# Institution — Wiki

*Prison Architect in RimWorld. One install, five toggleable layers, over one shared engine.*

> **Every pawn has a criminal propensity on a spectrum — nature (traits) × nurture (mood,
> mistreatment, treatment) — and the colony can police it.**

That one sentence is the whole suite. Colonists, prisoners, and slaves drift toward crime on a
continuous spectrum; a policing-and-justice machine discovers, catches, weighs, punishes, reforms,
treats, and releases them — and catching one pawn changes the disposition of the rest.

**Institution** is the single mod that ships all of it. It bundles the suite's layers into one
install with a **checkbox per layer** (all on by default), owning no gameplay code itself — it is a
thin settings shim over the same separate, still-splittable feature DLLs. Pull it apart into its
layers again and nothing is lost.

---

## The gameplay loop

The suite is a closed loop, and each turn of it lives in a different layer:

1. **Disposition** *(Core)* — every pawn carries a seeded propensity: *would this one do it?*
2. **Crime** *(Justice · Policing)* — free colonists offend on that spectrum (rare in a small, tight,
   well-deterred colony), with visible consequences — theft, vandalism, assault — that fray
   relationships.
3. **Detection** *(Justice · Policing)* — witnesses and a **constable** work an open case until the
   culprit is named.
4. **The weighed arrest** *(Justice · Policing)* — an arrest is made only when the crime is grave
   enough to justify losing the pawn and the colony can afford to hold a prisoner; the disposed
   **resist**, and a subdued resister is taken in.
5. **Contraband** *(Contraband)* — once held, a pawn conceals and improvises: shivs, brews, tunnels
   under the perimeter, all countered by warden search — and a bent warden who smuggles for them.
6. **Gangs** *(Gangs)* — held pawns organise into contraband economies: joining by disposition,
   smuggling networks, rivalry, fights that book as crimes.
7. **Corrections** *(Justice · Rehabilitation)* — a warden **rehabilitates** a prisoner: counselling
   sessions move a **reform** score and raise the colony's climate of **order** (classification
   re-grades as reform rises), that order feeds back into everyone's disposition, and a **parole**
   alert releases the genuinely reformed back into the colony. Neglect a flagged prisoner and they harden.
8. **Treatment** *(Ward)* — the other door: a prisoner committed for **psychiatric care** rather than
   punished. Counselling reduces the disorder that broke them and builds a recovery track toward
   discharge; neglect a committed patient and they deteriorate.

Steps 7 and 8 close the loop back onto step 1: catching, punishing, reforming, or treating one pawn
moves the colony's climate of order, which bends the disposition of everyone still deciding whether
crime pays here.

---

## The five layers

Each is a separate repo and DLL, bundled here behind a toggle. Every layer defaults **on**; turning
one off disables its systems in place without uninstalling anything.

| Layer | Toggle | What it adds | Wiki |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Core** | *(always on — the engine)* | propensity, the criminal record, secured context, the shared **treatment engine**, the deterrence seam | [Core](core/Home.md) |
| **Contraband** | Contraband | concealment & intake, improvised shivs, Prison-Architect tunnels, warden search, warden corruption | [Contraband](contraband/Home.md) |
| **Justice** | Justice | classification, deterrence feedback, discipline & reform, **rehabilitation** (warden reform work + parole), regime | [Justice](justice/Home.md) |
| **Justice · Policing** | Policing | colony crime on the spectrum, witnesses, a constable, the weighed arrest, prison riots, recidivism alerts | [Policing](justice/Policing.md) |
| **Gangs** | Gangs | gangs as contraband economies — joining, smuggling networks, rivalry, fights-as-crime | [Gangs](gangs/Home.md) |
| **Ward** | Ward | psychiatric care — treatment, recovery, discharge, ward neglect, sedation | [Ward](ward/Home.md) |

**Policing** has its own toggle inside Justice because colony crime is a large behavioural change — a
player can run the rest of the corrections layer without their own colonists committing crimes.

---

## Why one Core, many layers

The suite runs on a small **Core** that owns exactly what every layer must agree on — *is this pawn
dangerous?*, *what have they actually done?*, *what hold are they under?* — plus two shared services:
the **treatment engine** (Ward's psychiatric care and Justice's rehabilitation point the same loop at
different states) and the **deterrence seam** (a neutral hook Justice fills so the order-climate
feedback runs *through* Core without Core ever depending on Justice).

Everything else builds up from there: Contraband and Justice on Core; Gangs on Core + Contraband +
Justice; Ward on Core. Cross-layer integrations that aren't hard dependencies stay soft — a feature
lights up if its sibling is present and the loop still closes without it. That is what keeps the
suite genuinely modular: this aggregate is a convenience, not a merge.

---

## Requirements & install

- **RimWorld 1.6.**
- **[Harmony](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2009463077)** — required (the
  suite's Harmony-using code is Justice's prisoner-recreation patch and Ward's).
- Install **Institution**, enable Harmony, and load Institution after it. That is the whole suite in
  one mod; open the settings to toggle any layer.

The standalone **[Foul Play](https://git.onetick.ninja/flan/rimworld-foulplay)** framework is a
separate install that bridges into the suite when both are present.

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*The **Institution** suite for RimWorld 1.6: Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs · Ward. Designed and
built with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).*