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Affiliations-and-Segregation.md
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# Affiliations and segregation
*Gangs grow out of who pawns **already are** — and the counter-play is to keep the wrong pawns apart.*
A gang in this mod is never invented from nowhere. It crystallises along the bonds a colony already
contains: shared faction, shared faith, or real friendship. This page covers the formation rule — which
bonds count and why the *same room* requirement matters — and then the segregation counter-play that
turns those same bonds against the network.
## The formation rule
On each 5000-tick pass, the game walks everyone currently over the join bar (Nature × Nurture ≥ 0.9)
and tries to pair each unaffiliated pawn with a mate. A pawn pairs up with someone who is, at that
moment, **in the same room** *and* someone they **already share a bond with**.
Two conditions, both required: they must be **in the same room** at the moment of the check, **and**
they must **share an affiliation**. A disposed pawn does not fall in with a stranger across the map; it
falls in with someone it is standing next to *and* already connected to.
Pairing binds them together: if either already runs with a gang, the other joins that gang; otherwise a
fresh gang is founded. So gangs accrete — a new member pairing with an existing member is absorbed
into the existing crew rather than starting a rival one.
### What counts as an affiliation
| Bond | Condition | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| **Same faction** | both belong to the same (non-empty) faction | your colonists share one; captured raiders share theirs |
| **Same ideoligion** | both follow the same ideoligion, only if the Ideology DLC is active | needs Ideology enabled |
| **Friendship** | an opinion of at least **+20** of each other | a real positive relationship, not mere acquaintance |
The design intent:
> Gangs grow out of who pawns ALREADY are, not out of nowhere — so a prisoner's gang on the outside is
> their old faction/friends, and rival factions run as rival gangs.
This is why the system feels coherent rather than arbitrary. A crew is a faction bloc, a congregation,
or a friend group — social lines the colony *already has*. Gangs mesh with them instead of stamping
random groupings over the top.
## Rival factions become rival gangs
Follow the rule to its conclusion. Two captured raiders from **different** hostile factions each share
an affiliation with *their own* side but not with each other. Housed in the same wing, each pairs up
along its own faction line — and now you have **two gangs**. As the
[Rivalry and Fights](Rivalry-and-Fights.md) page explains, members of two different gangs are
automatically **rivals**, and rival-gang violence between them is booked as a crime.
So the affiliation rule and the rivalry rule are two ends of one idea: **who bands together** and **who
is opposed** both derive from pre-existing loyalties. Mix hostile factions or clashing ideoligions in
one room and you have not made one big gang — you have made two rival ones and lit the fuse between
them. This is a housing decision with mechanical teeth.
## Segregation: the counter-play
Here is where the formation rule and the network rule meet, and where the rest of the suite earns its
keep. A gang can only *do* anything — resupply itself — if its members can **reach** each other.
Passing contraband requires two things: the pawns must be in the same gang, **and** two pawns both on
the map must have a walkable path between them. Break the path and you break the network.
The design calls this out as the intended answer to the whole mod:
> The counter-play is the rest of the suite: Classification SEGREGATES rivals into different wings, and
> a network whose members cannot REACH each other is starved.
**Classification** lives in **Institution: Justice**. It grades pawns by risk and lets you sort them
into separate, walled wings. Two gangmates graded into different wings, with no walkable route between
them, fail the reach test on every network pass. The gang still *exists* — they are still the same crew,
still rivals of the other crew — but it can no longer pass a shiv from a holder to a have-not. **A
network that cannot reach itself is a network that cannot supply itself.**
This is the elegant part of the design: the very bonds that formed the gang tell you *who to keep
apart*, and the reach requirement makes keeping them apart actually starve the supply chain. You do not
disband a gang; you **cut it off from itself** until nothing can move along it.
## How to play it
- **Read affiliations before you house pawns.** Same-faction and same-ideoligion prisoners will band
together; hostile factions in one wing will form *rival* gangs and fight. Sort deliberately.
- **Segregate by Classification, not by hope.** Putting rivals in "different areas" is not enough —
resupply only needs a *walkable path* between two gangmates. A shared corridor is a supply line. Use
genuinely separate, walled wings.
- **Starve, don't chase.** You will rarely delete a gang outright. The durable win is to keep its
members unable to reach one another so the network dries up, while keeping mood and deterrence high so
few pawns cross the join bar in the first place (see [Joining](Joining.md)).
- **Watch the outside valve.** Segregation starves *internal* resupply; a bent warden can still inject
new contraband from outside (see [Networks and Smuggling](Networks-and-Smuggling.md)). Partition the
wing *and* clean up your wardens for a network that genuinely goes dark.
---
*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.*
Commitment.md
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# Commitment
How involuntary psychiatric commitment actually works in play: how a colonist becomes a ward patient,
what the treatment station does, how a room turns into a ward, who does the counselling, what the
treatment buys, and what happens if you commit someone and then forget about them.
---
## The loop in one paragraph
You **arrest** a colonist (or otherwise take a prisoner) and set their interaction mode to
**psychiatric care**. You build a **treatment station** in their cell, which turns the room into a
**psychiatric ward**. A warden walks over, sits, and **counsels** them; each session builds up their
**treatment**, which **lowers their mental-break threshold** so they break less often. That progress
**fades** over about a week if nobody keeps attending, so it has to be sustained. Counselling also
gives the patient a small mood lift. Neglect a committed patient — leave them with no ongoing
treatment — and once a day they pick up a **neglected** mood penalty that drags them back toward the
break that got them committed. Treat them and they stabilise; forget them and they don't. That
feedback loop is the entire mod.
---
## Step 1 — Becoming a ward patient
Commitment reuses vanilla's arrest → prisoner transition. You don't get a new pawn state; you take a
prisoner (arrest your own colonist, or a captured raider) and then switch on a new interaction mode.
### Psychiatric care — the interaction mode
In the prisoner's interaction dropdown you'll find a new option, **psychiatric care**, sitting between
*Reduce resistance* and *Release*. A few things make it behave the way it does:
- **It stacks.** Unlike recruit / convert / enslave / release / execute — which are one-at-a-time
choices — psychiatric care is a toggle that layers *on top* of whatever else you've picked, the
same way vanilla's *Bloodfeed* and *Study* toggles do. So a patient can be set to **recruit AND
psychiatric care at once**: you counsel a sad captured colonist toward stability while also chipping
at their resistance.
- **You can flag a downed or sleeping patient.** Setting the mode doesn't require them to be awake —
the warden decides when to actually treat.
- **Not for wild men**, and it works fine **without Ideology's ideoligion system**.
Because the mode stacks, it also lets Ward coexist cleanly with work-your-prisoners mods like *Prison
Labor* — see **Compatibility**.
---
## Step 2 — The treatment station
Flagging a patient for care does nothing on its own. Treatment happens *at a station, in the
patient's own room*. Without one, a patient flagged for care in an ordinary cell simply goes
untreated — which is the point of the neglect penalty (Step 6).
### The treatment station — the building
> *"A desk, a chair bolted to the floor, and a locked cabinet of sedatives. A warden set to
> psychiatric care will use it to counsel patients held in this room."*
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Cost | **40 Steel + 2 medicine** — deliberately cheap |
| Build time | Quick |
| Research needed | **Medicine Production** — the one gate |
| Size | A two-tile desk; pawns squeeze past it, so it doesn't wall off a cell |
| Notes | It burns |
**It's cheap on purpose.** The real cost of running a ward is not the 40 steel. It's the **warden
hours** you spend counselling and the **labour you give up** by not putting the patient to work. The
building is just the gate that says "this room is set up to treat people."
And the locked cabinet isn't only flavour: a patient sliding toward a break faster than counselling
can steady them is the moment a **sedative** earns its keep — something to calm a patient who's close
to going over the edge.
---
## Step 3 — The room becomes a ward
Once a treatment station stands in a room that already holds prisoner beds, the room's role changes
from prison cell to **psychiatric ward**. Vanilla already has Prison Cell, Prison Barracks and
Hospital; the ward is the fourth sibling. Two things are worth knowing:
- **It's gated on the station.** A room only reads as a ward if it actually contains a treatment
station *and* at least one prisoner bed. Without that, an ordinary prison cell full of beds keeps
its normal Prison Cell role, untouched. Build the station and it's a ward; don't and nothing
changes.
- **It's still a prison cell.** Re-labelling the role does not release anyone. A ward is a prison cell
*and* a ward at the same time, so containment, food delivery, and prison breaks all keep working.
---
## Step 4 — The warden does the work
Counselling is **warden work**. Assign it the way you assign any warden task, and a warden will walk
over and treat the patient. A few rules govern when a session can start:
- The warden needs to be able to **talk and hear** — a mute or deaf warden can't counsel.
- The patient must be **awake, not downed, and not mid-break** — you can't counsel someone who's
unconscious or already spiralling.
- There must be a **treatment station in the patient's own room** (not out in the open). You can't
treat someone through a wall from a station two cells over.
- Its priority sits **above chatting** but **below feeding** — an untreated patient deteriorates, a
bored one doesn't — so wardens won't skip meals to run a session.
### A session
- **Length:** about **20 in-game minutes**, with a progress bar while it runs.
- It **fails out** if the patient despawns, is forbidden, falls asleep, or breaks partway through.
- On completion it applies the treatment, gives the patient a "counselled" mood memory, runs a
deep-talk conversation (so the relationship builds and the *next* session lands harder), and awards
the warden **60 Social XP**.
Because psychiatric care is its own separate warden job rather than a rewrite of vanilla's, it doesn't
collide with mods that modify the built-in warden interactions — again, **Compatibility**.
---
## Step 5 — What treatment buys
Each completed session adds to the patient's treatment, and how much depends on the warden's **Social
skill**:
| Warden Social skill | Treatment gained per session |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0.20 |
| 5 | 0.275 |
| 10 | 0.35 |
| 15 | 0.425 |
| 20 | 0.50 |
The floor is deliberate: even an unskilled warden buys **0.20** a session. A bad ward is *neglect*,
not *zero* — a clumsy counsellor is still worth something. Treatment tops out at **1.0**, a full
course.
**What it does:** while treatment is active it **lowers the patient's mental-break threshold by
0.10** — a lower threshold means they break at a worse mood, i.e. **break less often**.
**Decay is the mechanic.** Treatment bleeds off at **0.15 per day**, so a full course fades back to
nothing in **about a week** if nobody keeps attending. A patient treated once and then ignored slides
right back. Sustained counselling keeps it topped up and the break threshold suppressed; stopping lets
it fade. Treatment is a *programme*, not a one-time cure.
> The −0.10 break-threshold figure is a first pass and not yet heavily playtested — expect it to be
> tuned.
---
## Step 6 — The other half: neglect
A ward you don't staff is not a neutral place to keep someone. It's a *worse* one. Without a cost,
"arrest the sad colonist and park them" would be a free way to remove a problem pawn from play. It
isn't free.
**Once per in-game day**, Ward checks every prisoner flagged for psychiatric care. Any patient who
isn't currently under treatment — meaning no warden has been near them in days — picks up a
**neglected** mood penalty. (The check keys off active treatment, and since treatment decays on its
own, its absence is the tell that the patient has genuinely been left alone, not merely that nobody
happens to be counselling them this exact minute.)
### The two moods
| Mood | Value | Duration | Stacks to | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| **Counselled** | **+6** | 2 days | 3 | "Someone sat with me and listened. It helped, a little." |
| **Neglected** | **−8** | 3 days | 4 | "They locked me in here for my own good and then forgot about me." |
Neglect is **asymmetric** — a −8 penalty stacking four deep (−32) badly outweighs three counselling
lifts (+18). That's intentional: a neglected patient's mood falls, which raises their break risk,
which is exactly the crisis you committed them to avoid. A ward can *manufacture* the break it was
built to prevent. Staff it, or don't build it.
> **Known rough edge:** neglect keys off "not currently under treatment," so a patient treated once a
> week can technically dodge the penalty on the single day their treatment runs out. It's a documented
> quirk, not yet smoothed.
---
## How it stacks with recruitment (and everything else)
Because psychiatric care is a non-exclusive toggle, it layers onto whatever else you've set:
| You want to… | Set | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Just stabilise a broken colonist | Psychiatric care | Wardens counsel; break threshold drops |
| Talk a captured raider down *and* recruit them | Psychiatric care **+** Attempt recruit | Both run — counselling lifts mood while resistance is chipped |
| Convert *and* treat | Psychiatric care **+** convert | Both toggle on |
| Work a patient *and* treat them | Psychiatric care **+** Prison Labor's work mode | Both apply. Working a fragile patient is bleak — and it's your call |
The last row is the darkest option the mod exposes, and it exposes it on purpose: Ward doesn't forbid
working a patient, it just makes the trade-off visible.
Because a ward patient is a genuine vanilla prisoner, everything the wider Institution suite does to
prisoners applies to them unchanged — a committed patient can be classified, disciplined, paroled,
searched, and can conceal or improvise contraband. See **Home** for the suite map and **Compatibility**
for how Ward stays out of other mods' way.
---
## Quick reference — the numbers
| Thing | Number |
|---|---|
| Treatment station cost | 40 steel + 2 medicine; needs Medicine Production research |
| Counselling session | ~20 in-game minutes |
| Treatment per session | 0.20 (unskilled) → 0.50 (Social 20) |
| Treatment cap | 1.0 (a full course) |
| Treatment decay | −0.15/day (~a week from full to nothing) |
| Break-threshold effect | −0.10 while treated (breaks less often) |
| Counselled mood | +6, 2 days, stacks to 3 |
| Neglected mood | −8, 3 days, stacks to 4 |
| Neglect check | once per in-game day |
| Warden reward | 60 Social XP per session |
---
## Part of the Institution suite
Institution: Ward is one mod in the **Institution** suite of RimWorld 1.6 mods — Ward, plus
**Institution: Core**, **Institution: Contraband**, **Institution: Justice**, **Institution: Gangs**,
and **Foul Play**. Each stands alone; together they interlock. A committed patient rides the same
prisoner rail the rest of the suite polices, so a psychiatric ward is also a secure context where a
patient can conceal and improvise contraband exactly as a prisoner can.
Home.md
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# Institution: Gangs
# Institution: Ward
*Gangs as **contraband economies** — not mood. The social capstone of the **Institution** suite of
RimWorld 1.6 mods.*
**Involuntary psychiatric commitment for RimWorld 1.6 — the third pawn state, neither free nor guilty.**
> **The psychiatric-care layer of the [Institution](https://git.onetick.ninja/flan/rimworld-institution)
> suite.** Ward runs on Core's shared treatment engine and ships bundled in the single Institution
> install with a toggle of its own; it still installs standalone (needing only Institution: Core and
> Harmony). Once a separate sister mod, now folded in.
RimWorld gives a person exactly two places to stand: **colonist**, or **prisoner**. There is no
third state for someone who is neither free nor guilty. Out of the box you cannot commit anyone. A
colonist breaks, wanders off, punches a wall, recovers on their own, and goes back to hauling steel
as though nothing happened. Mental breaks are episodic and amnesiac — nothing persists, nothing is
*done* about them.
Ward adds the missing state, and the room to put it in. A colonist you arrest can be set to
**psychiatric care**. Wardens counsel them at a **treatment station**. A room with prisoner beds
and a treatment station is a **psychiatric ward**, not a prison cell. Treatment lowers the patient's
mental-break threshold while it lasts — and it fades, so it has to be *sustained*. A ward you don't
staff is worse than no ward at all.
---
## What Gangs is
## The third state RimWorld doesn't have
Gangs turns the loose, disposed pawns in your colony — colonists, prisoners, slaves — into a
**network** that moves contraband. When disposition and circumstance line up, pawns who already share
a bond band together, and a member who holds a stash quietly resupplies a member who has none. A
search that turns up nothing on one prisoner has therefore *not* cleaned out the wing: the wing is a
supply chain, and you only searched one link.
The reason "commit a colonist" isn't a stock button is simple: vanilla only knows two kinds of held
person — a free colonist and a prisoner. There's no built-in slot for someone who is neither free nor
guilty, which is why other mods that keep a not-quite-colonist around (like *Hospitality* and its
guests) have to work so hard to maintain them.
That is the entire point, and it is a deliberately narrow one. Gangs does not do mood. It does not do
a "gang leader buff." It does the one thing nothing else in the ecosystem does — it makes contraband
**flow between pawns**, and then hands you the tools to cut the flow.
**Ward takes the cheap road.** A committed pawn *is* a prisoner — arresting your own colonist already
does that. Ward just adds a new **way to handle** that prisoner: a "psychiatric care" mode you toggle
on, sitting alongside vanilla's recruit / convert / release options. Nothing exotic — it's the same
kind of custom prisoner mode other prison mods already add.
## The gap it fills (and the one it doesn't)
So committing someone is entirely ordinary from the game's point of view:
If you run **Prisoner Realism**, its *Ringleader* system already models a dominant prisoner spreading
unrest and mood contagion through a wing. That system is good, and Gangs does not touch it. Ringleader
owns *influence and mood*.
- **psychiatric care** — a new prisoner interaction mode you switch on
- **the psychiatric ward** — a new room role a cell earns once it holds a treatment station
- **counselling** — a new warden job, handled like any other warden work
- the **treatment station**, the **recovery**, the **neglect** — new content layered on top
Gangs owns the thing Ringleader has no equivalent for: **the network as a supply chain.** Contraband
physically changes hands along social lines. A stash on one pawn is a stash available to the whole
gang. The two systems are complementary — run both. Ringleader tells you *who stirs the pot*; Gangs
tells you *how the shivs get around*.
Because Ward *adds* things rather than rewriting how vanilla prisoners behave, it sits quietly next to
the popular psych and prison mods instead of fighting them. Which mods, and why, is on the
**Compatibility** page.
## Why it needs the whole suite
---
Gangs is the module built **last**, because it needs every other Institution mod already in place. It
is not a standalone feature; it is the suite working together, and it is honest about that in its
dependencies:
## Riding the prisoner rail (why the suite cares)
| It asks... | ...and the answer comes from |
The choice that makes Ward *cheap* also makes it *interesting* inside the wider Institution suite. A
committed patient is a genuine vanilla prisoner. That means they're a **held pawn** in exactly the
sense the rest of the suite understands: someone who can be searched, and who can conceal and
improvise contraband. A patient in a psych ward can hoard a shiv or brew something foul in a smuggled
vessel, because the contraband, search, corruption and gang systems already work on any held
prisoner — and a ward patient is one, for free.
**And re-labelling a cell as a ward never lets anyone out.** A ward is a prison cell that also happens
to be a ward — the two roles coexist. Containment, food delivery, and prison breaks all keep working
exactly as they did before you built the station.
---
## Wiki index
| Page | What's on it |
|---|---|
| *Who is disposed enough to join?* | **Institution: Core** — the propensity engine that scores each pawn's Nature and Nurture |
| *What do they move?* | **Institution: Contraband** — concealment, stashes, search, and the bent-warden supply route |
| *Where does a fight get booked, and how are rivals kept apart?* | **Institution: Justice** — the crime/deterrence loop, and Classification's segregation |
Remove any one of those and Gangs has nothing to stand on. It is the place where Core's spectrum,
Contraband's stashes, and Justice's policing all cash out at once.
## A healthy colony grows few gangs — or none
This is the thesis, and it is enforced in the numbers, not just the flavour. Membership is gated at a
Nature × Nurture score of **0.9 or higher** — a high bar on purpose. A disposed pawn who is
**well-kept and well-policed** does not band up: their nurture multiplier stays low, and deterrence
pulls it lower still. It takes a foul streak (nature) *and* a badly-run situation (nurture) at the
same time.
So a gang problem is a **symptom**. It is the game telling you that a wing is mistreated, under-policed,
or both. The fix is never "fight the gang system" — it is to run a better prison. Feed them, give them
recreation, keep deterrence high, segregate rivals, and the networks starve on their own.
> A gang is a symptom of a badly-run colony, not furniture.
## The pages
- **[Joining](Joining.md)** — why the join bar (Nature × Nurture ≥ 0.9) is high, why good treatment and
deterrence keep pawns *out*, and how membership is re-checked for every kind of pawn.
- **[Networks and Smuggling](Networks-and-Smuggling.md)** — how a holder resupplies a needy gangmate,
the *same-gang-and-can-reach* rule, why this defeats a single search, and how a bent warden refills a
starved network from outside.
- **[Rivalry and Fights](Rivalry-and-Fights.md)** — how a gang fight is booked as a crime through
Justice, why inside-the-wire and out-on-the-street are the same offence, and how it feeds deterrence.
- **[Affiliations and Segregation](Affiliations-and-Segregation.md)** — shared faction, faith, or
friendship plus *same room* as the formation rule, why rival factions become rival gangs, and how
Classification's segregation is the counter-play that starves a network which cannot reach itself.
## The suite
Part of the **Institution** suite of RimWorld 1.6 mods:
- **Institution: Core** — the propensity engine (Nature × Nurture), criminal records, secured context.
- **Institution: Contraband** — concealment, improvised shivs, tunnels, warden search and corruption.
- **Institution: Justice** — Classification, Deterrence, Discipline, Parole, Regime.
- **Institution: Gangs** — this mod: joining, networks/smuggling, rivalry/fights.
Sibling projects: **Foul Play** (the vessel/substance framework and the "Piss Nuke") and **Ward** (a
ward/treatment prison mode).
Each mod stands alone as an install; together they form one system.
| **Home** (this page) | What Ward is, the third-state problem, the suite |
| **Commitment** | How commitment works in play: the care mode, the station, the ward room, the warden's job, treatment, recovery, neglect, and how it stacks with recruitment — with the real numbers |
| **Compatibility** | Which popular psych and prison mods Ward plays nicely with, and why it doesn't fight them |
---
## Part of the Institution suite
A set of RimWorld 1.6 mods about what an institution does to the people inside it. Each mod stands
alone as an install; together they interlock into one system — colonists and prisoners drift toward
crime on a spectrum of nature × nurture, and a policing/justice layer discovers, catches, punishes,
reforms, or paroles them. Ward's psychiatric ward is a secure context where a committed patient can
conceal and improvise contraband exactly as a prisoner can, because they ride the same prisoner rail.
| Mod | What it is |
|---|---|
| **Institution: Ward** (this) | Involuntary psychiatric commitment — the third pawn state, neither free nor guilty. |
| **Institution: Core** | The shared engine — propensity (nature × nurture), the criminal record, secured context. |
| **Institution: Contraband** | The physical smuggling loop — conceal, improvise shivs, dig Prison-Architect tunnels, warden search, warden corruption. |
| **Institution: Justice** | Corrections & policing — classification, deterrence, discipline, parole, regime. |
| **Institution: Gangs** | Gangs as contraband economies — joining, smuggling networks, rivalry, fights-as-crime. |
| **Foul Play** | The vessel + substance + throw framework, and the "Piss Nuke" flagship; bridges to Core + Contraband when both are present. |
Reference sibling mods by name — the mods are separate repositories and cross-repo links break.
---
*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.*
Joining.md
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# Joining a gang
*How Gangs decides who runs with a crew — and why a well-run colony keeps almost everyone out.*
Membership is not random, and it is not a mood event. A pawn joins a gang only when their **disposition
and their circumstances line up at once** — the same Nature × Nurture propensity that drives every
other behaviour in the Institution suite. This page covers the exact test, why the bar is set where it
is, and how you keep pawns on the right side of it.
## The rule
A pawn joins when their **Nature multiplied by their Nurture reaches 0.9 or higher**. Only humanlike
pawns are ever eligible — animals and mechs never join.
Beyond that it is one line of arithmetic: multiply the pawn's **Nature** by their **Nurture** and
compare to **0.9**. There is no dice roll here. The same pawn in the same situation always gives the
same answer — join, or don't. (That makes membership different from one-off acts like a piss spree,
which *do* roll the dice each time. Gang membership is a standing condition, so it uses the raw product
with no randomness.)
### The two halves
Both terms come from **Institution: Core** — see Core's own documentation for the full tables — but you
need the shape of them to understand the bar:
- **Nature** (`0` to `1`) is *who the pawn is*: a base of `0.05`, plus trait weights, floored at `0`
and capped at `1`. Psychopath `+0.45`, Bloodlust `+0.35`, Kleptomaniac `+0.40`, Greedy `+0.25`,
Abrasive `+0.15`; and it goes **down** for Kind `−0.30` or Ascetic `−0.15`. This is fixed at pawn
creation and barely moves.
- **Nurture** (a multiplier, roughly `0.4` at the floor, `1.0` at baseline) is *the situation you put
them in*: a floored mood multiplies it up hard (roughly `×2.5` under 0.20 mood, `×1.6` under 0.35),
being held while miserable adds more (`×1.4`), a hardened record (negative reform) raises it, and —
critically — **deterrence pulls it down** (toward about `0.7` in a high-deterrence colony; a neutral,
baseline order sits at `1.0`). This is the half you control.
## Why the bar is high
`0.9` is a deliberately steep threshold. In the design's own words:
> A high bar, on purpose: gangs are a symptom of a badly-run colony, not furniture. A healthy Rimworld
> — content pawns, an orderly colony — grows few gangs, if any.
Because the two terms are **multiplied**, both have to be substantial for the product to clear `0.9`.
A nasty pawn in a happy, policed colony has a low nurture and stays out. A saintly pawn in a hellhole
has a near-zero nature and stays out. You only get a gang when a genuinely disposed pawn is *also*
neglected or unpoliced — foul streak **and** bad situation, together.
That is the design speaking through the arithmetic: a gang is never bad luck. It is feedback.
## Worked examples
All numbers below use Core's documented factors; the intermediate nurture figures are rounded to show
the shape of the decision.
| Pawn | Nature | Situation → Nurture | Product | Joins? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| **Kind colonist**, ordinary life | `0.05 − 0.30`, floored at `0.00` | content, `≈ 1.0` | `0.00` | **No** — nature floors it |
| **Greedy prisoner**, content, policed | `0.30` | fed & high deterrence, `≈ 0.7` | `≈ 0.21` | **No** |
| **Greedy prisoner**, starved & neglected | `0.30` | mood floored + held, `≈ 3.5` | `≈ 1.05` | **Yes** |
| ...same pawn, but you raise deterrence | `0.30` | `× ≈ 0.7` → `≈ 2.45` | `≈ 0.74` | **No** — deterrence tipped them out |
| **Psychopath + Bloodlust**, mood floored | `≈ 0.85` | mood floored + held, `≈ 3.5` | `≈ 2.9` | **Yes** — nothing short of reform pulls this back |
The middle rows are the whole game of it. The **same greedy prisoner** joins or abstains purely on how
you run the wing. The Kind colonist and the near-maxed psychopath are the fixed poles: one essentially
cannot join, the other essentially always will if you neglect them. Everyone in between is a policy
choice.
## It works for every pawn, everywhere
There is no "prisoners only" special case: any pawn — colonist, prisoner, slave — can run with a crew,
wherever they are.
Membership pays no attention to a pawn's secured status. A disposed **free colonist** can run with a
crew on the outside; a **prisoner** can run with theirs on the inside; a **slave** likewise. This is
what lets a gang span the wall — an outside member and an inside member of the same crew (see
[Networks and Smuggling](Networks-and-Smuggling.md)). Being held raises nurture (misery), but it is not
a requirement.
## The cadence: every 5000 ticks
Gang membership is re-evaluated on a fixed interval — every **5000 ticks**, which is about **2 in-game
hours** (a RimWorld day is 60,000 ticks), or roughly **80 seconds** of real time at normal (1×) speed.
On each pass, the game:
1. Gathers everyone on the map who currently meets the Nature × Nurture ≥ 0.9 join bar.
2. Pairs up unaffiliated members who **share a room and a bond** into gangs (see
[Affiliations and Segregation](Affiliations-and-Segregation.md)).
3. Runs one round of network resupply inside each gang (see
[Networks and Smuggling](Networks-and-Smuggling.md)).
Because the join bar is re-checked from scratch every pass, membership is *live*: a pawn whose situation
improves until the product drops back under `0.9` simply stops being eligible to form new bonds. The
bar is not a one-time gate at recruitment — it is a standing condition the colony is continuously graded
against.
## How to keep pawns out
You do not fight the gang system. You lower nurture, which lowers the product, which drops pawns below
`0.9`:
- **Feed them and give them recreation.** Mood is the biggest nurture multiplier by far. A wing above
0.35 mood loses the `×2.5`/`×1.6` spikes entirely.
- **Keep deterrence high** (Institution: Justice). Deterrence scales nurture down toward `0.7`; a
well-policed colony is *arithmetically* less gang-prone. This is the row in the table above where the
same greedy prisoner flips from *joins* to *abstains*.
- **Reform, don't just punish.** A hardened record (negative reform) *raises* nurture; discipline that
actually reforms (positive reform) lowers it. Harsh punishment that prisonizes a pawn makes the
gang problem worse, not better.
- **Accept the two poles.** A near-maxed psychopath will run with someone the moment you slip; a Kind
pawn essentially never will. Spend your attention on the middle.
---
*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.*
Networks-and-Smuggling.md
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# 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.
---
*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.*
Rivalry-and-Fights.md
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# Rivalry and fights
*Two gangs, one grudge. A gang fight is a **crime** — booked, attributed, and fed back into the colony's
climate of order.*
Gangs do not just supply themselves; they collide. Where the network is about who shares, rivalry is
about who is opposed — and, crucially, about turning gang violence into something the rest of the
suite can *see* and *police*.
## Who is a rival
The rule is exactly as blunt as it sounds: **two pawns in two different gangs are rivals.** Both must
actually be in a gang, and it must be a *different* gang for each. As the design puts it:
> Two pawns of DIFFERENT gangs are rivals — inside the wire or out on the street.
Note what is *not* required. There is no separate "hostility" flag, no rival-declaration event, no
threshold to cross. The moment two crews exist, their members are rivals of one another. Rivalry is a
structural fact about who is in which gang, not a mood or a relationship value.
Two consequences fall straight out of that:
- **Non-members are nobody's rival.** A pawn in no gang — everyone in a healthy colony — is never a
rival to anyone, because rivalry needs *both* pawns to be in a gang. No gangs, no rivalry.
- **Same gang, never rivals.** Members of one crew are in the *same* gang, so they are not rivals.
Within a gang there is no rivalry to book; there is the network (see
[Networks and Smuggling](Networks-and-Smuggling.md)).
Where do two *different* gangs come from in the first place? From the affiliations pawns already have —
rival factions and rival ideoligions form into separate crews. That is the subject of
[Affiliations and Segregation](Affiliations-and-Segregation.md); the short version is that gangs mesh
with the colony's existing social fault lines, so **rival factions run as rival gangs.**
## A fight is a crime
The payoff of tracking rivalry is what happens when rivals fight. When a rival-gang attack happens, it
is not treated as generic brawling — it is booked as a crime through the same Justice pipeline as any
other offence.
Only rival-gang violence counts: the two pawns must be in different gangs for anything to be recorded.
A scuffle between gangmates, or between two non-members, is not a *gang* fight and is not booked. When
it *is* rival-gang violence, the whole event is recorded as a crime against the **attacker**, and that
does three things at once (they live in Institution: Justice, but this is what Gangs is leaning on):
| Effect of booking a gang fight | Where it lands |
|---|---|
| the attacker's crime count goes up | their criminal record (Core) |
| the time of the crime is stamped to now | their criminal record (Core) |
| the colony's **deterrence** nudges **down** (a crime happened; order slipped) | Justice's deterrence system |
## Inside the wire and out on the street are the same offence
This is the design point the mod is emphatic about:
> A gang fight is a CRIME — it goes on the attacker's record and moves the colony's climate through
> the same Justice loop as any other, so it can be investigated, attributed and policed. Rival-gang
> violence inside a prison and out on the street are the same offence.
There is no separate rule for a prison-yard shanking versus a colonists' brawl in the dining room. A
fight is booked purely on whether the two pawns are rivals. A free colonist who is a gang member
attacking a rival is booked identically to a prisoner doing the same in a cell block. The gang system
does not care which side of the wall the violence is on — only that it was between rivals.
This is what makes gang violence *legible* to the rest of the suite. A fight is not a one-off flavour
event that scrolls past in the log; it is a record entry with an attributed perpetrator and a timestamp,
which means it can be investigated, blamed on a specific pawn, and answered.
## How it feeds deterrence — and back into joining
Here is the loop that closes the whole suite:
1. A rival-gang fight is booked as a crime against the attacker.
2. That nudges the colony's **deterrence down**. Order has visibly slipped.
3. Lower deterrence *raises* the nurture multiplier for **every** disposed pawn on the map (less
deterrence means a bigger multiplier).
4. Higher nurture pushes more pawns over the Nature × Nurture ≥ 0.9 join bar (see
[Joining](Joining.md)).
5. More members → more rivals → more fights available to be booked.
Left unanswered, gang violence is self-reinforcing: each booked fight makes the next one likelier. The
brake is the other half of Justice — **punishment raises deterrence back up**, which lowers nurture,
which drops borderline pawns back under the bar. The seesaw works both ways: punishing a pawn raises the
deterrence level, and a fresh crime lowers it again.
## How to play it
- **Respond to booked fights.** A gang fight is real feedback that deterrence has slipped. Punishing the
attributed attacker is not just retribution — it is the mechanical lever that pulls deterrence back
up and cools the whole map's propensity.
- **Don't manufacture two gangs where there was one.** Rivalry needs two different crews. Housing pawns
of hostile factions or clashing ideoligions together is what creates the second gang and the fights
between them — see the next page.
- **Read the record, not the moment.** Because every fight is attributed to a perpetrator, a thick
record of gang violence points you at *who* to segregate, discipline, or parole — the same tools the
rest of the suite already gives you.
---
*Part of the **Institution** suite — Core · Contraband · Justice · Gangs (this). Each mod stands alone; together they are one system.*
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# Compatibility
Ward is built to sit alongside your existing mod list rather than elbow it aside. The trick is that
Ward mostly **adds** things — a new "psychiatric care" prisoner mode, a new building, a new room role,
new jobs — instead of rewriting how vanilla prisoners already behave. And a committed patient isn't a
new kind of pawn: they're an ordinary vanilla prisoner with an extra "treat me" flag switched on. So
any mod that already works with prisoners keeps working with a ward patient, and Ward stays out of its
way.
Here's how Ward gets along with the popular psych and prison mods:
| Mod | How it coexists with Ward |
|---|---|
| **Hospitality** | Hospitality manages *guests*; Ward manages *prisoners*. They ride two completely separate rails and never touch. |
| **Prison Labor** | Psychiatric care is a toggle, so you can put a patient **to work *and* in treatment at the same time**. No conflict, no either/or. |
| **Custom Prisoner Interactions** | That mod tweaks the built-in warden interactions (chat, convert, enslave, release). Ward's counselling is a *separate* job of its own, so the two don't overlap. |
| **Prison Commons** | Ward's warden work automatically respects prison-commons areas — you get that for free, without either mod knowing about the other. |
| **Psychology (unofficial) · Rim Disorders · More Mental Breaks** | These reshape the mental-break and mental-illness machinery. Ward doesn't touch that machinery — it just nudges the break *threshold* the way a mood effect would — so they all stack. |
| **Prisoner Realism** | It changes how the game decides what counts as a prison cell. Ward's ward role sits on top of that without breaking containment — a ward is still a prison cell. |
| **Locks · Restraints · Prisoner Recreation** | All fine. They touch prisoner behaviours Ward leaves alone. |
| **Dubs Bad Hygiene** | No overlap at all. |
| **Royalty · Ideology · Biotech** | Ward works with or without the DLC. Psychiatric care is available even if you don't run Ideology's ideoligions. |
The general rule: because Ward *adds* rather than *overrides*, it should also coexist with prison and
psych mods that aren't on this list. If you ever find one it genuinely fights, that's a bug worth
reporting — Ward's whole design is built around not doing that.
---
## Part of the Institution suite
The Institution suite — **Institution: Core**, **Institution: Contraband**, **Institution: Justice**,
**Institution: Gangs**, **Foul Play**, and **Institution: Ward** — is a set of RimWorld 1.6 mods about
what an institution does to the people inside it. Each stands alone; together they interlock. Ward's
psychiatric ward is a secure context where a committed patient can conceal and improvise contraband
exactly as a prisoner can, because they ride the same prisoner rail the rest of the suite polices.