institution/Wiki/Home.md

Institution — Wiki

Prison Architect in RimWorld. One install, six toggleable layers, over one shared engine.

Every pawn has a criminal propensity on a spectrum — nature (traits) × nurture (mood, mistreatment, treatment) — and the colony can police it.

That one sentence is the whole suite. Colonists, prisoners, and slaves drift toward crime on a continuous spectrum; a policing-and-corrections machine discovers, catches, weighs, punishes, reforms, treats, and releases them — and catching one pawn changes the disposition of the rest.

Institution is the single mod that ships all of it. It bundles the suite's layers into one install with a checkbox per layer (all on by default), owning no gameplay code itself — it is a thin settings shim over the same separate, still-splittable feature DLLs. Pull it apart into its layers again and nothing is lost.

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The gameplay loop

The suite is a closed loop, and each turn of it lives in a different layer — mirroring the real separation of powers: police, (courts,) prison, parole.

1. Disposition (Core) — every pawn carries a seeded propensity: would this one do it?
2. Crime (Policing) — free colonists offend on that spectrum (rare in a small, tight, well-deterred colony), with visible consequences — theft, vandalism, assault — that fray relationships.
3. Detection (Policing) — witnesses and a constable work an open case until the culprit is named.
4. The weighed arrest (Policing) — an arrest is made only when the crime is grave enough to justify losing the pawn and the colony can afford to hold a prisoner; the disposed resist, and a subdued resister is taken in. (A future Judiciary layer — a court that tries and sentences — is reserved to sit here, between arrest and imprisonment; today the arrest imprisons directly.)
5. Contraband (Contraband) — once held, a pawn conceals and improvises: shivs, brews, tunnels under the perimeter, all countered by warden search — and a bent warden who smuggles for them.
6. Gangs (Gangs) — held pawns organise into contraband economies: joining by disposition, smuggling networks, rivalry, fights that book as crimes.
7. Corrections (Corrections) — a warden rehabilitates a prisoner: counselling sessions move a reform score and raise the colony's climate of order (classification re-grades as reform rises), that order feeds back into everyone's disposition, and a parole alert releases the genuinely reformed back into the colony. Neglect a flagged prisoner and they harden.
8. Treatment (Ward) — the other door: a prisoner committed for psychiatric care rather than punished. Counselling reduces the disorder that broke them and builds a recovery track toward discharge; neglect a committed patient and they deteriorate.

Steps 7 and 8 close the loop back onto step 1: catching, punishing, reforming, or treating one pawn moves the colony's climate of order, which bends the disposition of everyone still deciding whether crime pays here.

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The six layers

Each is a separate repo and DLL, bundled here behind a toggle. Every layer defaults on; turning one off disables its systems in place without uninstalling anything.

Layer	Toggle	What it adds	Wiki
Core	(always on — the engine)	propensity, the criminal record, secured context, the shared treatment engine, the deterrence seam	Core
Contraband	Contraband	concealment & intake, improvised shivs, Prison-Architect tunnels, warden search, warden corruption	Contraband
Policing	Policing	colony crime on the spectrum, witnesses, a constable, the weighed arrest, the deterrence feedback loop, prison riots, recidivism alerts	Policing
Corrections	Corrections	classification (with whole-wing markers), discipline & reform, rehabilitation + parole, regime (recreation/visitation/cell-safety)	Corrections
Gangs	Gangs	gangs as contraband economies — joining, smuggling networks, rivalry, fights-as-crime	Gangs
Ward	Ward	psychiatric care — treatment, recovery, discharge, ward neglect, sedation	Ward

Policing and Corrections are separate layers — the enforcement half and the prison half of the former Justice module, split along the separation of powers. Policing has its own toggle because colony crime is a large behavioural change: a player can run the prison (Corrections) without their own colonists committing crimes. Corrections depends on Policing for the shared climate of order.

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Why one Core, many layers

The suite runs on a small Core that owns exactly what every layer must agree on — is this pawn dangerous?, what have they actually done?, what hold are they under? — plus two shared services: the treatment engine (Ward's psychiatric care and Corrections' rehabilitation point the same loop at different states) and the deterrence seam (a neutral hook Policing fills so the order-climate feedback runs through Core without Core ever depending on the policing layer). A future Judiciary layer will slot in through the same style of Core seam — a sentence on the criminal record that Policing writes a default of today and a court would fill tomorrow.

Everything else builds up from there: Contraband, Policing, and Corrections on Core (Corrections also on Policing); Gangs on Core + Contraband + Policing; Ward on Core. Cross-layer integrations that aren't hard dependencies stay soft — a feature lights up if its sibling is present and the loop still closes without it. That is what keeps the suite genuinely modular: this aggregate is a convenience, not a merge.

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Requirements & install

• RimWorld 1.6.
• Harmony — required (the suite's Harmony-using code is Corrections' prisoner-recreation patch and Ward's).
• Install Institution, enable Harmony, and load Institution after it. That is the whole suite in one mod; open the settings to toggle any layer.

The standalone Foul Play framework is a separate install that bridges into the suite when both are present.

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The Institution suite for RimWorld 1.6: Core · Contraband · Policing · Corrections · Gangs · Ward.