Institution: Ward
Involuntary psychiatric commitment for RimWorld 1.6 — the third pawn state, neither free nor guilty.
The psychiatric-care layer of the 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.
The third state RimWorld doesn't have
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.
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.
So committing someone is entirely ordinary from the game's point of view:
- 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
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.
Riding the prisoner rail (why the suite cares)
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 |
|---|---|
| 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.