institution/Wiki/contraband/Concealment-and-Intake.md

Concealment and Intake

How a hidden item exists without existing, how it gets onto a prisoner in the first place, and how it becomes real again.

This is the spine of the whole mod. Everything else — shivs, tunnels, searches, corruption — is a different way to add to, or remove from, the private stash this page describes.

While it is concealed, there is no item

The single most important rule:

The prison quietly tracks what each pawn is hiding. Concealed contraband is not an item on the map. It is a secret. It is not in the gear tab, there is no icon, and the player is told nothing — because an item you can see in the UI is not contraband, it is inventory, and there would be nothing for a warden to discover and no reason to ever order a search.

A concealed item is only a hidden fact about a pawn: what it is, how far along it is, what material it ended up made of, an optional source it is being whittled from, its tunnel state if it is a pick, and whatever it holds inside. It has no physical object anywhere in the world until one of two things happens:

Moment	What happens
The prisoner uses it	It materialises into their inventory as a real item
A warden finds it	It is deleted; it never becomes an item at all

A corollary the search page leans on hard: an empty search must still cost time. If the search job only ever appeared when there was genuinely something to find, the mere offer of the job would be the discovery. You have to be able to toss a clean cell and come up with nothing.

Where a thing can hide

Every piece of contraband can hide in one of two places, and this decides who can ever find it:

Site	Holds	Found by
On the body	small: a shiv, pills, a phone	searching the pawn
In the cell	bulky: a rifle, a carboy, a crude pick	tossing the room

A warden turning over a prisoner and their cell reaches both. The reason the two are split at all: a constable in Justice's policing layer, frisking a colonist named in a street crime, only reaches what is on the body, so whatever is under their floorboards stays there until somebody has grounds to search the room. The split between "who may search" and "what a search reaches" is deliberate — see Warden Search.

Three kinds of contraband, and no list of items

There is no hardcoded list of contraband item names. At the start of a game, the mod looks at every item in the game and decides, once, whether it counts as contraband, in one of three ways:

1. Explicit. Anything a mod has deliberately marked as contraband. This is the opt-in, and it is how a mod plugs in its own behaviour for how the item is acquired, used, or used to escape.
2. Every drug — recognised automatically.
3. Every weapon that isn't destroyed when dropped — recognised from its mass.

For anything not marked explicitly, the mod fills in how well it hides and where, so a modder never has to:

Kind	Test	Concealability	Hides
Hard drug	drug rated Hard	0.75	on body or in cell
Other drug	any other drug	0.5	on body or in cell
Light weapon	mass ≤ 2.0 kg	0.7	on body or in cell
Heavy weapon	2.0 kg < mass ≤ 10.0 kg	0.35	in cell only
Very heavy weapon	mass > 10.0 kg	—	not contraband (a minigun hides nowhere)

Concealability runs 0 to 1, where 0 = a warden finds it every time and 1 = never; higher is harder to find. Drugs and inferred weapons get no crafting route (you cannot synthesise yayo in a bare cell, and you cannot conjure a rifle) and no special use behaviour — because vanilla already knows what to do with them. A prisoner takes a drug on their own; an armed prisoner is the payload. Getting the item into the cell is the entire problem, and that is all these routes solve.

Nothing here edits another mod's items. It is a one-time reading of each item's own stats. Modded drugs and weapons are covered without ever being named.

The heartbeat

The prison does its ongoing work on a heartbeat. Every 250 ticks it visits every pawn who could be concealing something and does all the ongoing work: intake, tunnel progress, and improvisation. If nothing on the map can be self-made and no escape tools are in play, it does nothing and costs nothing.

Because the heartbeat already visits every held pawn, intake needs no special trigger on the capture event: a pawn who is in custody but has not yet been processed is, by definition, one who was newly taken.

Who counts as a concealer

The set of pawns being tracked is not just prisoners. It is every pawn whose belongings are anyone's business — prisoners, slaves, ward patients, and free colonists:

A free colonist forbidden their drug by a drug policy or an ideoligion is precisely the pawn who keeps a private stash — and vanilla already denies them, with no valve.

Whether anyone may search a given concealer is a separate question with a separate answer (the warden's authority reaches prisoners; a future cop's reaches colonists). Tracking is pawn-agnostic; authority is not.

Intake: the moment of capture

Vanilla never strips a captive on capture — a downed pawn keeps whatever they walked in with, and the warden just hauls them to a cell. Intake is Contraband's answer to that gap, and it runs on the first heartbeat that sees a newly-held pawn:

1. Held only. The pawn must be a person and in custody — prisoner, slave, or ward patient. A free colonist is tracked, but nobody frisks and processes them on the way into a cell, so their carried gear is never intaken.
2. Once. Each captive is processed a single time; a later pass finds them already done and moves on. (It remembers by an ID, so it holds no ghost of a captive who has since died.)
3. Even while downed. Intake runs before the "must be awake" gate. The stash a captive walked in with is hidden the moment they are in custody, not when they wake — everything after intake (whittling, digging) needs them awake, but hiding what is already on you does not.
4. Only what can ride on a body. A thing can be intaken only if it is small enough to hide on the body. A shiv up a sleeve is intaken; a rifle or a suit of armour is too bulky to palm and stays as ordinary strippable gear the player confiscates for free.
5. Per-item disposition. For each concealable thing the captive carries, the mod rolls whether this pawn would hide this item — a base chance of 0.6, then scaled by the pawn's nature × nurture (Core's propensity). The roll is fixed per (pawn, item) — a settled fact, not a fresh coin each tick. The frightened cook surrenders the knife; the disposed lifer palms it, and always would have.

When a pawn does hide an item, the real object is removed from the game and a hidden secret takes its place, preserving what the item was made of and — critically — anything it holds inside.

Preserving contents without understanding them

A concealed vessel is not just "a jar" — it is a jar of something (hooch, piss, a fermented blend), and that something has to survive being hidden and come back when the item is used. Contraband stores what a vessel contains as a single opaque label and has no idea what it means.

When the item is concealed, that label is captured; when the item comes back out, the label is used to pour the contents back into the freshly-made thing. This is the exact seam Foul Play uses to keep a smuggled carboy's contents intact. Without a bridge mod, no content is captured and nothing is lost — a shiv is just a shiv.

Fermentation itself lives in Foul Play, not here. A concealed vessel comes back out fresh and ferments afterward like any other, which suits the theme: fresh-brewed piss is weak, and time is what makes it a weapon. (The prison remembers how long the vessel was hidden, for any bridge mod that wants to restore its aging, but it never acts on that number itself.) See Compatibility.

Redemption: the secret becomes real

When a hidden item is finally used, it turns real:

1. It is made from the material it was whittled from (or the item's default material, if it was never made from a material).
2. Anything it held inside is poured back in.
3. It is placed into the pawn's inventory. If that somehow fails, nothing is dropped and nothing is lost.
4. The secret is cleared from the stash.

The trigger for this is a breakout. When a prisoner enters an escape or assault-the-colony state, they will arm themselves and then use whatever they are hiding — the same moment a base-game prisoner would reach for a combat drug. The one contraband hook Ludeon wrote and then left reading an always-empty inventory is exactly where this slots in. For each thing a pawn is hiding:

• Inert contraband (a drug, a stashed rifle — nothing special to "use"): just materialise it and get out of the way. Vanilla takes the drug on its own; a weapon in inventory is a weapon. But a stashed weapon only comes out for someone who would actually use it — the same person who would not stop to pick a rifle off the floor does not become a fighter because the knife was in their sock, and a pawn incapable of violence never does at all. If they qualify, the weapon moves into their hands; otherwise it stays hidden and they run. See Improvised Weapons.
• Active contraband (something with a special use — e.g. Foul Play's throw-the-carboy): materialise it, then hand off to that item's own use behaviour.

Confiscation, and the door every route comes through

When a warden finds contraband, it is simply removed. It never becomes a real item — the warden found it, and there is nothing to drop on the floor. (This is why searching is not a way for the colony to acquire a prisoner's drugs; it is a way to deny them.)

At the other end, there is one single door that every supply route comes through — intake uses it, a bent warden uses it (Corruption), and a smuggling gangmate (Institution: Gangs) uses it. It hands a prisoner something already finished and hidden, optionally with contents. One door, many keys.

Saving

Concealed contraband is saved with your game — the whole stash, the per-pawn search cooldowns, and who has already been intaken. On load, any secret whose pawn or item no longer exists is quietly dropped: prisoners who died or left take their secrets with them.

Quick reference

Constant	Value	Meaning
Heartbeat	every 250 ticks	poll cadence for intake / tunnels / improvisation
Intake base chance	0.60	per-item, before nature × nurture
Intake gate	held + body-hideable	only pawns in custody, only items small enough to palm
Hard-drug concealability	0.75	inferred from being a hard drug
Other-drug concealability	0.50	inferred
Light-weapon concealability	0.70	mass ≤ 2.0 kg, hides on body
Heavy-weapon concealability	0.35	2.0–10.0 kg, in cell only
Unhideable mass	> 10.0 kg	not contraband

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Part of the Institution suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs, alongside Foul Play and Ward. Each stands alone; together they interlock.