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Networks and smuggling
The one thing nothing else models: contraband that flows between pawns. A gang is a supply chain.
This is the core of the mod. Everything else — who joins, who fights, who is kept apart — exists to serve or to break the network described here. A gang is not a mood aura; it is a supply chain, and contraband flows along it.
The move
The heart of it is a single transfer: a gangmate who is holding a stash passes one piece of it to a gangmate who has none. Here is everything that has to be true for a piece to move:
- both pawns are in the same gang;
- if both are on the map, the supplier has a walkable path to the customer (touch range, willing to cross deadly danger to get there);
- there is contraband in play on the map at all;
- the supplier is actually holding at least one concealed item.
When all of that holds, the supplier's first concealed item leaves their hands and arrives — still hidden — on the customer.
A few things worth reading carefully:
- One item per move. It moves the first concealed item on the supplier, and exactly that. It is a redistribution, not a duplication: the item leaves the supplier and arrives concealed on the customer. The gang's total stash is unchanged; only who holds it changes.
- Same gang, always. Both pawns must belong to the same gang. There is no smuggling to a stranger — the network only moves along membership.
- The reach requirement only applies to pawns both on the map. Two pawns physically present must have a walkable path between them. If a member is off the active map, the reach check is skipped — which is what allows a gang to reach across the wall to a member who is not on the map right now.
Why this defeats a single search
Consider a wing of four gangmates and one shiv. You search Prisoner A and find nothing — clean. You tick a box: cell searched, no contraband. But the shiv was on Prisoner C the whole time, and on the next 5000-tick network pass it will move to whoever is out. Search C tomorrow and it may already be on A again.
Put plainly:
A gangmate holding a stash supplies one who has none, so a search that turns up nothing on one prisoner has not cleaned out the wing.
A single search is a snapshot of one pawn in a network that reshuffles itself. This is the whole reason contraband-as-a-network is worth modelling: the unit of contraband is the wing, not the pawn. To clean it out you have to either search faster than it moves, or — far better — break the network.
The automatic resupply pass
You never trigger a transfer by hand; the game runs it automatically on the 5000-tick pass. After forming gangs for the pass, it runs one resupply round per gang: it finds the first member who is hiding contraband and the first member who is not, and if both exist, moves one item from the holder to the empty-handed member.
So on each interval, every gang that has both a haves-member and a have-not-member performs one transfer, moving a single item from a holder to someone empty-handed. Over several passes the effect is that a gang tends to keep its members supplied and to spread a stash out — which is exactly what makes a scattershot search miss it. (Only members who currently meet the join bar take part in this automatic pass.)
The cross-wall move
Because neither the join bar nor gang membership cares about a pawn's secured status, a gang can have a free member and a held member. If the free member is holding the stash, the network resupplies into the prison — the outside man passes to the inside man. A free colonist and a prisoner can be in one gang with the stash on the free member; the transfer succeeds, and afterwards the prisoner is hiding contraband and the colonist is not. Your prison's contraband problem is not sealed inside your prison.
Resupply from outside: the bent warden
The transfer only redistributes what a gang already has. So what happens when you finally search the whole wing on the same day and strip every member clean — there is nothing left to pass around? The gang is starved. It stays starved until contraband re-enters from outside.
That external source is not part of Gangs; it is Institution: Contraband's corruption route. A warden's honesty varies by personality (a Greedy warden has a price), and a bent warden can smuggle contraband in to a prisoner, planting a concealed item directly. That single planted item is then all the network needs: one holder, and the next 5000-tick pass spreads it back out across everyone who can reach.
So the two halves of the supply picture are:
| Mechanism | Owner | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Passing contraband between gangmates | Gangs | moves existing contraband between gangmates who can reach each other |
| Warden smuggling | Contraband | injects new contraband from outside via a corruptible warden |
Cut both and a gang genuinely dries up. Cut only the redistribution and a bent warden re-seeds it; cut only the warden and any stash you missed keeps circulating.
How to break a network
- Search the whole wing at once, not one pawn at a time. A partial sweep is a snapshot the network routes around.
- Segregate rivals into different, unreachable wings (Classification, in Institution: Justice). The reach requirement is the lever — a network whose members cannot walk to each other cannot pass anything. This is the primary counter-play; see Affiliations and Segregation.
- Clean up your wardens. If searches never seem to finish the job, you may have a Greedy warden re-seeding the wing. Corruption is the resupply valve; personality is the fix.
Part of the Institution suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.