222 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
222 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
# 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.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## 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 builds up their
|
||
**treatment**, which **lowers their mental-break threshold** so they break less often. That progress
|
||
**fades** over about a week if nobody keeps attending, so it has to be sustained. Counselling also
|
||
gives the patient a small mood lift. Neglect a committed patient — leave them with no ongoing
|
||
treatment — and once a day they pick up a **neglected** 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.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## Step 1 — Becoming a ward patient
|
||
|
||
Commitment reuses vanilla's arrest → prisoner transition. You don't get a new pawn state; you take a
|
||
prisoner (arrest your own colonist, or a captured raider) and then switch on a new interaction mode.
|
||
|
||
### Psychiatric care — the interaction mode
|
||
|
||
In the prisoner's interaction dropdown you'll find a new option, **psychiatric care**, sitting between
|
||
*Reduce resistance* and *Release*. A few things make it behave the way it does:
|
||
|
||
- **It stacks.** Unlike recruit / convert / enslave / release / execute — which are one-at-a-time
|
||
choices — psychiatric care is a toggle that layers *on top* of whatever else you've picked, the
|
||
same way vanilla's *Bloodfeed* and *Study* toggles do. So a patient can be set to **recruit AND
|
||
psychiatric care at once**: you counsel a sad captured colonist toward stability while also chipping
|
||
at their resistance.
|
||
- **You can flag a downed or sleeping patient.** Setting the mode doesn't require them to be awake —
|
||
the warden decides when to actually treat.
|
||
- **Not for wild men**, and it works fine **without Ideology's ideoligion system**.
|
||
|
||
Because the mode stacks, it also lets Ward coexist cleanly with work-your-prisoners mods like *Prison
|
||
Labor* — see **Compatibility**.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## 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 penalty (Step 6).
|
||
|
||
### The treatment station — 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."*
|
||
|
||
| What | Value |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| Cost | **40 Steel + 2 medicine** — deliberately cheap |
|
||
| Build time | Quick |
|
||
| Research needed | **Medicine Production** — the one gate |
|
||
| Size | A two-tile desk; pawns squeeze past it, so it doesn't wall off a cell |
|
||
| Notes | It burns |
|
||
|
||
**It's cheap on purpose.** The real cost of running a ward is not the 40 steel. It's 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."
|
||
|
||
And the locked cabinet isn't only flavour: a patient sliding toward a break faster than counselling
|
||
can steady them is the moment a **sedative** earns its keep — something to calm a patient who's close
|
||
to going over the edge.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## 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**. Vanilla already has Prison Cell, Prison Barracks and
|
||
Hospital; the ward is the fourth sibling. Two things are worth knowing:
|
||
|
||
- **It's gated on the station.** A room only reads as a ward if it actually contains a treatment
|
||
station *and* at least one prisoner bed. Without that, an ordinary prison cell full of beds keeps
|
||
its normal Prison Cell role, untouched. Build the station and it's a ward; don't and nothing
|
||
changes.
|
||
- **It's still a prison cell.** Re-labelling the role does not release anyone. A ward is a prison cell
|
||
*and* a ward at the same time, so containment, food delivery, and prison breaks all keep working.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## Step 4 — The warden does the work
|
||
|
||
Counselling is **warden work**. Assign it the way you assign any warden task, and a warden will walk
|
||
over and treat the patient. A few rules govern when a session can start:
|
||
|
||
- The warden needs to be able to **talk and hear** — a mute or deaf warden can't counsel.
|
||
- The patient must be **awake, not downed, and not mid-break** — you can't counsel someone who's
|
||
unconscious or already spiralling.
|
||
- There must be a **treatment station in the patient's own room** (not out in the open). You can't
|
||
treat someone through a wall from a station two cells over.
|
||
- Its priority sits **above chatting** but **below feeding** — an untreated patient deteriorates, a
|
||
bored one doesn't — so wardens won't skip meals to run a session.
|
||
|
||
### A session
|
||
|
||
- **Length:** about **20 in-game minutes**, with a progress bar while it runs.
|
||
- It **fails out** if the patient despawns, is forbidden, falls asleep, or breaks partway through.
|
||
- On completion it applies the treatment, gives the patient a "counselled" mood memory, runs a
|
||
deep-talk conversation (so the relationship builds and the *next* session lands harder), and awards
|
||
the warden **60 Social XP**.
|
||
|
||
Because psychiatric care is its own separate warden job rather than a rewrite of vanilla's, it doesn't
|
||
collide with mods that modify the built-in warden interactions — again, **Compatibility**.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## Step 5 — What treatment buys
|
||
|
||
Each completed session adds to the patient's treatment, and how much depends on the warden's **Social
|
||
skill**:
|
||
|
||
| Warden Social skill | Treatment 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** a session. A bad ward is *neglect*,
|
||
not *zero* — a clumsy counsellor is still worth something. Treatment tops out at **1.0**, a full
|
||
course.
|
||
|
||
**What it does:** while treatment is active it **lowers the patient's mental-break threshold by
|
||
0.10** — a lower threshold means they break at a worse mood, i.e. **break less often**.
|
||
|
||
**Decay is the mechanic.** Treatment bleeds off at **0.15 per day**, so a full course fades back to
|
||
nothing in **about a week** if nobody keeps attending. A patient treated once and then ignored slides
|
||
right back. Sustained counselling keeps it topped up and the break threshold suppressed; stopping lets
|
||
it fade. Treatment is a *programme*, not a one-time cure.
|
||
|
||
> The −0.10 break-threshold figure is a first pass and not yet heavily playtested — expect it to be
|
||
> tuned.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## Step 6 — The other half: neglect
|
||
|
||
A ward you don't staff is not a neutral place to keep someone. It's 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.
|
||
|
||
**Once per in-game day**, Ward checks every prisoner flagged for psychiatric care. Any patient who
|
||
isn't currently under treatment — meaning no warden has been near them in days — picks up a
|
||
**neglected** mood penalty. (The check keys off active treatment, and since treatment decays on its
|
||
own, its absence is the tell that the patient has genuinely been left alone, not merely that nobody
|
||
happens to be counselling them this exact minute.)
|
||
|
||
### The two moods
|
||
|
||
| Mood | Value | Duration | Stacks to | Meaning |
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||
| **Counselled** | **+6** | 2 days | 3 | "Someone sat with me and listened. It helped, a little." |
|
||
| **Neglected** | **−8** | 3 days | 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. A ward can *manufacture* the break it was
|
||
built to prevent. Staff it, or don't build it.
|
||
|
||
> **Known rough edge:** neglect keys off "not currently under treatment," so a patient treated once a
|
||
> week can technically dodge the penalty on the single day their treatment runs out. It's a documented
|
||
> quirk, not yet smoothed.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## How it stacks with recruitment (and everything else)
|
||
|
||
Because psychiatric care is a non-exclusive toggle, 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 |
|
||
|
||
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. See **Home** for the suite map and **Compatibility**
|
||
for how Ward stays out of other mods' way.
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## Quick reference — the numbers
|
||
|
||
| Thing | Number |
|
||
|---|---|
|
||
| Treatment station cost | 40 steel + 2 medicine; needs Medicine Production research |
|
||
| Counselling session | ~20 in-game minutes |
|
||
| Treatment per session | 0.20 (unskilled) → 0.50 (Social 20) |
|
||
| Treatment cap | 1.0 (a full course) |
|
||
| Treatment decay | −0.15/day (~a week from full to nothing) |
|
||
| Break-threshold effect | −0.10 while treated (breaks less often) |
|
||
| Counselled mood | +6, 2 days, stacks to 3 |
|
||
| Neglected mood | −8, 3 days, stacks to 4 |
|
||
| Neglect check | once per in-game day |
|
||
| Warden reward | 60 Social XP per session |
|
||
|
||
---
|
||
|
||
## 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.
|