5.6 KiB
Criminal Record — the history of fact
If Propensity is suspicion — "this pawn seems dangerous" — the criminal record is fact: "this pawn has escaped twice and shanked a guard." The two are deliberately different kinds of thing. Propensity is computed fresh from who a pawn is and how they're treated; a record is a durable log of what they've actually done, written once when it happens and read forever after.
There is exactly one criminal record per pawn, and the whole suite shares it. Classification grades on it, parole gates on it, the deterrence loop reacts to it, and reintegration remembers it. Because everyone reads the same record, no two parts of the suite can disagree about a pawn's past.
What a record remembers
A record is a small set of counters plus two special marks. Core provides the record and keeps it safe; the individual events are logged by whichever mod they happen in.
| What it tracks | Starts at | Meaning | Tracked by | Used by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crimes committed | 0 | count of committed crimes | Justice (and gang fights) | classification risk score, deterrence |
| Escape attempts | 0 | breakout attempts | Contraband | classification risk score |
| Contraband made | 0 | items brewed / whittled | Contraband | classification risk score |
| Times searched | 0 | how often searched | Contraband (warden search) | search prioritisation |
| Times caught | 0 | searches that found something | Contraband (warden search) | classification risk score |
| Last crime | never | when the most recent crime happened | Justice | recency / cooldown checks |
| Reform | 0 | rehabilitation score (see below) | Justice (discipline, parole) | Propensity's Nurture, parole gate, reintegration |
| Pardoned | no | granted a clean slate after genuine reform | Justice (on release) | parole gate, reintegration |
"Last crime" starts at never — a distinct value from "at the very first moment of the game." Everything else starts at zero / no.
Who logs what. Core is the vault, not the clerk. It hands out records and keeps them; the actual "a crime just happened, add one" logging lives in the mod where the event occurs. The columns above name which mod does that — Core itself only holds the fields.
Reform — the pivot of the suite
Most of a record is inert tallies. Reform is the one entry that feeds back into behaviour, and it's worth its own section. It's raised by good treatment and good conduct, decays without either, and can be driven negative by harsh punishment. A record is where a sentence's outcome is stored, and three systems lean on that one number:
- Propensity's Nurture scales a pawn's disposition by their reform score — so a genuinely rehabilitated pawn (reform above 0) is calmer for good, and a prisonized one (reform below 0) is inflamed for good. This is how institutionalization and recidivism enter the game without a separate mechanic bolted on.
- Parole (Justice) gates release on it: a pawn is only releasable once reform clears a threshold. It's the number that says "this one is ready."
- Reintegration reads it to decide when a clean slate is earned — which is what the pardoned mark records.
The negative range isn't a bug — it's the "hardened" end of the spectrum, and Nurture is written to expect it.
Pardoned and blank records
The pardoned mark flips on exactly once, after genuine reform, so reintegration can grant a clean slate without erasing the history that earned it — the counters stay, but the pawn is marked forgiven.
A record counts as blank when nothing meaningful has ever been written to it: no crimes, no escape attempts, no contraband, never caught, reform still 0, not pardoned. Note what blankness ignores: times searched and the last-crime time aren't part of the test. A pawn who was searched and found clean — searched but never caught, never a crime — still counts as blank. That's intentional: being checked is not a mark against you, only being found is.
Records are created only when needed
Records are made lazily. A pawn only gets a record the first time something is actually written to it — a crime, a search that found something, a reform change. Simply reading a pawn's disposition never creates one.
That distinction matters because Propensity's Nurture reads a pawn's reform score constantly, on every pawn on the map, as part of judging their mood. If merely checking disposition created a record, every mood check would stamp a criminal file onto every innocent pawn on the map. Because reading only peeks — and tolerates a pawn having no record at all — the innocent stay off the books.
The rule the whole suite follows: something happened → a record is created and written; just looking → no record is created.
Persistence
Records save with your game and reload with it, and there's exactly one shared store for the whole colony — no mod keeps its own private copy, which is what keeps them all agreeing with each other.
On load, that store cleans itself up. Three kinds of record get dropped:
- Records of pawns who are gone — dead or removed. They take their records with them.
- Corrupt entries — a guard against a broken save.
- Blank records — anything still blank. There's no reason to keep a file that records nothing.
The upshot: records are cheap and self-cleaning. Anything that never got a real mark written to it simply evaporates on the next load, so the save never bloats with one empty file per pawn ever glanced at.
Part of the Institution suite.