institution/Wiki/gangs/Networks-and-Smuggling.md

Networks and smuggling

The one thing nothing else models: contraband that flows between pawns. A gang is a supply chain.

This is the core of the mod. Everything else — who joins, who fights, who is kept apart — exists to serve or to break the network described here. A gang is not a mood aura; it is a logistics graph, and its edges carry contraband.

The move

The heart of it is one method, MoveWithin(from, to): a gangmate who is holding a stash passes a piece of it to a gangmate who has none. It returns true if something actually moved.

MoveWithin(from, to):
  1. both non-null, and SameGang(from, to)          -- else false
  2. if both are Spawned: from must CanReach(to,      -- the reach gate
        PathEndMode.Touch, Danger.Deadly)             -- else false
  3. a Contraband tracker must exist on the map        -- else false
  4. 'from' must have at least one concealed item       -- else false
  5. take stash[0]:
        tracker.Confiscate(from, item.def)   -- leaves the supplier's hands
        tracker.Conceal(to,   item.def)      -- arrives, hidden, in the customer's
     return true

A few things worth reading carefully:

• One item per move. It takes stash[0] — the first concealed item on the supplier — and moves exactly that. It is a redistribution, not a duplication: the item leaves from (Confiscate) and arrives concealed on to (Conceal). The gang's total stash is unchanged; only who holds it changes.
• Same gang, always. SameGang requires both pawns to hold the same non-zero gang id. There is no smuggling to a stranger — the network only moves along membership.
• The reach gate only applies to co-located pawns. The CanReach check is guarded by from.Spawned && to.Spawned. Two pawns both physically on the map must have a walkable path (Touch range, willing to cross Deadly danger) between them. If a member is not spawned, the reach check is skipped — which is what allows a gang to reach across the wall to a member who is off the active map.

Why this defeats a single search

Consider a wing of four gangmates and one shiv. You search Prisoner A and find nothing — clean. You tick a box: cell searched, no contraband. But the shiv was on Prisoner C the whole time, and on the next 5000-tick network pass it will move to whoever is out. Search C tomorrow and it may already be on A again.

From the source comment, plainly:

A gangmate holding a stash supplies one who has none, so a search that turns up nothing on one prisoner has not cleaned out the wing.

A single search is a snapshot of one node in a graph that reshuffles itself. This is the whole reason contraband-as-a-network is worth modelling: the unit of contraband is the wing, not the pawn. To clean it out you have to either search faster than it moves, or — far better — break the graph.

The automatic resupply pass

You do not call MoveWithin by hand; the gang component does it on the 5000-tick check. After forming gangs for the pass, it runs one resupply round per gang:

for each gang among the eligible crew:
    holder = first member who IS hiding contraband
    needy  = first member who is NOT hiding contraband
    if holder and needy both exist:
        MoveWithin(holder, needy)

So on each interval, every gang that has both a haves-member and a have-not-member performs one transfer, moving a single item from a holder to someone empty-handed. Over several ticks the effect is that a gang tends to keep its members supplied and to spread a stash out — which is exactly what makes a scattershot search miss it. (Only members who currently meet the join bar participate in this automatic pass; the resupply loop draws from the same crew used for formation.)

The cross-wall move

Because WouldJoin and SameGang care nothing about a pawn's secured status, a gang can have a free member and a held member. If the free member is holding the stash, the network resupplies into the prison — the outside man passes to the inside man. The mod's integration test builds exactly this: a free psychopath colonist and a prisoner in one gang, the stash on the free member, and MoveWithin(free, prisoner) succeeds — after which the prisoner is hiding contraband and the free colonist is not. Your prison's contraband problem is not sealed inside your prison.

Resupply from outside: the bent warden

MoveWithin only redistributes what a gang already has. So what happens when you finally search the whole wing on the same day and strip every member clean — the graph has no more edges to carry? The gang is starved. It stays starved until contraband re-enters from outside.

That external source is not part of Gangs; it is Institution: Contraband's corruption route. A warden's honesty varies by personality (a Greedy warden has a price), and a bent warden can smuggle contraband in to a prisoner — Corruption.Smuggle(warden, prisoner, tracker) plants a concealed item directly. That single seeded item is then all the network needs: one holder, and the 5000-tick pass spreads it back out across everyone who can reach.

So the two halves of the supply picture are:

Mechanism	Owner	What it does
MoveWithin	Gangs	moves existing contraband between gangmates who can reach each other
Corruption.Smuggle	Contraband	injects new contraband from outside via a corruptible warden

Cut both and a gang genuinely dries up. Cut only the redistribution and a bent warden re-seeds it; cut only the warden and any stash you missed keeps circulating.

How to break a network

• Search the whole wing at once, not one pawn at a time. A partial sweep is a snapshot the network routes around.
• Segregate rivals into different, unreachable wings (Classification, in Institution: Justice). The reach gate is the lever — a network whose members cannot walk to each other cannot pass anything. This is the primary counter-play; see Affiliations and Segregation.
• Clean up your wardens. If searches never seem to finish the job, you may have a Greedy warden re-seeding the wing. Corruption is the resupply valve; personality is the fix.

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Part of the Institution suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system. AI disclosure: developed with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).