# Improvised Weapons

*The supply route you cannot deny — because you are obliged to furnish the cell, and the furniture is
the raw material.*

You have to give a prisoner a bed. RimWorld will nag you until you do. That bed is a frame of wood, or
steel, or — if you built a nice prison — plasteel. Give a disposed prisoner a season of unsupervised
time with it and they will file a blade off it. **The prison's own furnishings are the arsenal, and
better furniture is worse.**

## The shiv

The shiv is a crude stabbing weapon: *"A blade filed off a bed frame and wrapped in cloth for a grip.
Barely a weapon — but a barely-a-weapon in a cell you thought was empty is a dead guard."*

| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Tech level | Neolithic |
| Mass | 0.4 kg |
| Concealability | **0.75** (hides very well — it rides on the body) |
| Hides | on body or in cell |
| Point (Stab) | power 7, cooldown 1.5 s |
| Handle (Blunt) | power 5, cooldown 1.6 s |
| Use | none — an armed prisoner *is* the payload |

Its stats come from its material: it can be made of metal, wood, or stone. A wood shiv is feeble; a
plasteel one is vicious. That is the whole point of the harvest mechanic — you never furnished a cell
thinking of it as an armoury, but that is what it is.

## Who whittles: the disposition gate

Not just "any prisoner." Three things must all be true:

1. **Held.** The pawn is a prisoner, slave, or ward patient. Free colonists do not whittle shivs in
   the commons — *yet* (the concealment layer already tracks them; only the authority to act on them
   is missing).
2. **Disposed.** A base chance of **0.10**, scaled by Core's nature × nurture. It is a *fixed fact*
   about the pawn — the mistreated, high-propensity lifer chews his bed apart; the frightened cook
   never does, and never would have, no matter how many times you reload.
3. **Material in reach.** There is a workable source (see below).

The base is deliberately low. Most prisoners are not making weapons. When one is, that is a fact about
*who they are and how you keep them*, and the tell it leaves is meant to point you at exactly that
pawn.

## The source: what counts as raw material

The prisoner looks for the nearest reachable, damageable, usefully-made piece of furniture:

- **Their own assigned bed first** — it is right there in the cell.
- Otherwise the **closest artificial building within 12 tiles** that qualifies.

To be a workable source, a piece of furniture must be:

| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| Made of a material | you cannot whittle a blade out of nothing |
| Damageable | it has to take a beating |
| Made of metal, wood, or stone | cloth and leather cannot be filed into a blade |
| Reachable, even through danger | they have to get to it |

This is also the counter-play. A cell furnished only in cloth and hydroponics offers nothing to file.
A steel bed offers a steel shiv. **What you build the cell out of decides whether it can become a
weapon, and how nasty that weapon is.**

## Harvest by damage: the tell *is* the mechanic

Each heartbeat, a whittling prisoner chips at the source — roughly **1.2% of its max hit points per
worked poll**, as blunt damage.

The damage is not a side effect — it is the point. A gnawed bed is **probable cause**. The same tick
that advances the shiv damages the furniture, and that visible wear is what
[Warden Search](Warden-Search.md) reads to send a guard to the *right* prisoner first: a badly damaged
bed shoots a prisoner to the top of the search priority list. Whittling a shiv is loud, in the only
sense that matters — it leaves a mark you can act on.

Because the source takes real damage, a determined prisoner can **reduce a piece of furniture to
wreckage and move on to the next**: if the source is destroyed before the shiv is finished, they look
for another, and if there is none, the route **stalls** (progress is kept, not lost). A materially
poor cell is a real defence — the prisoner cannot make progress with nothing to file.

## How long, and the material it becomes

A shiv takes roughly **1.5 unsupervised days** of active work, jittered ±25% each poll so no two
shivs finish on the same schedule.

When it is finished, it happens **silently** — the player is told nothing. Two things happen:

- **Material carry-through.** The shiv is made of whatever the source was made of. A wood bed yields a
  wood shiv, a plasteel bunk a plasteel one, and its combat stats follow.
- **The record.** The pawn's tally of contraband made ticks up (in Core's record). That number feeds
  the warden's future suspicion of this pawn and, if you run **Institution: Justice**, their security
  classification.

## The shiv comes out in a break — and who reaches for it

A hidden shiv is inert until a breakout. When a prisoner enters an escape or assault-the-colony state,
they will use what they are hiding — but a **weapon** only comes out for someone who would actually
use it. That is the same test that decides whether an escapee even bothers to pick a weapon off the
floor.

This matters because **vanilla escapees never arm themselves at all.** The base game has the behaviour
for opportunistically grabbing a weapon, and simply leaves it out of the escape flow, so a base-game
prisoner walks out unarmed, always. Arming is genuinely new behaviour, so it is kept rare enough that
when it happens you recognise *who* did it.

### Would this pawn arm itself?

First a **hard gate**: a pawn who is incapable of violence never arms, ever — a pacifist who picks up
a rifle is not a rare event, it is a bug. Otherwise the chance is the pawn's **disposition** (who they
are, fixed) times their **circumstance** (what is happening right now), capped at **0.85** and settled
once per pawn as a fixed fact.

**Disposition** — who they are, fixed, nothing about today changes it. A base of 0.10, scaled by trait
and skill:

| Factor | Value |
|---|---|
| Bloodlust | ×2.5 (highest applicable trait only — not a stack) |
| Psychopath | ×2.0 |
| Brawler | ×1.8 |
| Wimp | ×0.3 |
| Kind | ×0.4 |
| skill | scales with their best of Shooting or Melee → range **0.5 .. 2.0** |

*Being captured in a raid does not make someone a fighter* — plenty of prisoners are cooks and
conscripts. A weapon is only worth grabbing if you know what to do with it, hence the skill term.

**Circumstance** — what is happening right now, live:

| Condition | Effect | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Health < 50% | ×0.4 | badly hurt people run or crawl; they don't seek a fight |
| ≥ 2 other prisoners escaping within 12 tiles | ×2.0 | a crowd emboldens; one man slips out, six men riot |
| An armed colonist within 20 tiles | ×1.8 | now a weapon is not bravado, it's the plan |

### Which weapon they reach for

An arming escapee prefers, in order:

1. **Their own dropped weapon** — the gun they carried when you downed them, still lying where it fell
   within 45 tiles. The base game remembers where it fell and then never uses that for prisoners. *"A
   man walking back to the spot where his own rifle fell is a better story than a man rummaging through
   your stockpile."* A prisoner does not care that you marked it forbidden.
2. **Anything to hand** within 18 tiles — but only for a pawn over a higher disposition floor (0.35).
   Rummaging a stockpile is a further step than grabbing your own gun back.

A concealed shiv slots into this the natural way: a prisoner who has been sitting on a blade and who is
the sort to use it does not leave it in his pocket — it goes straight into his hand. The pawn who
would *not* arm keeps it hidden and runs — and the shiv survives to be found in a later search, or
used in a later break.

## Not only shivs: the crude pick

The same whittling behaviour makes the **crude pick** — filed off furniture exactly the same way, with
the same disposition gate and the same damage tell — but its purpose is a tunnel rather than a fight.
See [Tunnels](Tunnels.md).

## Quick reference

| Constant | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Improvise base chance | 0.10 | before nature × nurture; fixed per pawn |
| Damage per worked poll | ~1.2% of source max HP | blunt; the visible tell |
| Source search radius | 12 tiles | own bed first, then nearest workable furniture |
| Time to finish a shiv | ~1.5 active days | jittered ±25% per poll |
| Workable material | metal / wood / stone | cloth and leather cannot be whittled |
| Shiv concealability | 0.75 | hard to find on the body |
| Arm chance cap | 0.85 | after disposition × circumstance |
| Own-weapon reach | 45 tiles | their dropped weapon |
| Any-weapon reach | 18 tiles | scavenge floor 0.35 disposition |

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*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs, alongside Foul Play and
Ward. Each stands alone; together they interlock.*