5.8 KiB
Corruption
A search is only as thorough as the warden running it, and a warden is a person with their own diligence and their own price.
The counter to contraband is the warden search — but a search is not a machine. It is a human being with traits and a mood, and Contraband models that human being on two axes, both read off the same vanilla traits, mood, and relationships — no new stat to maintain:
| Axis | Question | Effect on a search |
|---|---|---|
| Diligence | How hard do they look? | multiplies the find chance |
| Corruption | How bent are they? | a flat chance to look away — and a route into the prison |
This is "what turns 'the game vs the player' into 'the player's own guards, each with an angle.'" The prisoner you can control. The guard you assigned to watch them, you cannot.
Diligence — how hard they look
Diligence runs 0 to 1 and multiplies the whole find chance. A lax or miserable warden misses things a dutiful one would turn up. It starts from a baseline of 0.55 and moves with traits and mood:
| Trait / factor | Δ Diligence | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Industrious | +0.1 per degree | a hard worker searches hard |
| Lazy | −0.1 per degree | a lazy one frisks gently |
| Abrasive | +0.15 | happy to toss a cell |
| Psychopath | +0.10 | thoroughness without squeamishness |
| Kind | −0.20 | reluctant to be rough |
| Mood | ×0.6 (miserable) .. ×1.1 (content) | morale is thoroughness |
Corruption — their price
Corruption also runs 0 to 1. In a search, a bent warden gets a flat chance to look away on each item they would otherwise have a shot at finding — that chance is their Corruption × 0.6, rolled per hidden item before the find roll. Corruption starts from a baseline of 0.04 (most guards are mostly honest) and moves with traits and mood:
| Trait / factor | Δ Corruption | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Greedy | +0.40 | the classic bent guard — everyone has a number |
| Kind | +0.15 | looks the other way out of sympathy, not money |
| Ascetic | −0.10 | wants nothing, so cannot be bought |
| Abrasive | −0.05 | too surly to do anyone a favour |
| Mood | ×1.6 (miserable) .. ×0.7 (content) | a happy guard is harder to tempt |
The Kind warden is a double liability
Read the two tables together and one trait jumps out. Kind lowers Diligence (−0.20) and raises Corruption (+0.15). The gentle guard both frisks softly and bends the rules out of pity — the worst warden you can put on a contraband detail, and the least obvious one, because "kind" reads as a virtue everywhere else in the game. Meanwhile mood cuts the same way on both axes: a miserable warden looks less hard and is more temptable. A depressed guard is a sieve at both ends.
Worked examples
Find chance for a hidden item is roughly the base find chance × Diligence, with a separate look-away chance (Corruption × 0.6) to ignore it entirely. Assume a mid-skill warden whose raw find chance on a shiv is around 0.30 before disposition:
| Warden | Diligence | Corruption | Look-away/item | Net on a 0.30 shiv |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neutral, content | ~0.61 | ~0.03 | ~2% | thorough-ish: ~0.18 find |
| Abrasive + Psychopath, content | ~0.88 | ~0.02 | ~1% | a nightmare for prisoners: ~0.26 find |
| Greedy, content | ~0.61 | ~0.31 | ~18% | looks capable, pockets bribes |
| Greedy, miserable | ~0.37 | ~0.62 | ~37% | ignores contraband over a third of the time |
| Kind + miserable | ~0.25 | ~0.27 | ~16% | a sieve at both ends: ~0.07 find |
(Numbers rounded; mood taken as content ≈ 100% or miserable ≈ 20%.) The takeaway is that who you assign to search matters as much as whether you search at all. A greedy, miserable warden is not a guard — he is a supply line you are paying to pretend otherwise.
The bent warden as a supply route in
Corruption is not only "looks away." The other half is reaching in — a bent guard who slips a prisoner contraband through the very same door a smuggler or a gangmate uses. Only what can ride on a body gets slipped across a handshake. Whether and when a guard does this is gated on that guard's Corruption.
In Contraband on its own, this "smuggle in" ability exists but is not yet wired to an in-game trigger. It is the seam Institution: Gangs drives when a gang's outside members pay a bent warden to make a delivery, and the thing a planned secure-zone checkpoint that frisks guards is meant to catch. Search-side corruption (looking away) is fully live today; reach-in corruption is the hook the rest of the suite plugs into. See Compatibility.
How to play with it
- Vet your wardens. A Greedy or Kind pawn on prison duty is a liability the trait tooltip won't warn you about. Ascetic and Industrious make the best searchers; Psychopath and Abrasive are brutally effective if you can stomach them.
- Watch mood. A prison-duty warden in a slump is failing at both jobs — searching and not smuggling. Keep your guards content or rotate them out.
- Redundancy beats brilliance. Because each search is one shot per prisoner per day and even a good warden misses a well-hidden shiv, a second diligent warden over time matters more than a single perfect search.
Quick reference
| Constant | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Diligence baseline | 0.55 | before traits and mood |
| Corruption baseline | 0.04 | most guards are mostly honest |
| Diligence mood scale | ×0.6 .. ×1.1 | miserable → content |
| Corruption mood scale | ×1.6 .. ×0.7 | miserable → content |
| Look-away multiplier | ×0.6 | applied to Corruption, per item |
| Smuggle payload | body-hideable contraband only | what fits in a handshake |
Part of the Institution suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs, alongside Foul Play and Ward. Each stands alone; together they interlock.