5.8 KiB
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:
- Disposition (Core) — every pawn carries a seeded propensity: would this one do it?
- 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.
- Detection (Justice · Policing) — witnesses and a constable work an open case until the culprit is named.
- 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.
- 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.
- Gangs (Gangs) — held pawns organise into contraband economies: joining by disposition, smuggling networks, rivalry, fights that book as crimes.
- 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.
- 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 |
| Contraband | Contraband | concealment & intake, improvised shivs, Prison-Architect tunnels, warden search, warden corruption | Contraband |
| Justice | Justice | classification, deterrence feedback, discipline & reform, rehabilitation (warden reform work + parole), regime | Justice |
| Justice · Policing | Policing | colony crime on the spectrum, witnesses, a constable, the weighed arrest, prison riots, recidivism alerts | Policing |
| Gangs | Gangs | gangs as contraband economies — joining, smuggling networks, rivalry, fights-as-crime | Gangs |
| Ward | Ward | psychiatric care — treatment, recovery, discharge, ward neglect, sedation | Ward |
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 — 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 framework is a separate install that bridges into the suite when both are present.
The Institution suite for RimWorld 1.6: Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs · Ward. Designed and built with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).