institution/Wiki/justice/Regime.md

Regime

The daily life of the held — and the one lever vanilla withholds.

Most of what a prison regime needs, vanilla already gives you. The schedule is the Restrict tab. The mood-driven disposition already flows through Propensity.Nurture — a neglected prisoner runs hotter with no new machinery. So Regime does not rebuild any of that. It adds the single thing vanilla flatly refuses to model: recreation.

---

What vanilla does, and what Regime flips

Vanilla denies prisoners the Joy (recreation) need outright — the need is flagged colonistsOnly and neverOnPrisoner, so it simply never appears on a prisoner. A caged pawn has no recreation bar, cannot take joy from anything, and never suffers for its absence.

Regime flips exactly that one bit on, via a small Harmony postfix — the same approach the good, popular Prisoner Recreation mod takes:

[HarmonyPatch(typeof(Pawn_NeedsTracker), "ShouldHaveNeed")]
static class Patch_PrisonerRecreation
{
    static void Postfix(NeedDef nd, Pawn ___pawn, ref bool __result)
    {
        if (__result || nd?.defName != "Joy") return;          // only touch Joy, only when vanilla said no
        if (___pawn?.RaceProps?.Humanlike == true
            && ___pawn.IsPrisonerOfColony)
            __result = true;                                    // humanlike prisoners get the need
    }
}

Three guards, in order:

1. __result already true — vanilla or another patch already granted the need. Do nothing. This is what makes the patch additive: it only ever turns a false into true, never the reverse.
2. nd.defName != "Joy" — this patch is about recreation and nothing else. Every other need is left exactly as vanilla decided.
3. humanlike prisoner-of-colony — animals, guests, slaves and colonists are untouched; only a humanlike prisoner of your colony gains the need.

That is the entire mechanism. Enabling recreation is trivial — once the need exists, vanilla does all the rest (joy sources, the recreation bar, the mood effects of a full or empty one). The value is not the plumbing; it is what an empty bar now costs.

---

Why a need you can neglect is the point

Giving prisoners recreation is not a mercy toggle — it is a lever with two ends, and the down end is the one that matters to the suite. Once a prisoner has the Joy need, they can be starved of it, and vanilla's own machinery then does the work:

no recreation  →  Joy falls  →  mood falls  →  Propensity.Nurture rises  →  higher propensity

Every one of those arrows already exists. Regime only opens the first door; mood is wired to disposition in Core, so a prisoner who gets no yard time stews, their mood sinks, and their Nurture — and with it their odds on every "would they?" roll — climbs. From Deterrence and Discipline & Reform you already know Nurture is the multiplier the whole system keys off; Regime is what lets neglect feed it.

Concretely, in Core's Nurture:

Prisoner condition	Nurture contribution
Mood < 0.20 (recreation-starved, at the floor of despair)	× 2.5
Mood < 0.35 (badly kept)	× 1.6
Held and mood < 0.40 (a badly run cell)	additional × 1.4

A prisoner you give no recreation is a prisoner you are pushing up those brackets. Regime turns "I didn't bother building a rec room" from a non-event into a disposition cost you pay on every roll.

---

Idempotent with Prisoner Recreation

If you also run the Prisoner Recreation mod, nothing breaks. Both mods do the same thing — force ShouldHaveNeed to return true for prisoner Joy — and because Regime's postfix only acts when __result is still false, the two are simply two postfixes that force the same true. Whichever runs first grants the need; the second sees it already granted and returns immediately. Running both is harmless. Running either alone is sufficient. There is no double-need, no conflict, no load-order sensitivity between them.

Regime announces itself at startup so you can confirm it loaded:

[Institution: Justice] Regime: prisoner recreation enabled.

---

Content on top

Yard time, safety needs, and visitation are content on this foundation, not new machinery. Each of them is just another thing that moves a prisoner's mood — and mood is already wired to disposition — so they need only defs and jobs, not new systems. When they land, they will make a well-run regime feel richer; the mechanical spine is already here in this one postfix.

---

How to play with Regime

• Build the rec room. A prisoner with recreation settles; the mood brackets above stay off, and their disposition sits near baseline. A cheap horseshoe pin or chess table earns its keep in crimes that don't happen.
• Neglect is a choice with a number. Leaving prisoners with nothing to do isn't neutral — it drives mood into the ×1.6 and ×2.5 Nurture brackets, and a hotter prisoner reoffends, which cools your colony's climate of order, which heats everyone. The rec room is deterrence you build once.
• Recreation and reform stack. Regime cools disposition live (through mood); reform cools it permanently (through Discipline & Reform). A reformed prisoner in a well-run wing is calm on both axes — which is exactly the pawn you can eventually parole.
• You don't need Prisoner Recreation too — but if you have it, keep it. They coexist.

---

For modders

Harmony ID flan.institution.justice, a single postfix on Pawn_NeedsTracker.ShouldHaveNeed. It is the suite's only Harmony-using code — Contraband dropped its Harmony dependency after Justice was split out. The patch class lives in the Contraband namespace (shared across the suite since the extraction). The postfix is strictly additive (false → true only), so it is safe to stack with any other mod that grants prisoner needs.

---

Part of the Institution suite for RimWorld 1.6: Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs. Developed with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).