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Secured Context — the kind of hold a pawn is under
The suite has a rule that looks small and is load-bearing: nothing keys off "is this a prisoner." It keys off the kind of hold a pawn is under. That one step of indirection is why a ward patient, a slave, and (later) anyone inside a secure zone get the same concealment, search, schedule, and needs machinery for free, without any feature hard-coding a single pawn status.
A pawn's secured context boils down to one of three kinds and the question "who, if anyone, may search them." Everything downstream reads that, so a new feature works across every kind of hold the day it's written, and a new kind of hold works across every existing feature the day it's added.
The three kinds
| Kind | Who it is | May search them | Can conceal? | Held against their will? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | a free colonist | no one — until a secure-area or policing layer grants standing | yes — they can hoard | no |
| Prisoner | a prisoner of the colony | the warden | yes | yes |
| Slave | a slave (Ideology DLC) | the overseer | yes | yes |
Two subtleties fall out of this table:
- Free colonists can still conceal. A free colonist can hoard contraband, but no one has standing to search them until a secure-area or policing layer grants it. Freedom isn't innocence — it's only the absence of an authority allowed to check.
- Prisoner and Slave differ only in who holds the keys. Both are "held"; the search authority is the warden for one and the overseer for the other. Features that only care "is someone entitled to search this pawn" read whether the pawn is held and never branch on which.
Two questions, two axes
The context answers two different questions, and picking the right one is the whole skill of using it:
| Question | True for | Ask it when you care about… |
|---|---|---|
| Is this pawn held? | Prisoner, Slave | custody — who is under the colony's control, who can be disciplined, whose cell can be searched |
| Could this pawn be hiding something? | Free, Prisoner, Slave (any real pawn) | contraband — who could be hiding something, regardless of status |
For example, Propensity's Nurture uses held in its "held & unhappy compounds" lever — it only wants to pile the ×1.4 penalty on a pawn the colony actually holds and mistreats, not on a grumpy free colonist. A warden-search feature, by contrast, cares who could be hiding something to decide who's even worth checking, and then checks standing to decide whether it's allowed to.
How a pawn gets classified
Any pawn resolves to one context, or to nothing at all if the suite doesn't model them:
- Animals, mechs, and the dead are simply not the suite's business — they resolve to nothing, and every sweep and check skips them without a special case.
- A pawn is tested as prisoner first, then slave, then free colonist. So a pawn who is somehow both a colonist and imprisoned is classified by their hold first.
Keeping "nothing at all" separate from "a free pawn we track" is deliberate: there's a real difference between "a free pawn we watch" and "a pawn we don't model at all," and collapsing them would let non-colony pawns leak into colony machinery. A single sweep can walk every prisoner, slave, and colonist on a map in one pass, skipping everything that resolves to nothing.
Why not just "prisoner"?
This is the design decision the whole page exists to justify. If every feature checked "is this pawn a prisoner" directly, then:
- adding slaves to a feature would mean revisiting every feature;
- adding a ward patient mode would mean revisiting every feature;
- adding a future secure-zone concept would mean revisiting every feature.
By routing all of them through one question — what kind of hold is this? — a new kind of hold is added once, and every existing feature inherits it. The concealment, search, and needs machinery never has to learn what a slave is; it only ever asked whether the pawn is held and whether they could conceal.
The deliberately-absent Ward kind
There's no separate "ward patient" kind, and its absence is intentional. A committed ward patient is a prisoner in the game's own sense — Institution: Ward builds its committed-patient mode on top of vanilla's prisoner system — so such a pawn already counts as Prisoner here, with no special case and no dependency from Core (or Contraband) onto Ward. Every feature treats a ward patient exactly as it treats any prisoner. The right amount of new work to support Ward's hold semantics was zero, and that's the payoff of keying off the kind of hold instead of the label.
Part of the Institution suite.