West of Dead achievements are mainly related to the progression through the main story, but a few of them ask the player to defeat outlaws and save good souls met in Purgatory. Specifically, the achievements are: Justice Begins, Bounty Hunter and Lawman, for defeated outlaws; Good Soul (I), Good Soul (II) and Good Soul (III), for saved souls.

The aforementioned achievements require some grinding, but there are no in-game counters for defeated outlaws or saved souls. Considering that the game is a little buggy, some people may feel unmotivated in not knowing whether they are making progress or not with their achievements. If you belong to this category of player, I have good news: it's actually possible to check how many outlaws/souls have been defeated/saved, and in this guide I'll show you how.

Both counts are stored in a single text file (that is the save game data file), so the only thing you need for this method to work is a text editor/viewer featuring a search/find function (ex. Notepad).

The first step is to locate your save game data file. The correct location depends on your system, you can take a look at the West of Dead page on PCGamingWiki[www.pcgamingwiki.com] to find it.

For Windows systems, the file is usually located within AppData, a hidden folder in the User folder. The exact location usually looks like this (please note that the "USER" word must be changed to your specific User name folder):
C:\Users\USER\AppData\LocalLow\Upstream Arcade\West of Dead\

Alternatively, you can use this shortcut to speed up things, just copy-paste it into the address bar of file explorer and then press Enter:
%APPDATA%\..\LocalLow\Upstream Arcade\West of Dead\

After reaching the West of Dead folder, look for a folder whose name is a sequence of numbers (corresponding to your Steam ID, by the way). It contains a single text file: that's the one we're looking for. If you see multiple folders with numerical names, you probably use more than one Steam account on your computer, so you have to figure out which one corresponds to the correct account.

After locating the save game data file, open it using the text editor. The game data is stored as a long JSON string, quite easy to read if you're familiar with the JSON format (don't worry, you don't need to know it for this guide). However, before proceeding further, please consider copy-pasting the whole content into a new blank file and working with it instead: this way, you can already close the save game data file and avoid any risk to mess things up.

Now use the "find" function of your text editor to find the substring: _OutlawIDs
This substring is followed by a list of "OutlawX" substrings (the "X" is a number), all separated by commas. Here's the trick: the "X" number of the last "OutlawX" substring on this list should be the number of defeated outlaws. The whole list is enclosed between two square brackets, so you can't go wrong.

The procedure for the saved souls is pretty much the same, but the substring to look for is this one: _SoulIDs
Again, this substring is followed by a list of "LostSoulX" substrings, very similar to the previous one. The "X" number of the last "LostSoulX" substring on this list should be the number of saved souls.

You might find two occurrences for both "_OutlawIDs" and "_SoulIDs". It's not an error: one is related to your current run, while the other is related to your overall progress through the story. In such a case, just check both occurrences.

... you edit the save game data file, in order to immediately get the achievements?

The answer is: no, refrain from proceeding. There are multiple reasons for not doing it, the main one is: the outlaws and souls entries you found on those lists are linked to other entries of the save game data file. It can be dangerous to add new entries without updating other parts of the file.

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That's all, folks! 🐷