the WRONG amount of profiles dead on every single day.
- Don't let everyone live/die on most days, except:
- On "wildcard" days when Fate gives you instructions like "go with the flow", let everyone LIVE to annoy him. You will still get your 300 bucks, but this act of sass will still count towards the achievement.
- You're on the right track if you only get a bonus of 500 on day 14, and most of the days (except the wildcard ones) no money at all.
- I don't know if it's necessary, but I always chose unfriendly/rebellious dialogue options, if possible.

Outro

I hope this guide will be helpful to players. Please comment questions and suggestions down below. Thanks for reading!

[AxelFreid]

Спасибо, ваше руководство помогло в выбивании сбалансированной концовки.

[Panqueca]

I got the Rulebender achievement with the Utopian ending

[DexTheHexx]

There isn't an achievement for the Balance ending RynFTW.

[DecorativeFox]

On the Rulebender achievement, I found that it is best to use the gerbil, then work backwards through the instructions (so if it says religious must die, spare them first) just to make sure you don't accidentally pass one of the secondary instructions.
I also found that the Last Human decision is irrelevant - I accidentally doomed them on the last day like the instruction requested and still got the achievement.

I may be wrong, but it seems like usually you get a fixed number of warnings for sparing or killing everyone, but I'm pretty sure that if the first two times you choose the same result for all profiles, you pick the opposite outcome (so all spare then all doom or in reverse) I think you actually get one additional warning before being fired, as opposed to making the same "mistake" twice in a row to start.

[ᴺᵉᶜʳᵒᵐᵒʳᵗᶦ]

I tried all the tips for "Rulebender achievement" and didn't got it. Any idea is there something more to be done?

[ovoWhiteCrow]

I've unlocked the Infinitarium achievement (Get all endings) and the Balance ending is shown in the Gallery in-game. I've hit Balance endings THREE TIMES but the Balance achievement has not unlocked. How is it even possible to be missing the Balance achievement while also having Infinitarium unlocked? I feel like there's a bug here.. Anyone have any advice?

[♚ Akko II]

Also, it's not true that you should aim for blue sky.

A dystopian ending will occur if you have one of the stats very bad, aka stage 2 bad, or if you have two of the stats stage 1 bad. You can easily keep one of the stats stage 1 bad and it won't bring you the dystopian ending by itself.

[♚ Akko II]

Important notes.

Rulebender cannot be obtained if you push for utopian ending. Not sure about balance as I've never gotten the balanced ending, but with utopian ending it eventually becomes impossible to "not listen to Fate's orders" as he stops caring after day 23.
Also... If you're pushing for balanced ending, make sure you don't get the 2nd chaos stage of a chaos parameter. It becomes impossible to climb up from it.

[SeppTB]

RE: Wildcard Days
I let everyone live on the "go with the flow" and "mark anyone suspicious" and also day 1, and was fired for it. So careful doing that =) It does seem to count against you still. Perhaps mixing between letting everyone live and killing everyone?

[Reina Awesome]

So I just got this achievement and want to confirm that on any day there's only 2 profiles, mark them both to live or die.