institution/Wiki/gangs/Networks-and-Smuggling.md

# 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](Affiliations-and-Segregation.md).
- **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.

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*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.*