institution/Wiki/contraband/Improvised-Weapons.md

Improvised Weapons

The supply route you cannot deny — because you are obliged to furnish the cell, and the furniture is the raw material.

You have to give a prisoner a bed. RimWorld will nag you until you do. That bed is a frame of wood, or steel, or — if you built a nice prison — plasteel. Give a disposed prisoner a season of unsupervised time with it and they will file a blade off it. The prison's own furnishings are the arsenal, and better furniture is worse.

The shiv

The shiv is a crude stabbing weapon: "A blade filed off a bed frame and wrapped in cloth for a grip. Barely a weapon — but a barely-a-weapon in a cell you thought was empty is a dead guard."

Stat	Value
Tech level	Neolithic
Mass	0.4 kg
Concealability	0.75 (hides very well — it rides on the body)
Hides	on body or in cell
Point (Stab)	power 7, cooldown 1.5 s
Handle (Blunt)	power 5, cooldown 1.6 s
Use	none — an armed prisoner is the payload

Its stats come from its material: it can be made of metal, wood, or stone. A wood shiv is feeble; a plasteel one is vicious. That is the whole point of the harvest mechanic — you never furnished a cell thinking of it as an armoury, but that is what it is.

Who whittles: the disposition gate

Not just "any prisoner." Three things must all be true:

1. Held. The pawn is a prisoner, slave, or ward patient. Free colonists do not whittle shivs in the commons — yet (the concealment layer already tracks them; only the authority to act on them is missing).
2. Disposed. A base chance of 0.10, scaled by Core's nature × nurture. It is a fixed fact about the pawn — the mistreated, high-propensity lifer chews his bed apart; the frightened cook never does, and never would have, no matter how many times you reload.
3. Material in reach. There is a workable source (see below).

The base is deliberately low. Most prisoners are not making weapons. When one is, that is a fact about who they are and how you keep them, and the tell it leaves is meant to point you at exactly that pawn.

The source: what counts as raw material

The prisoner looks for the nearest reachable, damageable, usefully-made piece of furniture:

• Their own assigned bed first — it is right there in the cell.
• Otherwise the closest artificial building within 12 tiles that qualifies.

To be a workable source, a piece of furniture must be:

Requirement	Why
Made of a material	you cannot whittle a blade out of nothing
Damageable	it has to take a beating
Made of metal, wood, or stone	cloth and leather cannot be filed into a blade
Reachable, even through danger	they have to get to it

This is also the counter-play. A cell furnished only in cloth and hydroponics offers nothing to file. A steel bed offers a steel shiv. What you build the cell out of decides whether it can become a weapon, and how nasty that weapon is.

Harvest by damage: the tell is the mechanic

Each heartbeat, a whittling prisoner chips at the source — roughly 1.2% of its max hit points per worked poll, as blunt damage.

The damage is not a side effect — it is the point. A gnawed bed is probable cause. The same tick that advances the shiv damages the furniture, and that visible wear is what Warden Search reads to send a guard to the right prisoner first: a badly damaged bed shoots a prisoner to the top of the search priority list. Whittling a shiv is loud, in the only sense that matters — it leaves a mark you can act on.

Because the source takes real damage, a determined prisoner can reduce a piece of furniture to wreckage and move on to the next: if the source is destroyed before the shiv is finished, they look for another, and if there is none, the route stalls (progress is kept, not lost). A materially poor cell is a real defence — the prisoner cannot make progress with nothing to file.

How long, and the material it becomes

A shiv takes roughly 1.5 unsupervised days of active work, jittered ±25% each poll so no two shivs finish on the same schedule.

When it is finished, it happens silently — the player is told nothing. Two things happen:

• Material carry-through. The shiv is made of whatever the source was made of. A wood bed yields a wood shiv, a plasteel bunk a plasteel one, and its combat stats follow.
• The record. The pawn's tally of contraband made ticks up (in Core's record). That number feeds the warden's future suspicion of this pawn and, if you run Institution: Justice, their security classification.

The shiv comes out in a break — and who reaches for it

A hidden shiv is inert until a breakout. When a prisoner enters an escape or assault-the-colony state, they will use what they are hiding — but a weapon only comes out for someone who would actually use it. That is the same test that decides whether an escapee even bothers to pick a weapon off the floor.

This matters because vanilla escapees never arm themselves at all. The base game has the behaviour for opportunistically grabbing a weapon, and simply leaves it out of the escape flow, so a base-game prisoner walks out unarmed, always. Arming is genuinely new behaviour, so it is kept rare enough that when it happens you recognise who did it.

Would this pawn arm itself?

First a hard gate: a pawn who is incapable of violence never arms, ever — a pacifist who picks up a rifle is not a rare event, it is a bug. Otherwise the chance is the pawn's disposition (who they are, fixed) times their circumstance (what is happening right now), capped at 0.85 and settled once per pawn as a fixed fact.

Disposition — who they are, fixed, nothing about today changes it. A base of 0.10, scaled by trait and skill:

Factor	Value
Bloodlust	×2.5 (highest applicable trait only — not a stack)
Psychopath	×2.0
Brawler	×1.8
Wimp	×0.3
Kind	×0.4
skill	scales with their best of Shooting or Melee → range 0.5 .. 2.0

Being captured in a raid does not make someone a fighter — plenty of prisoners are cooks and conscripts. A weapon is only worth grabbing if you know what to do with it, hence the skill term.

Circumstance — what is happening right now, live:

Condition	Effect	Reasoning
Health < 50%	×0.4	badly hurt people run or crawl; they don't seek a fight
≥ 2 other prisoners escaping within 12 tiles	×2.0	a crowd emboldens; one man slips out, six men riot
An armed colonist within 20 tiles	×1.8	now a weapon is not bravado, it's the plan

Which weapon they reach for

An arming escapee prefers, in order:

1. Their own dropped weapon — the gun they carried when you downed them, still lying where it fell within 45 tiles. The base game remembers where it fell and then never uses that for prisoners. "A man walking back to the spot where his own rifle fell is a better story than a man rummaging through your stockpile." A prisoner does not care that you marked it forbidden.
2. Anything to hand within 18 tiles — but only for a pawn over a higher disposition floor (0.35). Rummaging a stockpile is a further step than grabbing your own gun back.

A concealed shiv slots into this the natural way: a prisoner who has been sitting on a blade and who is the sort to use it does not leave it in his pocket — it goes straight into his hand. The pawn who would not arm keeps it hidden and runs — and the shiv survives to be found in a later search, or used in a later break.

Not only shivs: the crude pick

The same whittling behaviour makes the crude pick — filed off furniture exactly the same way, with the same disposition gate and the same damage tell — but its purpose is a tunnel rather than a fight. See Tunnels.

Quick reference

Constant	Value	Meaning
Improvise base chance	0.10	before nature × nurture; fixed per pawn
Damage per worked poll	~1.2% of source max HP	blunt; the visible tell
Source search radius	12 tiles	own bed first, then nearest workable furniture
Time to finish a shiv	~1.5 active days	jittered ±25% per poll
Workable material	metal / wood / stone	cloth and leather cannot be whittled
Shiv concealability	0.75	hard to find on the body
Arm chance cap	0.85	after disposition × circumstance
Own-weapon reach	45 tiles	their dropped weapon
Any-weapon reach	18 tiles	scavenge floor 0.35 disposition

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