# The Institution suite — master roadmap A set of RimWorld mods about **what an institution does to the people inside it** — and the crime, policing, and justice that put them there. Each mod stands alone; together they form one system. ## North star > **Every pawn has a criminal propensity on a spectrum — nature (traits) × nurture (circumstance, > mood, treatment) — and the colony can police it.** The same seeded disposition engine that drives the piss spree (`WouldFoulPeople` = disposition × circumstance, fixed per pawn), generalized. The suite is the two halves of that: - **Pre-arrest** — colonists commit crimes on a spectrum; a policing layer discovers, investigates, and catches them. Arrest is the hinge. - **Post-arrest** — prison, contraband, improvised weapons, escape, wards, secure areas, the daily life of the held, and the path back out (parole / discharge / manumission). ## The load-bearing principle: SECURED CONTEXT, not "prisoner" Nothing hard-codes "prisoner." The subject of every held-person system is a **secured context** — a pawn held in a controlled space, subject to search, following a regime: | Context | Members | Authority | Release path | |---|---|---|---| | Prison | prisoners | warden | **parole** | | Psych ward (Ward mod) | committed patients | orderly / warden | **discharge** (when treated) | | Slavery (Ideology) | slaves | overseer | **manumission** (Ideology) | | Secure area | anyone inside a zone | assigned guard | leave the zone | A committed patient rides the vanilla prisoner rail (Ward's `Ward_PsychiatricCare` mode), so contraband, search, schedule, needs, and visitation **already apply to ward patients for free** — and to slaves via a small Ideology-gated extension. Every system below reads `SecuredContextOf(pawn)`, never `IsPrisonerOfColony` directly. Build prisoner-first, against the predicate, and ward + slave + secure-area fall out without a rewrite. Design tone: **standards are low on the rim.** Needs and expectations for the held are modest — a prisoner does not expect a spa. Don't over-model comfort; a little goes a long way. --- ## Suite modules | Mod | Scope | Status | |---|---|---| | **Foul Play** | throw a container of something off a body; vessels + substances + Piss Nuke flagship | built | | **Institution: Contraband** | conceal / improvise / search / confiscate / intake / escape / secure-areas | building | | **Institution: Ward** | involuntary psychiatric commitment — the third pawn state | built | | **Institution: Regime** | daily schedule (vanilla Restrict) + modest needs + visitation, for every secured context | planned | | **Institution: Justice** | the crime loop (commit → discover → investigate → attribute → arrest), policing officer, parole/discharge/manumission | planned | | **Institution: Discipline** | security classification / segregation, punishment-as-order, corruption | planned | | **Institution: Gangs** | prisoner & colony gangs, rivalries, contraband networks | planned | Seven mods is the ceiling. Prefer folding a slot into an existing module over minting a new one. --- ## Regime — daily life of the held ### Schedule (use vanilla, don't reinvent) RimWorld already has `Pawn_TimetableTracker` + `TimeAssignmentDef` and the Restrict tab. **Extend that to secured pawns** rather than building a new regime UI. Prison Labor (`1899474310`, 176k) already puts force-to-work prisoners in the Restrict grid — build on that pattern, don't fight it. - Give secured pawns a timetable; surface it in the Restrict tab. - Two new `TimeAssignmentDef`s cover the prison-specific blocks vanilla lacks: **Yard** (go to a designated yard/commons — ties to Prison Commons) and **Lockup** (confined to cell). Eat/Sleep/ Work/Joy map to existing assignments. - A think-tree branch makes secured pawns honour their timetable (they already have a prisoner think-tree branch to hook). - Ward routine and slave work-schedule are the same machinery, different default timetables. ### Needs (modest — standards are low) Do NOT build a full Prison Architect needs sim. One or two low-stakes needs, keyed to the schedule: - **Yard / open air** — satisfied by the Yard block. Vanilla already has the Outdoors need; check whether it applies to secured pawns and lean on it before adding one. - **Safety** — a modest mood factor from feeling safe (few violent cellmates, guards present). - Recreation is already covered by Prisoner Recreation (`815726158`) — don't rebuild. Keep the magnitudes small. A satisfied schedule = a quiet wing; neglect = the disposition engine tips more pawns over the edge (feeding contraband, breaks, gang recruitment). ### Visitation Off-map visitors and related pawns visit the held. A genuine greenfield gap — Hospitality is guests only and never touches prisons. - A **visitation room** role; scheduled visiting hours (a schedule block). - A prisoner/patient with family or faction ties gets visits; the warden/orderly supervises. - Feeds a modest Family/social mood boost. **Thematically strongest for the ward** — a committed patient's family visiting is exactly right — and it is a supply route for contraband (a visitor smuggles something in → Contraband's conceal system). --- ## Justice — the crime loop (the missing middle) The heart. Without discovery + investigation, "crime" is just a random bad event, not something you police. The loop: **commit → discover → investigate → attribute → arrest → (held) → release** - **Commit.** A colonist acts on their propensity (nature: traits incl. VTE `2296404655` 646k kleptomaniac/pyromaniac — *integrate as inputs, don't rebuild*; nurture: our stat). Crimes: theft, contraband possession, sabotage, arson, assault, at the serious end murder. - **Discover.** The colony learns a crime happened: missing goods, a body, damage, filth, or a **witness**. Discovery is not automatic — a crime in an unwatched place may go unnoticed. - **Witnesses / informants.** A colonist near the act may witness it → report, be intimidated into silence, or inform for favour. The cheap, characterful detection layer. - **Investigate.** A policing officer works the scene: evidence, opportunity, the stolen goods in someone's concealed stash (ties to Contraband search!), narrowing suspects. - **Attribute.** Evidence points to a pawn. Confidence, not certainty — wrongful accusation is a possible, dramatic failure. - **Arrest.** Vanilla's one law verb. The hinge into the held systems. ### Policing officer Guarding is owned (Guards For Me `1855885448`, 88k — patrol/bodyguard, external threats only), the *catching* is not. Build the officer who investigates and arrests criminal colonists; **lean on Guards For Me's guard role** where present rather than reinventing patrol. ### Parole / discharge / manumission — release, driven by IDEOLOGY The payoff that makes Ward's treatment and good behaviour *mean* something. Release is not a flat timer — the colony's **Ideology precepts** decide the policy (`MayRequire` Ideology; a vanilla fallback for non-Ideology games): - A harsh / execution-favouring ideoligion rarely paroles (executes or works-to-death instead). - A rehabilitative / lenient ideoligion paroles readily on reform + good behaviour. - **Parole** (prisoner), **discharge** (ward patient, when treated — the Ward analog), **manumission** (slave, Ideology's own freeing) are one mechanism with three faces. - A released, reformed pawn has **reduced recidivism** — integrate with Prisoner Realism's recidivism (`3760196312`) rather than duplicate it: our reform lowers its return chance. Sentencing timers exist (Prisoner Sentencing `3736998871`) — defer to it; add only the ideology-driven *decision*, not another timer. --- ## Discipline — control - **Classification / segregation — make the wings players already build MEAN something.** Players already hand-build min / medium / max / solitary blocks with zones, cells and locks. RimWorld just has no notion of *who belongs where* or *whether they are correctly placed*. We do not replace the building — we add the intelligence layer on top of it, and it becomes the **router** that connects the whole suite: - **Grade (information).** Each secured pawn gets a risk grade computed from disposition × traits × history (escape attempts, contraband made, guards attacked, murder on record). The player stops guessing who is dangerous — the game tells them "this one is max." - **Assignment + misplacement flag (enforcement).** Tag a wing's grade; the system routes prisoners to the matching wing and **warns** when a max-grade pawn sits in a min cell. Vanilla gives zero feedback here today. - **Dynamic re-classification (dynamics).** Grade moves with behaviour: an escape attempt or a shanking **upgrades** them; Ward treatment + good conduct + time **downgrades** them. This wires classification straight into the behaviour loop. - **Grade gates the other systems (the payoff).** Grade drives search frequency (Contraband — max = frisked often), privileges (Regime — yard/visitation/recreation restricted by grade), escape risk (a dangerous pawn in a weak cell escapes more), and reform eligibility (Justice). - **The tension that makes it a decision.** Over-classify (everyone in max/solitary) = safe but mood craters, reform fails, ideology frowns on cruelty, and warden-hours explode. Under-classify (everyone min) = cheap and happy but they walk out. Classifying *correctly* is the game; we supply the information and the consequences that make it one. No mod auto-classifies (manual wing-building is emergent player behaviour, not a mod), so the *system* is an uncontested gap even though the physical tiers are common. - **Punishment as a player order.** Issue solitary / lockdown / privilege-revocation as a discipline *action*. Distinct from Prisoner Realism's *passive* solitary toll — we add the order and its interface; defer the mood consequence to Realism where present. - **Corruption.** Wardens/guards take bribes, smuggle, or look away — a guard-integrity stat. Seeds the bent-warden contraband supply route already in Contraband's plan. --- ## Gangs Untouched by any mod. Prisoners (and colonists) form gangs / factions with rivalries that drive violence and run contraband networks. Ties to disposition (who joins), contraband (what they move), and classification (segregate rivals). The richest, latest module — build after the loop works. --- ## Build order (fills the meta-gap: don't build it all at once) 1. **The crime loop core** — discover + witnesses + investigate + attribute. Without it the whole crime thesis is inert. Build *before* individual crime types. 2. **Regime** — schedule (vanilla Restrict) + one or two modest needs. Cheap, high-value, and it feeds the disposition engine (neglect → crime). 3. **Visitation** — greenfield, thematically strong for the ward, doubles as a contraband route. 4. **Parole / discharge / manumission** — gives Ward and good behaviour a payoff; ideology-driven. 5. **Classification**, then **punishment-orders**, then **corruption**. 6. **Gangs** — last; needs the rest in place. Already in flight (Contraband/Foul Play): hooch, improvised weapons, fire-starter, escape tools, intake search, secure areas. See [Contraband ROADMAP](https://git.onetick.ninja/flan/rimworld-contraband). ## Compatibility — the non-negotiable The suite must load and run cleanly alongside the **all-time most-subscribed Workshop mods**, not just prison-adjacent ones — that is the load order most players actually run. The harness (`Tools/run-compat-test.sh` in the Ward repo) boots a real headless RimWorld with the suite plus this stack loaded at once and fails on any error naming our code. Baseline stack (all 1.6, verified subs): - **Frameworks:** Harmony (3.2M) · HugsLib (2.5M) · Vanilla Expanded Framework (2.0M) · Humanoid Alien Races (1.1M). - **Ubiquitous gameplay/AI:** Pick Up And Haul (1.7M) · Common Sense (1.05M) · Simple Sidearms (954k) · Vanilla Furniture Expanded (1.08M) · EdB Prepare Carefully (1.67M). - **UI (load-order neighbours):** RimHUD (1.5M) · Allow Tool (1.36M) · Interaction Bubbles (1.15M) · Camera+ (997k). - **Weapon/our-domain risk:** Vanilla Weapons Expanded (985k) · VFE Furniture Security (865k) · Vanilla Brewing Expanded (589k) · Hospitality (798k). - **Prison-adjacent (design overlap):** Prison Labor · Prison Commons · Locks · Restraints · Custom Prisoner Interactions · Prisoner Realism · Prisoner Recreation · Dubs Bad Hygiene · Psychology · Rim Disorders · More Mental Breaks. **Combat Extended** (387k, 1.6) gets its OWN dedicated pass, not the mixed stack: it overhauls verbs, projectiles, damage and armour — exactly our thrown-weapon surface — so an ambiguous failure in a 25-mod stack would be useless. Loading-clean-under-CE is a must-have; a tuned CE armour-penetration patch (`MayRequire`) is a strongly-recommended follow-up, not a release blocker. How the suite earns this: zero-Harmony cores, Contraband optional via a `LoadFolders` bridge, every DLC/mod tie-in `MayRequire`-gated, and new content registered by capability (`IsWeapon`, `IsDrug`, category) rather than hard-coded lists — so modded weapons, drugs and races are covered without being named. ## Self-complete, dependency-free — the standing rule Two rules, and the second is the sharper one: 1. **Judge by QUALITY, not sub count. If an incumbent is actually good, keep it.** A genuinely good mod — even a small one — is worth coexisting with rather than rebuilding: don't waste effort duplicating something done well (Prisoner Realism at 11k is a *good* deep sim → keep it). Only build our own where the incumbent is **thin, absent, or mediocre** on one of our crucial loops (Prisoner Recreation just flips vanilla Joy → trivially ours; the 334-sub crime mod is niche → the slot is open). Sub count is a hint, not the test. 2. **No hard dependencies. Every crucial loop is self-complete.** The suite must be a whole, working system on its own. Third-party mods are **coexistence targets that ENHANCE**, never requirements. Where we integrate (Ideology precepts, Prisoner Realism's recidivism, Prison Labor's regime), it is always `MayRequire`-soft: the feature lights up if the mod is present and the loop still closes without it. What this changes vs. a naive "defer to whoever got there first": - **Recreation is ours to enable.** Prisoner Recreation (38k) and Prisoner Realism (11k) ship no custom need — they just flip on the *vanilla Joy need* for prisoners. We do the same in our needs system: idempotent, coexists, zero dependency, no citing. - **Release-outcome / recidivism** — build a modest self-complete version (reformed → less return; abused → returns hostile). Prisoner Realism's deeper recidivism coexists; we don't require it. - **Solitary/isolation consequence** — a light version of our own so Discipline is self-complete; Realism's deeper toll coexists. - **Escape** is already self-complete: vanilla mental-break breaks + our disposition-driven arming + our patient tunnel. Realism's lockpick/ringleaders are enhancements on top, not gaps we leave. Genuinely leave alone (giant + redundant + not a gap in our loops): forced labor (Prison Labor 176k), hygiene (Dubs Bad Hygiene 632k), crime *traits* (Vanilla Traits Expanded 646k — we consume them as nature inputs), guest hosting (Hospitality 798k). Coexist with all; depend on none. ### Prior-art sweeps done (2026-07-14/15) Uncontested gaps, safe to build clean: contraband/search, improvised weapons, keep-inventory intake, secure-area search, nurture criminality stat, investigating officer, patient escape, visitation, classification, punishment-order, gangs, corruption. Partial (build the uncovered slice only): prisoner timetable, yard/safety/privacy needs, evidence/forensics investigation, active snitch/informant, reform-and-ideology-driven parole. The only prior art in the crime/parole space (Rimworld Law and Order, 334 subs) fails the *popular* bar, so that slot is open — build it without duplicating that niche mod exactly. ## Architecture already honors rule 2 Zero hard dependencies anywhere: Foul Play stands alone, Contraband is optional to it (the `LoadFolders` bridge loads only when both are present), Ward stands alone, and every DLC/mod tie-in is `MayRequire`. No suite mod requires another suite mod or any third-party mod. ## AI disclosure Designed and built with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).