institution/Wiki/ward/Commitment.md

Commitment

How involuntary psychiatric commitment actually works in play: how a colonist becomes a ward patient, what the treatment station does, how a room turns into a ward, who does the counselling, what the treatment buys, and what happens if you commit someone and then forget about them.

Every def and class name below is the real one from the mod source. The Ward_ prefix marks a def; the C# class names are the workers behind them.

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The loop in one paragraph

You arrest a colonist (or otherwise take a prisoner) and set their interaction mode to psychiatric care. You build a treatment station in their cell, which turns the room into a psychiatric ward. A warden walks over, sits, and counsels them; each session adds a little Ward_UnderTreatment severity, which lowers their mental-break threshold. That severity decays at 0.15/day, so the effect fades unless wardens keep attending. Counselling also gives a small mood lift (Ward_Counselled). Neglect a committed patient — leave them with no active treatment hediff — and once a day they gain Ward_Neglected, a mood penalty that drags them back toward the break that got them committed. Treat them and they stabilise; forget them and they don't. That feedback loop is the entire mod.

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Step 1 — Becoming a ward patient

Commitment reuses vanilla's arrest → prisoner transition. You don't invent a new pawn state; you take a prisoner (arrest your own colonist, or a raider) and then flip on a non-exclusive interaction mode.

Ward_PsychiatricCare — the interaction mode

Field	Value	Why
Def type	PrisonerInteractionModeDef	A Def, not the compiled GuestStatus enum — that's the whole point
defName	Ward_PsychiatricCare
label	"psychiatric care"	Shown in the prisoner's interaction dropdown
listOrder	150	Sits between vanilla's ReduceResistance (100) and Release (200)
isNonExclusiveInteraction	true	Stacks with recruit/convert/work instead of stealing the radio button
mustBeAwake	false	You can flag a downed or sleeping patient for care; the work giver decides when to actually treat
allowOnWildMan	false	A wild man isn't a commitment case
allowInClassicIdeoMode	true	Available without Ideology's ideoligion system

Non-exclusive is load-bearing. Vanilla's recruit/convert/enslave/release/execute modes are mutually exclusive — you pick one from a radio group. Psychiatric care is modelled on vanilla's own Bloodfeed and Study modes, which are toggles layered on top of the exclusive choice. So a patient can be set to recruit AND psychiatric care at once: you counsel the sad colonist toward stability while also chipping at their resistance. It also means Ward doesn't have to ship a cross-product of workAndPsychiatricCare variants to coexist with Prison Labor's work modes — both just toggle on.

The harness proves this on a live pawn: after ToggleNonExclusiveInteraction(Ward_PsychiatricCare, true) and then SetExclusiveInteraction(AttemptRecruit), both modes report enabled (live.stacksWithRecruit = True).

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Step 2 — The treatment station

Flagging a patient for care does nothing on its own. Treatment happens at a station, in the patient's own room. Without one, a patient flagged for care in an ordinary cell simply goes untreated — which is the point of the neglect thought (Step 6).

Ward_TreatmentStation — the building

"A desk, a chair bolted to the floor, and a locked cabinet of sedatives. A warden set to psychiatric care will use it to counsel patients held in this room."

Field	Value	Why
defName	Ward_TreatmentStation
Parent	BuildingBase	Ordinary passable furniture
Cost	40 Steel + 2 Industrial medicine	Deliberately cheap
WorkToBuild	1600	A quick build
MaxHitPoints	120
researchPrerequisites	MedicineProduction	The one research gate
size	(2,1)	A two-tile desk
graphicClass	Graphic_Single	One texture, not a rotation set — nothing to keep in sync
designationCategory	Misc
passability	PassThroughOnly, pathCost 60	Pawns squeeze past it; it doesn't wall a cell
Flammability	1.0	It burns

It's cheap on purpose. The real cost of running a ward is not the 40 steel. It is the warden hours you spend counselling and the labour you give up by not putting the patient to work. The building is just the gate that says "this room is set up to treat people."

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Step 3 — The room becomes a ward

Once a treatment station stands in a room that already holds prisoner beds, the room's role changes from prison cell to psychiatric ward.

Ward_PsychWard — the room role

Field	Value
Def type	RoomRoleDef (workerClass is a public field — no patch needed)
defName	Ward_PsychWard
label	"psychiatric ward"
workerClass	Ward.RoomRoleWorker_PsychWard
relatedStats	Impressiveness, Cleanliness, Space

Vanilla already ships PrisonCell, PrisonBarracks and Hospital on exactly this rail; the ward is the fourth sibling. The scoring worker, RoomRoleWorker_PsychWard.GetScore, is where the care goes:

score = 0                              if stations == 0  OR  prisonerBeds == 0
score = 1_000_000 × prisonerBeds       otherwise

Two design decisions are baked into that formula:

• Gated on a station. The score is zero unless the room actually contains a Ward_TreatmentStation and at least one prisoner bed. This is deliberate: without the gate, any ordinary prison cell full of prisoner beds would start scoring as a ward and quietly steal the PrisonCell role from vanilla — a compatibility bug dressed up as a feature. Build the station and it's a ward; don't and your cells keep their vanilla role, untouched.
• 1e6, not a hard-coded constant. Vanilla's room roles score in the ~1e5 range. The ward must outscore PrisonCell for the same room or it would read as a cell block. Multiplying by 1,000,000 clears that range without pinning to a magic number a future RimWorld patch might move. (The harness's FakeDLC fixture deliberately adds a greedy competing role at 1e5 × beds, and the ward still wins the room.)

Crucially, it is still a prison cell. Re-labelling the role does not release anyone. Room.isPrisonCell is a cached field set only when the room's shape changes — never derived from the role — so a ward is a prison cell and a ward simultaneously. Containment, food delivery, and prison breaks all keep working. This is the pair of claims the harness holds together: room.roleIsWard = True and room.stillPrisonCellAsWard = True.

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Step 4 — The warden does the work

Ward_WardenPsychiatricCare — the work giver

Field	Value	Why
defName	Ward_WardenPsychiatricCare
giverClass	Ward.WorkGiver_Warden_PsychiatricCare	A new class extending WorkGiver_Warden
workType	Warden	Assigned like any other warden work
verb / gerund	"treat" / "treating"
priorityInType	70	Above chat (60), below feeding — an untreated patient deteriorates, a bored one doesn't
requiredCapacities	Talking, Hearing	A mute or deaf warden can't counsel

The class extends WorkGiver_Warden and its JobOnThing refuses the job unless all of these hold:

1. The pawn is a prisoner of the colony being taken care of (ShouldTakeCareOfPrisoner).
2. IsInteractionEnabled(Ward_PsychiatricCare) — asked, not "is this the mode," because the mode is non-exclusive and the patient may also be set to recruit or forced labour.
3. The patient is awake, not in a mental state, and not downed — counselling someone mid-break or unconscious isn't counselling.
4. The warden can reserve the patient.
5. A Ward_TreatmentStation exists in the patient's own room (not PsychologicallyOutdoors), is reservable, and isn't forbidden. You can't treat someone through a wall from the station two blocks over.

Being a new class is the entire compatibility story (see The Compat Harness for the proof):

• Custom Prisoner Interactions prefixes/postfixes the named vanilla warden givers (_Chat, _Convert, _Enslave, _ReleasePrisoner). It literally cannot see WorkGiver_Warden_PsychiatricCare, so it can't break it.
• Prison Commons postfixes WorkGiver_Warden.ShouldSkip on the base class. Ward's giver inherits that method and doesn't override it, so Ward respects prison-commons areas for free, without Ward knowing Prison Commons exists.

Ward_ProvidePsychiatricCare — the job

Field	Value
defName	Ward_ProvidePsychiatricCare
driverClass	Ward.JobDriver_PsychiatricCare
casualInterruptible	false

Note: the JobDef and the PrisonerInteractionModeDef deliberately have different defNames. [DefOf] binds fields to defs by name, so two defs sharing one name couldn't both be reached from the WardDefOf class.

The driver, JobDriver_PsychiatricCare, walks the warden to the patient and runs a counselling toil:

• Session length: SessionTicks = 1200 — about 20 in-game minutes.
• The wait toil uses activeSkill = Social and shows a progress bar; it fails out if the patient despawns, is forbidden, falls asleep, or enters a mental state partway through.
• On completion it applies treatment, grants the counselled mood memory, fires a DeepTalk social interaction (so the relationship builds and the next session lands harder), and awards 60 Social XP to the warden.

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Step 5 — What treatment buys: Ward_UnderTreatment

Each completed session adds severity to a single hediff. The severity is skill-scaled:

gain = 0.20 + (wardenSocialLevel / 20) × 0.30      →  range 0.20 .. 0.50 per session

Warden Social skill	Severity gained per session
0	0.20
5	0.275
10	0.35
15	0.425
20	0.50

The floor is deliberate: even an unskilled warden buys 0.20 per session. A bad ward is neglect, not zero — a clumsy counsellor is still worth something. Severity is capped at maxSeverity = 1.0.

The hediff

Field	Value	Why
defName	Ward_UnderTreatment
hediffClass	HediffWithComps
label	"under psychiatric care"
isBad	false	It's a good hediff; won't be treated as an injury
scenarioCanAdd	false	Can't be granted by scenario editor
maxSeverity	1.0
Decay	severityPerDay = −0.15	Roughly a week from a full course back to nothing, unattended
Effect	MentalBreakThreshold −0.10 (stage 0)	A negative offset means the pawn breaks at a lower mood — i.e. breaks less often

Decay is the mechanic. Because severity bleeds off at 0.15/day, a patient treated once and then ignored slides right back. Sustained treatment keeps the hediff topped up and the break threshold suppressed; stopping lets it fade. Treatment is a programme, not a one-time cure. (The MentalBreakThreshold −0.10 value is a first-guess, not yet playtested — see the "unplaytested" caveats in the README.)

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Step 6 — The other half: neglect

A ward you don't staff is not a neutral place to keep someone. It is a worse one. Without a cost, "arrest the sad colonist and park them" would be a free way to remove a problem pawn from play. It isn't free.

MapComponent_WardNeglect

Once per in-game day (CheckIntervalTicks = 60000), this component scans every spawned prisoner of the colony. For each prisoner flagged for Ward_PsychiatricCare who does not currently have a Ward_UnderTreatment hediff, it grants the Ward_Neglected thought.

The absence of the treatment hediff is the signal by design: because the hediff decays on its own, its absence means no warden has been near this patient in days — not merely that they aren't being counselled at this exact instant.

The two thoughts

Thought	Mood	Duration	Stack	Meaning
Ward_Counselled	+6	2 days	up to 3	"Someone sat with me and listened. It helped, a little."
Ward_Neglected	−8	3 days	up to 4	"They locked me in here for my own good and then forgot about me."

Neglect is asymmetric — a −8 penalty stacking four deep (−32) badly outweighs three counselling lifts (+18). That's intentional: a neglected patient's mood falls, which raises their break risk, which is exactly the crisis you committed them to avoid. The ward can manufacture the break it was built to prevent. Staff it, or don't build it.

Known rough edge (from the README's "Open" list): neglect currently keys off "no Ward_UnderTreatment hediff." A patient treated once a week technically dodges the neglect thought on the single day the hediff expires. A real last-treated timestamp would be cleaner. Documented, not yet fixed.

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How it stacks with recruitment (and everything else)

Because Ward_PsychiatricCare is non-exclusive, it layers onto whatever else you've set:

You want to…	Set	Result
Just stabilise a broken colonist	Psychiatric care	Wardens counsel; break threshold drops
Talk a captured raider down and recruit them	Psychiatric care + Attempt recruit	Both run — counselling lifts mood while resistance is chipped
Convert and treat	Psychiatric care + convert	Both toggle on
Work a patient and treat them	Psychiatric care + Prison Labor's work mode	Both apply. Working a fragile patient is bleak — and it's your call to make

The last row is the darkest option the mod exposes, and it exposes it on purpose: Ward doesn't forbid working a patient, it just makes the trade-off visible.

Because a ward patient is a genuine vanilla prisoner, everything the wider Institution suite does to prisoners applies to them unchanged — a committed patient can be classified, disciplined, paroled, searched, and can conceal or improvise contraband. Ward writes no integration code for any of that; the patient satisfies "held pawn" and the rest follows. See Home for the suite map and The Compat Harness for how all of it is verified in one running game.

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Quick reference — every Ward def

defName	Type	Class (if any)	Key numbers
Ward_PsychiatricCare	PrisonerInteractionModeDef	—	non-exclusive; listOrder 150
Ward_TreatmentStation	ThingDef	Building	40 steel + 2 medicine; WorkToBuild 1600; MedicineProduction research
Ward_PsychWard	RoomRoleDef	RoomRoleWorker_PsychWard	score = 1e6 × prisonerBeds (station-gated)
Ward_WardenPsychiatricCare	WorkGiverDef	WorkGiver_Warden_PsychiatricCare	priority 70; Talking + Hearing
Ward_ProvidePsychiatricCare	JobDef	JobDriver_PsychiatricCare	1200-tick session; +60 Social XP
Ward_UnderTreatment	HediffDef	HediffWithComps	+0.20–0.50/session; −0.15/day decay; −0.10 break threshold
Ward_Counselled	ThoughtDef	Thought_Memory	+6 mood, 2 days, stack 3
Ward_Neglected	ThoughtDef	Thought_Memory	−8 mood, 3 days, stack 4
—	MapComponent	MapComponent_WardNeglect	daily scan (60000 ticks)

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Part of the Institution suite

Institution: Ward is one mod in the Institution suite of RimWorld 1.6 mods — Ward, plus Institution: Core, Institution: Contraband, Institution: Justice, Institution: Gangs, and Foul Play. Each stands alone; together they interlock. A committed patient rides the same prisoner rail the rest of the suite polices, so a psychiatric ward is also a secure context where a patient can conceal and improvise contraband exactly as a prisoner can.

AI disclosure

This mod was developed with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic), including the compatibility analysis, the def and C# implementation, and the test harness.