institution/Wiki/contraband/Warden-Search.md

Warden Search

The sixteenth warden job vanilla never wrote. A guard turns the cell over, and might find nothing — which is exactly why it has to cost.

The warden can chat, convert, feed, execute, enslave, release, suppress, and eleven other things. Searching a prisoner is not one of them, and no such job exists anywhere in the base game. Contraband adds it as a new warden job, not a change to an existing one, and builds it around a single hard rule: the search must be able to come up empty.

Authority vs. act

The design splits one job into two halves:

Half	Question it answers	Notes
The search assignment	Who may be searched?	it is ordinary warden work — a warden already has the run of the prison, so no new authority is invented
The search act	What is a search?	walk to the pawn, turn them over, resolve

The assignment is the authority. The act is just the act.

Why bother splitting them? Because the enforcement layer is meant to grow. A future Institution: Police module adds a second authority — a cop who may stop and frisk a free colonist — reusing the same act with a narrower reach (a street frisk gets what is on the body, not what is under the floorboards). That module is an addition, not a rewrite, precisely because "who may search" and "what a search reaches" were never welded together.

Who gets searched

The search is warden work, and it sits at a deliberate spot in the warden's priorities:

Property	Value	Why
Work type	Warden	it is warden work
Priority within warden work	below feeding	a starving prisoner matters more than a hidden shiv
Capacities needed	Manipulation, Sight	you search with your hands and eyes
Ranked by suspicion	yes	pick the right prisoner, not the nearest

That last one — ranking by suspicion rather than distance — is what lets a gnawed bed and a thick record send the warden to the right prisoner first.

A search is offered only if all of these hold: the warden should be looking after this prisoner, the per-prisoner cooldown is up, the prisoner is awake, not downed, and not in a mental state, and the warden can reach them.

Note what is not checked:

Whether the prisoner is actually hiding anything. The warden does not know. Nobody knows until the cell is turned over. If the job were only offered when there was something to find, the mere appearance of the job would BE the discovery, and searching would stop being a gamble the player pays for in warden-hours. An empty search has to be possible, and has to cost.

The cooldown

The same prisoner cannot be turned over more than once per day (60,000 ticks). You cannot brute-force a well-hidden shiv by re-searching the same prisoner ten times in an hour. Every search is one shot, and then that prisoner is off the list for a day.

Priority: the search reads the tells

Everyone is worth a routine toss; the tells push a prisoner up the queue. Priority is built up like this:

• Base 4 — a routine toss for every prisoner.
• Up to +12 for a gnawed bed — scaled by how damaged their owned bed is. A badly damaged bed shoots to the top.
• Up to +8 for their record — prior catches (×2 each), contraband made in the past (×0.5 each), and foiled escape attempts (×3 each, the heaviest term), capped at +8 so the record cannot completely swamp fresh probable cause.

Term	Weight	Meaning
Base	4	a routine toss for every prisoner
Gnawed bed	up to +12	how far below full HP their owned bed sits
Times caught	×2	already caught with contraband before
Contraband made	×0.5	has finished contraband in the past
Escape attempts	×3	the heaviest term — a known tunneller is checked first, every time
(record cap)	+8 max	the record cannot completely swamp fresh probable cause

The record is only read here, never created. The base of 4 for everyone is not an accident — innocent prisoners still get frisked, because the search must be able to come up empty or its mere offer would be the discovery.

Worked example. A prisoner whose bed sits at 40% HP (so 60% missing), with 2 prior catches and 1 foiled tunnel:

4 + (12 × 0.6) + min(8, 2×2 + 1×3) = 4 + 7.2 + 7 = 18.2

versus 4 for a clean prisoner with an intact bed. The warden walks past the quiet one and goes straight for the one who has been busy. This closes the loop Improvised Weapons opens: whittling a shiv chews the bed, the damage is probable cause, and the warden's suspicion — not the player's eye — sends them to search.

The act: what a search does

The searcher walks to the subject, spends a 900-tick turn with a progress bar, then resolves. Resolution always does two things, hit or miss:

1. Starts the daily cooldown on that prisoner.
2. Ticks up how many times this pawn has been searched — "classification and the guard's future suspicion read how often this pawn has been turned over."

Then it goes through everything the subject is hiding that this search can reach (a full warden search reaches both the body and the cell; a narrower future street-frisk reaches only the body). If nothing is reachable, the job ends here — the time was still spent, and the player is told nothing.

Find math, per hidden item

For each reachable secret, the chance to find it is built like this:

• Start from a base of 0.35, plus 0.03 for each level of the warden's Social skill.
• Scale by how concealable the item is: the factor pivots at concealability 0.5. A drug at 0.5 is average (×1.0), a shiv at 0.75 is halved (×0.5), a heavy weapon at 0.35 is boosted (×1.3).
• If the item is a tunnel in progress, add its extra find chance (up to +0.40 for a nearly finished shaft), and the ceiling rises.
• Multiply the whole thing by the warden's Diligence — a lax, kind, or miserable guard scales it down.
• Before the find roll, a bent warden gets a flat chance to look the other way (their Corruption × 0.6) even on an item they would otherwise have found.
• The chance is clamped to between 0.02 and 0.95 (0.98 for a tunnel).

Reading it in plain terms:

• Skill raises the ceiling; concealability lowers it. Each level of the warden's Social skill adds a little; a well-hidden item takes a lot of it back.
• A good warden still misses a well-hidden shiv more often than not. A level-8 Social warden searching for a 0.75-concealability shiv is already well under a coin-flip before Diligence scales it down further.
• A tunnel is a different story. The pick hides at 0.5, but a nearly-finished shaft adds up to +0.40 and the cap rises to 0.98 — the deeper the dig, the harder it is to miss. A routine cell toss catches a dig in progress.
• The warden's own thoroughness and price enter last: Diligence multiplies the whole chance down for a lax, kind, or miserable guard, and Corruption gives a bent guard a flat chance to look the other way even on an item they would otherwise have found. Both are on the Corruption page.

On a find

• The item is confiscated — it never becomes a real object, nothing drops on the floor.
• The prisoner's times-caught tally ticks up (raising future suspicion, feeding classification).
• If it was a tunnel, their escape-attempt tally ticks up too — a foiled dig counts the same as one that ran.

The player gets a message — "{warden} searched {prisoner} and found hidden {item}", or the tunnel variant. If nothing is found the player is told nothing: they do not learn there was something, only that the warden's time was spent.

Writing back to the record

Every outcome updates Core's criminal record, which is what makes the search a loop rather than a one-off dice roll:

Tally	Updated when	Read by
Times searched	every search, hit or miss	priority, suspicion, classification
Times caught	a find	priority (×2), classification
Escape attempts	a foiled tunnel	priority (×3, heaviest), classification

If you run Institution: Justice, those same tallies drive a prisoner's security classification and feed the deterrence signal — a prison that catches contraband becomes a prison that classifies its troublemakers correctly and deters the next attempt. If you run Contraband alone, the tallies still route the warden. See Compatibility.

Quick reference

Constant	Value	Meaning
Base find chance	0.35	before skill and concealability
Per Social level	+0.03	skill raises the ceiling
Find chance clamp	0.02 .. 0.95	(0.98 for a tunnel)
Search duration	900 ticks	one turn, hit or miss
Search cooldown	60,000 ticks (1 day)	per prisoner
Priority base	4	every prisoner is worth a routine toss
Gnawed-bed weight	up to +12	how far below full HP their bed sits
Record weight	up to +8	caught ×2 + made ×0.5 + escapes ×3
Default reach	body + cell	narrowed by a future street-frisk

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