Compatibility

Contraband adds its own content and reads from the base game rather than rewriting it. That is why it composes with other mods instead of colliding with them.

Requires: Institution: Core

Contraband has a hard dependency on Institution: Core and loads after it. This is not optional — after the split, everything Contraband reads lives in Core:

Core provides	Contraband uses it for
Which pawns count as "in custody," and who can hide things	who counts as a concealer; who can be intaken, whittle, or dig
A pawn's criminal propensity (nature × nurture)	every disposition roll — intake (0.6), improvise (0.10), dig (0.08), all scaled and settled per pawn
The criminal record	times searched, times caught, escape attempts, contraband made — written by search and acquisition, read by search priority

Install Contraband without Core and it will not run. Everything else on this page is optional interplay that degrades gracefully when the other mod is absent.

It plays nicely with other prison mods

Contraband adds its own content rather than rewriting the base game's. It:

Adds a new warden job (search) rather than changing an existing one.
Reuses vanilla warden behaviour rather than overriding it, so anything that adjusts warden behaviour on the base class flows through to searches for free.
Extends two escape-related behaviours at startup so prisoners arm themselves and use what they are hiding when they break — inserted at a specific point, and it logs a warning if that anchor is missing rather than failing silently.
Runs on a heartbeat over held pawns for intake, improvisation, and tunnels — no hook on the capture event is needed because the heartbeat already visits every held pawn.

The net effect: the surfaces other prison mods touch are mostly untouched here, so conflicts are the exception, not the rule.

Foul Play — the carboy bridge

Foul Play (the "Piss Nuke" mod) stays its own mod with its own front door, and yet its carboy is a first-class contraband item. This is the flagship demonstration of Contraband's "items are content, subsystems are shared, mods are audiences" principle, and it works two ways:

The carboy brings its own behaviour. The carboy simply declares itself as contraband and points at the throw-the-carboy behaviour that lives in Foul Play. Contraband never has to know that behaviour exists — it just runs whatever the item brought with it.
A concealed carboy keeps its contents. A carboy is not just "a jar" — it is a jar of a fermented blend, and that blend has to survive being concealed. When a carboy is intaken or smuggled, Contraband captures a label for its contents blindly; on redemption it hands the label back to Foul Play to restore the blend. Contraband knows nothing about substances or fermentation — that framework lives entirely in Foul Play. If Foul Play is absent, no content is captured and nothing breaks: a jar is just a jar. See Concealment and Intake.

The dependency runs one way only: Foul Play bridges to Contraband (and to Core) if they are present; Contraband takes no dependency on Foul Play.

Institution: Justice — the record is the shared bus

Contraband and Justice never call each other. They meet on Core's criminal record — Contraband writes to it, Justice reads from it:

Contraband writes	Justice reads it into
times searched	Classification (security grade)
times caught	Deterrence (colony-wide signal)
escape attempts	Discipline / Parole (reform)
contraband made

Catching contraband feeds classification. A prisoner repeatedly caught with shivs or foiled mid-tunnel racks up catches and escape attempts, which Justice's classification weighs into a higher security grade.
And it feeds back. Justice's deterrence signal flows back through Core's propensity, nudging every future intake / improvise / dig roll a Contraband pawn makes. A prison that catches and disciplines becomes a prison where fewer prisoners bother trying — without either mod referencing the other. Run Contraband alone and deterrence is a neutral 1.0; the record still routes the warden.

Institution: Gangs — the contraband economy

Gangs depends on Core, Contraband, and Justice, because a gang is a contraband economy:

Gang smuggling moves contraband through the same door intake and corruption use.
A gang's outside members are the natural caller for the reach-in corruption — paying a bent warden to make a delivery. That ability exists in Contraband but has no in-game trigger of its own; Gangs is what drives it. See Corruption.
Gang fights route to Justice's crime record, which then raises search priority here. The loop closes through Core again.

Prison mods the suite is tested against

Mod	Interaction	Verdict
Prison Commons	it adjusts warden behaviour on the base class, and Contraband's search inherits that, so searches respect prison-commons/allowed areas for free	works by inheritance
Custom Prisoner Interactions	it only touches the named vanilla warden jobs (chat, convert, enslave, release); it cannot see a brand-new job	no conflict
Prisoner Realism	its escapes are for "mood prisoners" mid-break; a tunnel breakout hands off to the vanilla prison-break flow, which Prisoner Realism layers on. Tunnels complement it — they let ward patients and slaves who would never mood-break still, patiently, dig out	complementary
Prison Labor	prisoners working outside the cell are still held pawns and still tracked; Contraband adds nothing to labor jobs. A work assignment is simply another place a disposed prisoner might come by materials	no conflict
Prisoner Recreation	overlaps the regime feature — which now lives in Institution: Justice, not here, and is written to coexist with Prisoner Recreation	not Contraband's concern post-split

Load order

Base game
Institution: Core — required, loads before Contraband
Institution: Contraband — this mod
Foul Play / Justice / Gangs — any order after Core; each bridges if present

The general rule

If a mod adds prisoner behaviour by changing vanilla warden jobs or the escape flow by name, it will not see Contraband's additions, and Contraband will not see its — they pass each other harmlessly. If a mod adds a new warden job or escape behaviour of its own, it stacks. The one place to watch is another mod that also rewrites the same two escape-related behaviours wholesale; Contraband inserts its part at a specific point and logs a warning if that point is missing, so a load-order or conflict problem is visible in the log rather than silent.

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

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