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 — every layer bundled into one install with a checkbox per layer (all on by default), so you run as much or as little of the suite as you like.
New to it? The FAQ covers what to do when the mod throws something new at you — an escape tunnel, a gang in the wing, a riot, a prisoner who won't reform, a "dangerous prisoner unsecured" alert.
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.
- Disposition (Core) — every pawn carries a seeded propensity: would this one do it?
- 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.
- Detection (Policing) — witnesses and a constable work an open case until the culprit is named.
- 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.)
- 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.
- Gangs (Gangs) — held pawns organise into contraband economies: joining by disposition, smuggling networks, rivalry, fights that book as crimes.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Institution suite for RimWorld 1.6: Core · Contraband · Policing · Corrections · Gangs · Ward.