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Regime
The daily life of the held — and the one lever vanilla withholds.
Most of what a prison regime needs, vanilla already gives you. The schedule is the Restrict tab. The mood-driven disposition already flows through the colony's underlying systems — a neglected prisoner runs hotter with no new machinery. So Regime does not rebuild any of that. It adds the single thing vanilla flatly refuses to model: recreation.
What vanilla does, and what Regime flips
Vanilla denies prisoners the Joy (recreation) need outright — the need is flagged colonists-only, so it simply never appears on a prisoner. A caged pawn has no recreation bar, cannot take joy from anything, and never suffers for its absence.
Regime flips exactly that one bit on — the same approach the good, popular Prisoner Recreation mod takes. It grants the recreation need to humanlike prisoners of your colony and nothing else: animals, guests, slaves and colonists are untouched, only the recreation need is affected, and it only ever adds the need where vanilla withheld it — it never removes a need another mod granted.
That is the entire mechanism. Enabling recreation is trivial — once the need exists, vanilla does all the rest (joy sources, the recreation bar, the mood effects of a full or empty one). The value is not the plumbing; it is what an empty bar now costs.
Why a need you can neglect is the point
Giving prisoners recreation is not a mercy toggle — it is a lever with two ends, and the down end is the one that matters to the suite. Once a prisoner has the Joy need, they can be starved of it, and vanilla's own machinery then does the work: no recreation lowers Joy, which lowers mood, and a low mood raises the pawn's disposition — their odds on every "would they?" roll.
Every one of those steps already exists. Regime only opens the first door; mood is wired to disposition in Core, so a prisoner who gets no yard time stews, their mood sinks, and their disposition climbs. From Deterrence and Discipline & Reform you already know disposition is the multiplier the whole system keys off; Regime is what lets neglect feed it.
Concretely, a prisoner's mood pushes their disposition into these brackets:
| Prisoner condition | Disposition contribution |
|---|---|
| Mood below 0.20 (recreation-starved, at the floor of despair) | ×2.5 |
| Mood below 0.35 (badly kept) | ×1.6 |
| Held and mood below 0.40 (a badly run cell) | an additional ×1.4 |
A prisoner you give no recreation is a prisoner you are pushing up those brackets. Regime turns "I didn't bother building a rec room" from a non-event into a disposition cost you pay on every roll.
Works alongside Prisoner Recreation
If you also run the Prisoner Recreation mod, nothing breaks. Both mods do the same thing — grant the recreation need to prisoners — and because Regime only acts when the need isn't already granted, whichever runs first grants it and the other sees it already done. Running both is harmless. Running either alone is sufficient. There is no double-need, no conflict, no load-order sensitivity between them.
Regime prints a short startup message so you can confirm it loaded and prisoner recreation is enabled.
Content on top
Yard time, safety needs, and visitation are content on this foundation, not new machinery. Each of them is just another thing that moves a prisoner's mood — and mood is already wired to disposition — so they build on the same spine that this one recreation change put in place. When they land, they make a well-run regime feel richer without adding new systems underneath.
How to play with Regime
- Build the rec room. A prisoner with recreation settles; the mood brackets above stay off, and their disposition sits near baseline. A cheap horseshoe pin or chess table earns its keep in crimes that don't happen.
- Neglect is a choice with a number. Leaving prisoners with nothing to do isn't neutral — it drives mood into the ×1.6 and ×2.5 disposition brackets, and a hotter prisoner reoffends, which cools your colony's climate of order, which heats everyone. The rec room is deterrence you build once.
- Recreation and reform stack. Regime cools disposition live (through mood); reform cools it permanently (through Discipline & Reform). A reformed prisoner in a well-run wing is calm on both axes — which is exactly the pawn you can eventually parole.
- You don't need Prisoner Recreation too — but if you have it, keep it. They coexist.
Part of the Institution suite for RimWorld 1.6: Core · Contraband · Policing · Corrections · Gangs · Ward.