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The Treatment Engine — shared rehabilitation
The shared maths behind every "fix a held pawn over time" system in the suite.
Core carries one more thing every rehabilitation-style system needs and none should own alone: the maths of a treatment programme. Sustained attention in a secured facility reduces a marked condition, the room's quality helps or hurts, and once there's nothing left to reduce a recovery track builds toward a state where the pawn can be discharged.
It exists for the same reason the propensity engine does. Two systems want the identical loop pointed at different things — Ward treats the mental illness that got a pawn committed; Justice rehabilitates the disposition that got one imprisoned — and without a shared engine each would grow its own copy and drift apart. Core owns only the maths. Which interaction enrols a pawn, which conditions and moods carry the flavour, which jobs run the sessions, and which alert fires on discharge all live in the mod using it.
The engine does something only when there's a real condition to work through, and does nothing otherwise. A colony that never marks anything treatable never notices it exists.
How treatment plays out
A condition has to be marked treatable before a programme can touch it (Ward marks mental illness this way; a modder or player can mark anything — see the Modder API page). Once a condition is marked, treatment runs in sessions:
- Each completed session removes a slice of the condition's severity. The base amount is 0.12 severity per session, before it's scaled by the treating pawn's skill, the facility's quality, and how much of the session that patient actually gets. When a condition's severity reaches zero it's gone.
- A full course is several sessions by design. The programme has to be sustained — you can't fix a pawn in a single visit.
- Once nothing is left to treat, continued care builds a recovery track from 0 toward 1 (discharge-ready). Fix the illness first, then stabilise.
- The recovery track decays on its own if you stop. Recovery you stop maintaining slips back down — which is what makes the whole thing a loop you keep up, not a one-time unlock.
The numbers
Facility quality
The room the treatment happens in scales every session between 0.5× (grim) and 1.5× (excellent):
| Room | Factor |
|---|---|
| Bare (0 impressiveness) | 0.60 |
| Decent (~48 impressiveness) | 1.00 |
| Impressive (108+ impressiveness) | 1.50 (capped) |
| Outdoors / no room | 0.75 |
The limits are deliberate: a grim, filthy, cramped facility heals worse and a calm clean one better, but a palace can't trivialise the work the programme costs (1.5× ceiling), and even treating a pawn out in the open is a poor makeshift room (0.75×), not a hard zero.
Reducing a condition
Each marked condition drops by 0.12 × the session's combined strength per session, and vanishes when it hits zero. That combined strength is the treating pawn's skill × the facility quality above × the patient's share of the session — so all three inputs matter, and a good therapist in a good room working one-on-one is worth many times a poor one splitting attention in a bad room.
Building recovery
The recovery track is a plain 0-to-1 progress bar toward discharge. Continued care adds to it (capped at 1.0) and — crucially — it carries a slow decay, so it slips back down without sustained attention. The mod using the engine decides what reaching the top actually unlocks (Ward: a "ready for discharge" alert).
Who uses it
- Institution: Ward — psychiatric care. Marks mental-illness conditions treatable (Rim Disorders' depression, anxiety, PTSD, and OCD, when that mod is present), runs warden counselling sessions, and builds a recovery track toward a "ready for discharge" alert. The reference example.
- Institution: Justice — rehabilitation. Its reform score is the disposition axis punishment moves; the recovery track is the natural home for a sustained rehabilitation programme that gates parole on the same shared engine, so the two systems agree on "getting better" instead of each inventing it.
"Reduce the condition, then build recovery" is the shape Ward uses, but it isn't forced: a rehabilitation system with no clinical condition to clear (like Justice's reform) can build a recovery track from the very first session and read its level to gate a parole.
The point, exactly as with propensity: one engine, two uses, no drift.
Part of the Institution suite.