11 KiB
Commitment
How involuntary psychiatric commitment actually works in play: how a colonist becomes a ward patient, what the treatment station does, how a room turns into a ward, who does the counselling, what the treatment buys, and what happens if you commit someone and then forget about them.
The loop in one paragraph
You arrest a colonist (or otherwise take a prisoner) and set their interaction mode to psychiatric care. You build a treatment station in their cell, which turns the room into a psychiatric ward. A warden walks over, sits, and counsels them; each session builds up their treatment, which lowers their mental-break threshold so they break less often. That progress fades over about a week if nobody keeps attending, so it has to be sustained. Counselling also gives the patient a small mood lift. Neglect a committed patient — leave them with no ongoing treatment — and once a day they pick up a neglected mood penalty that drags them back toward the break that got them committed. Treat them and they stabilise; forget them and they don't. That feedback loop is the entire mod.
Step 1 — Becoming a ward patient
Commitment reuses vanilla's arrest → prisoner transition. You don't get a new pawn state; you take a prisoner (arrest your own colonist, or a captured raider) and then switch on a new interaction mode.
Psychiatric care — the interaction mode
In the prisoner's interaction dropdown you'll find a new option, psychiatric care, sitting between Reduce resistance and Release. A few things make it behave the way it does:
- It stacks. Unlike recruit / convert / enslave / release / execute — which are one-at-a-time choices — psychiatric care is a toggle that layers on top of whatever else you've picked, the same way vanilla's Bloodfeed and Study toggles do. So a patient can be set to recruit AND psychiatric care at once: you counsel a sad captured colonist toward stability while also chipping at their resistance.
- You can flag a downed or sleeping patient. Setting the mode doesn't require them to be awake — the warden decides when to actually treat.
- Not for wild men, and it works fine without Ideology's ideoligion system.
Because the mode stacks, it also lets Ward coexist cleanly with work-your-prisoners mods like Prison Labor — see Compatibility.
Step 2 — The treatment station
Flagging a patient for care does nothing on its own. Treatment happens at a station, in the patient's own room. Without one, a patient flagged for care in an ordinary cell simply goes untreated — which is the point of the neglect penalty (Step 6).
The treatment station — the building
"A desk, a chair bolted to the floor, and a locked cabinet of sedatives. A warden set to psychiatric care will use it to counsel patients held in this room."
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Cost | 40 Steel + 2 medicine — deliberately cheap |
| Build time | Quick |
| Research needed | Medicine Production — the one gate |
| Size | A two-tile desk; pawns squeeze past it, so it doesn't wall off a cell |
| Notes | It burns |
It's cheap on purpose. The real cost of running a ward is not the 40 steel. It's the warden hours you spend counselling and the labour you give up by not putting the patient to work. The building is just the gate that says "this room is set up to treat people."
And the locked cabinet isn't only flavour: a patient sliding toward a break faster than counselling can steady them is the moment a sedative earns its keep — something to calm a patient who's close to going over the edge.
Step 3 — The room becomes a ward
Once a treatment station stands in a room that already holds prisoner beds, the room's role changes from prison cell to psychiatric ward. Vanilla already has Prison Cell, Prison Barracks and Hospital; the ward is the fourth sibling. Two things are worth knowing:
- It's gated on the station. A room only reads as a ward if it actually contains a treatment station and at least one prisoner bed. Without that, an ordinary prison cell full of beds keeps its normal Prison Cell role, untouched. Build the station and it's a ward; don't and nothing changes.
- It's still a prison cell. Re-labelling the role does not release anyone. A ward is a prison cell and a ward at the same time, so containment, food delivery, and prison breaks all keep working.
Step 4 — The warden does the work
Counselling is warden work. Assign it the way you assign any warden task, and a warden will walk over and treat the patient. A few rules govern when a session can start:
- The warden needs to be able to talk and hear — a mute or deaf warden can't counsel.
- The patient must be awake, not downed, and not mid-break — you can't counsel someone who's unconscious or already spiralling.
- There must be a treatment station in the patient's own room (not out in the open). You can't treat someone through a wall from a station two cells over.
- Its priority sits above chatting but below feeding — an untreated patient deteriorates, a bored one doesn't — so wardens won't skip meals to run a session.
A session
- Length: about 20 in-game minutes, with a progress bar while it runs.
- It fails out if the patient despawns, is forbidden, falls asleep, or breaks partway through.
- On completion it applies the treatment, gives the patient a "counselled" mood memory, runs a deep-talk conversation (so the relationship builds and the next session lands harder), and awards the warden 60 Social XP.
Because psychiatric care is its own separate warden job rather than a rewrite of vanilla's, it doesn't collide with mods that modify the built-in warden interactions — again, Compatibility.
Step 5 — What treatment buys
Each completed session adds to the patient's treatment, and how much depends on the warden's Social skill:
| Warden Social skill | Treatment gained per session |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0.20 |
| 5 | 0.275 |
| 10 | 0.35 |
| 15 | 0.425 |
| 20 | 0.50 |
The floor is deliberate: even an unskilled warden buys 0.20 a session. A bad ward is neglect, not zero — a clumsy counsellor is still worth something. Treatment tops out at 1.0, a full course.
What it does: while treatment is active it lowers the patient's mental-break threshold by 0.10 — a lower threshold means they break at a worse mood, i.e. break less often.
Decay is the mechanic. Treatment bleeds off at 0.15 per day, so a full course fades back to nothing in about a week if nobody keeps attending. A patient treated once and then ignored slides right back. Sustained counselling keeps it topped up and the break threshold suppressed; stopping lets it fade. Treatment is a programme, not a one-time cure.
The −0.10 break-threshold figure is a first pass and not yet heavily playtested — expect it to be tuned.
Step 6 — The other half: neglect
A ward you don't staff is not a neutral place to keep someone. It's a worse one. Without a cost, "arrest the sad colonist and park them" would be a free way to remove a problem pawn from play. It isn't free.
Once per in-game day, Ward checks every prisoner flagged for psychiatric care. Any patient who isn't currently under treatment — meaning no warden has been near them in days — picks up a neglected mood penalty. (The check keys off active treatment, and since treatment decays on its own, its absence is the tell that the patient has genuinely been left alone, not merely that nobody happens to be counselling them this exact minute.)
The two moods
| Mood | Value | Duration | Stacks to | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Counselled | +6 | 2 days | 3 | "Someone sat with me and listened. It helped, a little." |
| Neglected | −8 | 3 days | 4 | "They locked me in here for my own good and then forgot about me." |
Neglect is asymmetric — a −8 penalty stacking four deep (−32) badly outweighs three counselling lifts (+18). That's intentional: a neglected patient's mood falls, which raises their break risk, which is exactly the crisis you committed them to avoid. A ward can manufacture the break it was built to prevent. Staff it, or don't build it.
Known rough edge: neglect keys off "not currently under treatment," so a patient treated once a week can technically dodge the penalty on the single day their treatment runs out. It's a documented quirk, not yet smoothed.
How it stacks with recruitment (and everything else)
Because psychiatric care is a non-exclusive toggle, it layers onto whatever else you've set:
| You want to… | Set | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Just stabilise a broken colonist | Psychiatric care | Wardens counsel; break threshold drops |
| Talk a captured raider down and recruit them | Psychiatric care + Attempt recruit | Both run — counselling lifts mood while resistance is chipped |
| Convert and treat | Psychiatric care + convert | Both toggle on |
| Work a patient and treat them | Psychiatric care + Prison Labor's work mode | Both apply. Working a fragile patient is bleak — and it's your call |
The last row is the darkest option the mod exposes, and it exposes it on purpose: Ward doesn't forbid working a patient, it just makes the trade-off visible.
Because a ward patient is a genuine vanilla prisoner, everything the wider Institution suite does to prisoners applies to them unchanged — a committed patient can be classified, disciplined, paroled, searched, and can conceal or improvise contraband. See Home for the suite map and Compatibility for how Ward stays out of other mods' way.
Quick reference — the numbers
| Thing | Number |
|---|---|
| Treatment station cost | 40 steel + 2 medicine; needs Medicine Production research |
| Counselling session | ~20 in-game minutes |
| Treatment per session | 0.20 (unskilled) → 0.50 (Social 20) |
| Treatment cap | 1.0 (a full course) |
| Treatment decay | −0.15/day (~a week from full to nothing) |
| Break-threshold effect | −0.10 while treated (breaks less often) |
| Counselled mood | +6, 2 days, stacks to 3 |
| Neglected mood | −8, 3 days, stacks to 4 |
| Neglect check | once per in-game day |
| Warden reward | 60 Social XP per session |
Part of the Institution suite
Institution: Ward is one mod in the Institution suite of RimWorld 1.6 mods — Ward, plus Institution: Core, Institution: Contraband, Institution: Justice, Institution: Gangs, and Foul Play. Each stands alone; together they interlock. A committed patient rides the same prisoner rail the rest of the suite polices, so a psychiatric ward is also a secure context where a patient can conceal and improvise contraband exactly as a prisoner can.