institution/Wiki/contraband/Improvised-Weapons.md

# Improvised Weapons

*The acquisition route you cannot deny — because you are obliged to furnish the cell, and the
furniture is the raw material.*

You have to give a prisoner a bed. RimWorld will nag you until you do. That bed is a frame of wood,
or steel, or — if you built a nice prison — plasteel. Give a disposed prisoner a season of
unsupervised time with it and they will file a blade off it. **The prison's own furnishings are the
arsenal, and better furniture is worse.**

## The shiv

`CB_Shiv` is a crude stabbing weapon: *"A blade filed off a bed frame and wrapped in cloth for a
grip. Barely a weapon — but a barely-a-weapon in a cell you thought was empty is a dead guard."*

| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Tech level | Neolithic |
| Mass | 0.4 kg |
| `concealability` | **0.75** (hides very well — it rides on the body) |
| `hideIn` | `OnBody \| InCell` |
| Point (Stab) | power 7, cooldown 1.5 s |
| Handle (Blunt) | power 5, cooldown 1.6 s |
| `acquireWorker` | `AcquireWorker_Improvise` |
| `useWorker` | none — an armed prisoner *is* the payload |

It is **stuffable** (`stuffCategories`: Metallic, Woody, Stony), which is the entire point of the
harvest mechanic: a shiv's stats come from its material for free. A wood shiv is feeble; a plasteel
one is vicious. You never furnished a cell thinking of it as an armoury, but that is what it is.

## Who whittles: the disposition gate

`AcquireWorker_Improvise.CanAcquire` is not "any prisoner." Three things must all be true:

1. **Held.** The pawn is a prisoner, slave, or ward patient (`IsHeld`). Free colonists do not whittle
   shivs in the commons — *yet* (the concealment layer already tracks them; only the authority to act
   on them is missing).
2. **Disposed.** A seeded propensity roll:

   ```
   Propensity.Would(pawn, 0.10, SaltImprovise)
   ```

   Base chance **0.10**, scaled by Core's nature × nurture. It is seeded per pawn, so it is a *fixed
   fact* about them — the mistreated, high-propensity lifer chews his bed apart; the frightened cook
   never does, and never would have, no matter how many times you reload.
3. **Material in reach.** There is a workable source (see below).

The base is deliberately low. Most prisoners are not making weapons. When one is, that is a fact
about *who they are and how you keep them*, and the tell it leaves is meant to point you at exactly
that pawn.

## The source: what counts as raw material

`FindSource` looks for the nearest reachable, damageable, usefully-stuffed piece of furniture:

- **Their own assigned bed first** — it is right there in the cell.
- Otherwise the **closest artificial building within 12 tiles** that qualifies.

`IsWorkableSource` requires all of:

| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| Made of `Stuff` | you cannot whittle a blade out of nothing |
| `useHitPoints` | it has to be damageable |
| Stuff category is **Metallic, Woody, or Stony** | cloth and leather cannot be filed into a blade |
| Reachable at `Touch` through `Danger.Deadly` | they have to get to it |

This is also the counter-play. A cell furnished only in cloth and hydroponics offers nothing to file.
A steel bed offers a steel shiv. **What you build the cell out of decides whether it can become a
weapon, and how nasty that weapon is.**

## Harvest by damage: the tell *is* the mechanic

Each poll the pawn makes progress, `OnHarvestTick` chips at the source:

```
damage = max(1, round(source.MaxHitPoints × 0.012))   // Blunt, ~1.2% of max HP per worked poll
```

The damage is not a side effect — it is the point. A gnawed bed is **probable cause**. The same
poll that advances the shiv damages the furniture, and that visible wear is what
[Warden Search](Warden-Search.md) reads to send a guard to the *right* prisoner first: a badly
damaged bed shoots a prisoner to the top of the search priority list. Whittling a shiv is loud, in
the only sense that matters — it leaves a mark you can act on.

Because the source takes real damage, a determined prisoner can **reduce a piece of furniture to
wreckage and move on to the next**: if the source is destroyed before the shiv is finished,
`FindSource` looks for another, and if there is none, the route **stalls** (progress is kept, not
lost). A materially poor cell is a real defence — the prisoner cannot make progress with nothing to
file.

## How long, and the material it becomes

Progress uses the default rate — roughly **1.5 unsupervised days** of active work — jittered ±25%
each poll so no two shivs finish on the same schedule:

```
progressPerPoll = 250 / (1.5 × 60000)  ×  Rand.Range(0.75, 1.25)
```

When progress reaches 1, the shiv is finished, **silently** — the player is told nothing. Two things
happen:

- **Material carry-through.** `item.stuff = source.Stuff`. A wood bed yields a wood shiv, a plasteel
  bunk a plasteel one. When the shiv is later redeemed into a real `Thing`, it is made of exactly
  that material, and its combat stats follow.
- **The record.** `CriminalRecord.contrabandMade` is incremented (Core's record). That number feeds
  the warden's future suspicion of this pawn and, if you run **Institution: Justice**, their security
  classification.

## The shiv comes out in a break — and who reaches for it

A hidden shiv is inert until a breakout. When a prisoner enters the `PrisonerEscape` or
`PrisonerAssaultColony` duty, `JobGiver_UseContraband` offers to materialise what they are hiding —
but a **weapon** only comes out for someone who would actually use it. That test is
`Disposition.WouldArmSelf`, and it is the same gate `JobGiver_ArmSelf` uses to decide whether an
escapee even bothers to pick a weapon off the floor.

This matters because **vanilla escapees never arm themselves at all.**
`JobGiver_PickUpOpportunisticWeapon` exists and is simply absent from the escape duty tree, so a
base-game prisoner walks out unarmed, always. Arming is genuinely new behaviour, so it is kept rare
enough that when it happens you recognise *who* did it.

### `WouldArmSelf`

First a **hard gate**: a pawn who `WorkTagIsDisabled(Violent)` never arms, ever — a pacifist who
picks up a rifle is not a rare event, it is a bug. Otherwise:

```
chance = ArmDisposition(pawn) × ArmCircumstance(pawn)
armed  = WouldSeeded(pawn, min(chance, 0.85), SaltArm)   // seeded — a fixed fact per pawn
```

**Disposition** — who they are, fixed, nothing about today changes it:

```
ArmDisposition = 0.10 (base) × trait × skill
```

| Factor | Value |
|---|---|
| Bloodlust | ×2.5 (highest applicable trait only — not a stack) |
| Psychopath | ×2.0 |
| Brawler | ×1.8 |
| Wimp | ×0.3 |
| Kind | ×0.4 |
| skill | `0.5 + max(Shooting, Melee)/20 × 1.5` → range **0.5 .. 2.0** |

*Being captured in a raid does not make someone a fighter* — plenty of prisoners are cooks and
conscripts. A weapon is only worth grabbing if you know what to do with it, hence the skill term.

**Circumstance** — what is happening right now, live, not seeded:

| Condition | Effect | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Health < 50% | ×0.4 | badly hurt people run or crawl; they don't seek a fight |
| ≥ 2 other prisoners escaping within 12 tiles | ×2.0 | a crowd emboldens; one man slips out, six men riot |
| An armed colonist within 20 tiles | ×1.8 | now a weapon is not bravado, it's the plan |

### Which weapon they reach for

`JobGiver_ArmSelf` prefers, in order:

1. **Their own dropped weapon** — the gun they carried when you downed them, still lying where it
   fell within 45 tiles. Vanilla remembers it in `Pawn_MindState.droppedWeapon` and then never uses
   the field for prisoners. *"A man walking back to the spot where his own rifle fell is a better
   story than a man rummaging through your stockpile."* A prisoner does not care that you marked it
   forbidden.
2. **Anything to hand** within 18 tiles — but only for a pawn over a higher disposition floor
   (`WouldSeeded(pawn, 0.35, …)`). Rummaging a stockpile is a further step than grabbing your own gun
   back.

A concealed shiv slots into this the natural way: a prisoner who has been sitting on a blade and who
is the sort to use it does not leave it in his pocket. `JobGiver_UseContraband` redeems it and moves
it straight from inventory into the equipment slot. The pawn who would *not* arm keeps it hidden and
runs — and the shiv survives to be found in a later search, or used in a later break.

## Not only shivs: the crude pick

`AcquireWorker_Improvise` is shared. The **crude pick** (`CB_DiggingTool`) is filed off furniture
exactly the same way — same disposition gate, same damage tell — but it carries an `escapeWorker`
instead of weapon stats, and its purpose is a tunnel rather than a fight. See [Tunnels](Tunnels.md).

## Quick reference

| Constant | Value | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Improvise base chance | 0.10 | before nature × nurture; seeded per pawn |
| Damage per worked poll | ~1.2% of source max HP | Blunt; the visible tell |
| Source search radius | 12 tiles | own bed first, then nearest workable furniture |
| Time to finish a shiv | ~1.5 active days | jittered ±25% per poll |
| Workable stuff | Metallic / Woody / Stony | cloth and leather cannot be whittled |
| Shiv `concealability` | 0.75 | hard to find on the body |
| Arm chance cap | 0.85 | after disposition × circumstance |
| Own-weapon reach | 45 tiles | their dropped weapon |
| Any-weapon reach | 18 tiles | scavenge floor 0.35 disposition |

---

*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs, alongside Foul Play and
Ward. Each stands alone; together they interlock.*
*Developed with substantial assistance from Claude (Anthropic).*