Institution — Prison Architect in RimWorld

Every pawn has a criminal propensity on a spectrum — nature (traits) × nurture (mood, mistreatment, treatment) — and the colony can police it. Catching and punishing one pawn changes the disposition of the rest.

Institution is the whole suite in one install, with a checkbox per layer in the mod settings (all on by default). It turns RimWorld's forgotten rap sheet into a living justice system — police, prison, parole — mirroring the real separation of powers.

Documentation

The Institution wiki is the full guide: the gameplay loop, every layer, and how the pieces feed each other. Each layer below links to its wiki page.

The six layers

Turn any off in Options → Mod Settings and it goes inert immediately. All build on a shared Core engine that ships inside — no separate dependency.

Layer	In play	Wiki
Core	The engine every layer agrees on: propensity, the criminal record, the treatment engine. Invisible on its own.	Core
Contraband	Prisoners conceal what they walked in with, whittle shivs from their cell's furniture, and dig tunnels under the wall. Wardens search the likeliest prisoner first — and a bent warden looks the other way.	Contraband
Policing	Your own colonists offend on the spectrum. Witnesses and a constable name the culprit; a weighed arrest can end in a cell or a resisted breakout. A climate of order feeds back into everyone — plus riots when it collapses.	Policing
Corrections	Classification grades every prisoner by what they've done (a wall marker grades a whole wing). Discipline hardens or reforms; parole frees the reformed; regime gives them recreation, yard time, and visits.	Corrections
Gangs	Disposed prisoners band together and move contraband among themselves. Rival gangs fight — inside the wire or out — and the fight is a crime. A well-run colony grows few gangs.	Gangs
Ward	Commit a prisoner for psychiatric treatment instead of punishment: counselling reduces the disorder that broke them and builds a recovery track toward discharge. Neglect them and they deteriorate.	Ward

The loop

Disposition → Crime → Detection → Arrest → Contraband / Gangs → Corrections → Parole — and back to the start: reforming or punishing one pawn moves the colony's climate of order, which bends who else decides that crime pays here. (A future Judiciary layer — a court that tries and sentences — is reserved to sit between arrest and prison.)

Install

Steam Workshop: subscribe, and enable Harmony + Institution in the mod list. (Workshop link coming with the 0.1.0 upload.)

Or drop it straight onto your machine (auto-detects the Steam Mods folder on Linux/Mac):

D=$(ls -d ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam/steamapps/common/RimWorld/RimWorldMac.app/Mods \
      ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/RimWorld/Mods \
      ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/RimWorld/Mods 2>/dev/null | head -1)
git clone --depth 1 https://git.arch.fyi/flan/institution.git "$D/Institution"

Update later with git -C "$D/Institution" pull.

Requires

RimWorld 1.6 and Harmony. Pairs with the standalone Foul Play (a vessel/substance framework), which bridges in when both are present.

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Version: 0.1.0 · Attribution in NOTICE. Modding or curious how it fits together? The design notes live in ROADMAP.md.

Support

If you enjoy the Institution suite, consider supporting development via GitHub Sponsors or Ko-fi.

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