institution/Wiki/contraband/Home.md

Institution: Contraband

Prisoners get hold of things they should not have. Wardens turn the cell over looking for them.

This is the player-facing wiki for Institution: Contraband, a RimWorld 1.6 mod. It documents every mechanic with the real numbers pulled from the source, explains why each one works the way it does, and tells you how to play with them — and against them.

Note on scope. Contraband was recently split. It is now one thing: the physical smuggling loop of a prison. The engine it used to carry — propensity, the criminal record, the secured-context predicate — now lives in Institution: Core, which this mod requires. The response systems (classification, deterrence, discipline, parole, regime) went to Institution: Justice, and the gang network to Institution: Gangs. If this page mentions "the record" or "a pawn's propensity," those are Core's; Contraband reads them.

The one idea

The whole Institution suite rests on a single sentence:

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

Contraband is the half of that sentence you can hold in your hand. A propensity is abstract until a disposed prisoner files a blade off his bunk, palms a twist of yayo on the way into a cell, or starts digging. Contraband is where the spectrum becomes an object with edges.

Vanilla built the demand and forgot the supply chain

RimWorld already ships a fully-built junkie. Raiders spawn addicted (chemicalAddictionChance, forcedAddictions) and carrying combat drugs (combatEnhancingDrugsChance). You down one, capture strips everything (DropAndForbidEverything), and now withdrawal grips them in the cell (Need_Chemical, Hediff_Addiction). A prisoner already seeks a drug on their own — JobGiver_SatisfyChemicalNeed is in the prisoner think tree — and already ignores the forbidden flag inside their own cell (ForbidUtility.CaresAboutForbidden).

Put a drug within reach of an addicted prisoner and the base game makes them take it. Today. With no new code. The consumer, the craving, the reach, the ignore-forbidden — all of it ships.

What does not ship is any answer to two questions:

Vanilla has	Vanilla lacks
A prisoner who wants contraband	Any route for contraband to reach the cell
A warden with fifteen jobs	A sixteenth called search

Search Assembly-CSharp.dll for Contraband, Search, Confiscate, Smuggle, Frisk, Shakedown and you get zero types. The warden can chat, convert, feed, execute, enslave, release, suppress — and cannot look in a pocket. Contraband builds exactly the missing two halves: supply and search. It does not need to build the junkie, because Ludeon already did.

Concealment is a secret, not an item

This is the load-bearing design decision, inherited from Foul Play (the Piss Nuke) and kept:

While it is concealed, there is no Thing.

A hidden shiv is not in the gear tab. There is no icon. There is no stack on a shelf. The player is told nothing. The item exists only as a row in MapComponent_Contraband's private list, and it becomes a real Thing at exactly two moments:

• when the prisoner uses it (the secret is "redeemed" into their inventory), and
• when a warden finds it in a search (it is confiscated and never becomes a thing at all).

Why go to the trouble? Because an item you can see in a UI is not contraband — it's inventory, and there would be nothing to discover and no reason to ever order a search. The whole tension of the system is that you never know. A warden you send to toss a cell might find a blade, might foil a tunnel, or might waste twenty minutes on a prisoner who was hiding nothing — and that empty search still has to cost, or the mere offer of the job would be the discovery.

Read the full lifecycle in Concealment and Intake.

The four supply routes and the one counter

Route	What it is	Page
Intake	A captive hides the small contraband they walked in with	Concealment and Intake
Improvise	Whittle a shiv from the cell's own furniture	Improvised Weapons
Tunnel	Dig out under the perimeter with a filed pick	Tunnels
A bent warden	A greedy or over-kind guard smuggles for a prisoner	Corruption
The counter	A prioritized cell toss that reads the tells	Warden Search

And because every guard is a person with their own diligence and their own price, the search is only as good as who you send — see Corruption.

How everything is contraband without a list

Contraband names no items. It recognises three sources at load and logs the count:

1. Anything carrying CompProperties_Contraband — the explicit opt-in, with pluggable behaviour.
2. Every drug (ThingDef.IsDrug) — vanilla's, Vanilla Expanded's, mods that don't exist yet. Hard drugs conceal better (0.75 vs 0.5).
3. Every weapon (ThingDef.IsWeapon) — concealability and hiding place derived from mass. A knife rides on the body; a heavy gun goes under the floor; a minigun (over 10 kg) hides nowhere.

It is a lookup, not a patch. Nothing mutates another mod's defs. Details in Concealment and Intake and Compatibility.

Index

• Concealment and Intake — the secret model, ConcealSite, the three sources, intake on capture, redemption, and the opaque content-tag bridge.
• Improvised Weapons — the shiv whittled from furniture, material carry-through, the damage tell, and who reaches for it in a breakout.
• Tunnels — the Prison-Architect dig under the perimeter, which pawns dig, and how a search uncovers the shaft.
• Warden Search — the prioritized search, how tells and the record drive priority, what a search does, and how it writes back.
• Corruption — Diligence and Corruption from traits and mood, how they scale a find, and the bent warden who looks away or smuggles in.
• Compatibility — the Core dependency, the Foul Play bridge, Justice/Gangs interplay, and the prison mods the suite is tested against.

The suite

Each mod stands alone as an install; together they form one system.

Mod	Owns	Depends on
Institution: Core	propensity, criminal record, secured context	base game
Institution: Contraband (this)	concealment, intake, shivs, tunnels, search, corruption	Core
Institution: Justice	classification, deterrence, discipline, parole, regime	Core
Institution: Gangs	gangs as contraband economies	Core, Contraband, Justice
Foul Play	vessel + substance + throw framework; the Piss Nuke; bridges its carboy in as contraband	standalone
Ward	a ward prison mode + the suite's test harness	—

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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).