Bounty Hunters
Last Updated: January 6th, 2020
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Bounty Hunters serves two purposes within Crime And Punishment. We'll first look at how they are used as a policing force, called upon when your criminal activities are at a level that would merit being hunted down and called to task for your actions.

Whether you are using simplified or tiered crime reporting, at some point, if you have bounty hunters enabled in the MCM, they will come looking for you when your crime levels reach your defined threshold. And when they do come looking for you, you have a few different ways in which to approach the situation. The key thing for you to know is that when the hunters spawn in the world, they will walk, trying to find you. If they happen to get close enough to spot you, they will announce out loud that they have acquired their target, you will see an onscreen notice, advising you that you have been seen, and the bounty hunters will start to run towards you. They will not, by default state, be immediately hostile. And this is where your choices come into effect.

1) You can try to run or just ignore their approach. Should you do either of these things, after a set amount of time, the hunters will realize you do not wish to parlay and they will turn hostile, attempting to take you out.

2) You can simply decide to open fire on them. This will make them immediately hostile towards you. Or,

3) You can wait for them to catch up to you, or approach them yourself and enter dialogue with the NPC designated as the Bounty Hunter Leader. The typical hunters will not enter into dialogue with you.

4) If you manage to evade the hunters long enough, they will despawn for a random period of time, before coming back into the game world to hunt you again. if you observe this behavior, it is intended.

Before going into what happens during dialogue events, I would like to say that if you enable the Combat Surrender System, in instances where you have opted to deal with the hunters using options one or two, you can always surrender to them, which will begin the dialogue that would normally occur should you have opted for option three, minus the fact that the dialogue is quiet aware of whether you willingly entered into dialogue or were forced into it via surrendering to them in combat.

NOTE: If you kill the bounty hunter leader, or if they die due to any other NPC interactions, surrender and dialogue will not be available to you!

So you have decided to enter into dialogue or willingly surrendered to the hunters and were forced into it. What next?

Essentially, whether you use simplified or tiered reporting, you will have choices as to how you want to deal with being caught. If you are using simplified reporting, everything is more or less contained within a single scene and you have less options available to you, per the crimes you have committed. Meaning, all crimes have equal weight, so the kind of punishment is the same across the board. You could, in theory, face a capital punishment outcome just for stealing pop! On the other hand, if you use tiered reporting, the kinds of punishments available to you are weighted. The lower your criminal warrant, the easier on you the penalties will be.

Penalties range, no matter the reporting used, between paying a fine, or if you cannot pay, your gear is taken and stored in Diamond City Jail for a period of time, to allow you to collect the money to pay your fines and get your gear back. However, if you fail to pay the fine on time, you will lose whatever they have taken away from you and you will never get it back. You could also face penalties such as imprisonment in the jail, or public humiliations in the Diamond City Market. You may have to do community service or you may find yourself swinging from the short end of a rope.

When you start the mod, it asks a series of questions relating to you having been to Diamond City or not in the current game. These questions tell CAP exactly what punishments it can use on you. For example, if you haven't seen the two brothers scene in the market yet, public humiliation will not be an option until such a time as you do see this scene. The same goes with the mayor's speech. If you don't see it, public hangings will not be available, and instead, you will just be summarily executed on the spot by the bounty hunters. If you answer no to all of those (and any combination of those) questions, the mod will listen for their completion and update its own internal variables to unlock those possible outcomes. Of importance, if you answer no to having ever been to Diamond City, jailing will not be an option either, so as to preserve the introduction to Piper at the main gates.

Another key note to take heed of is that certain options are not available when you are located outside of the Commonwealth, such as in Far Harbor or in Nuka World - it would make no sense for hunters there to drag you to Diamond City Jail, so that, as an outcome, will never happen. Even if it is a capital punishment outcome, you will just be shot in the head, on the spot.

Now, if you decide to deal with the hunters from a combat perspective, be warned that killing them doesn't erase the bounty on you. In fact, it increases it! So if you killed 4 hunters that came after you, the next batch to come would be of stronger stock and in greater numbers. This holds true up to 12 hunters and 4 tracking hounds coming in a single group to find you. So think ahead before pulling that trigger!

Note: When you are taken to jail, the benches can be sat on, but they cannot be used to pass time with WAIT. The sleeping bags are similarly blocked from being used to SLEEP away your sentence. You will, at intervals, be given access to the sleeping bags so you can sleep (for those using survival mode or Advanced Needs 2), but once you wake, they will be blocked again for a certain amount of time. This was done to give that role playing element to those who want to feel their incarceration. There are options in the MCM to reduce jail time spent.

Bounty Hunters have a second possible visibility in your game, via random encounters, whereby they will be engaged versus a group of raiders, attackers versus defenders kind of thing. These events are triggered whether in an urban or non-urban environment, notably in places such as the shelled out two-story building between Lexington and College Square and the abandoned car dealership between Fallons and GNN. Regardless of your criminal standing, these bounty hunters will not interact with you. Unfortunately, the complexity involved in that was outside of being possible.

And finally, bounty hunters, via the Bounty Hunter Agent, located in Diamond City Security, can, aside from taking your caps when you need to pay a fine, give you jobs. These jobs are either kill or capture bounties, aimed at named Raider Bosses.

Kill quests are simple enough, you go where they are and you kill them. Return to the agent to be paid upon completion.

Capture quests fall into two categories; easy and challenging. If you opt for easy captures, the moment you make an enemy raider boss surrender to you (which operates separately from the combat surrender system) and you tell them via dialogue that they are coming with you, you will be teleported to Diamond City Security and the boss will be transferred inside the jail cell. You can then collect your fees.

If you opt for challenging captures, you will need to walk the captured boss from their base to Diamond City Security, which can be both fun and painful. While escorting a captured boss, you will need to pay attention to them, as they will always be on the lookout for an opportunity to escape from you. If you need to sleep, it is a good idea to restrain them while you do. You can restrain them by having handcuffs in your inventory and moving close to them. You will see an option appear to restrain them. Once you sleep, you can unbind them in the same "get close and select the option" method. While walking them, should you want to scout an area or will enter into combat, simply tell them to STAY, at which point they will get down on their knees. This may or may not, depending on combat length or types of hostiles being faced, reduce their chances of trying to get away from you. You can also bash them with your gun or punch them, in order to show them who's boss. Finally, you can equip transmitter collars on them, which will allow you to be able to track them should they run away. Without one equipped on them, after they get a certain distance away from you, the quest will fail and they will return to their base location, forcing you to go back to the hunter to get a new quest. Going after them during a failed quest scenario is outside of the capture quest system and would just be a wasted effort, if your goal was to actually capture and deliver them for a payout.

Another possible outcome of escorting a captured boss would be a chokepoint random encounter event, where raiders may spawn in right quarter locations, forcing you into a combat scenario, as they try to get their boss away from you. In this event, you will find the boss more likely to bolt or join in the fight against you.

Note: CAP is aware of the installation of Knockout Framework and as such, you will have a fourth dialogue option during initial surrender of the boss, in which you can knock them out. Using that mod's interaction menu, you can select kidnap in order to bundle them up and then deliver them to Diamond City Security, dumping the bag on the floor once you are inside the jail cell.

No matter how you get them there, you need simply direct them into the jail cell, where upon entering it, the door will close and you can then go and collect your fees.

One other task the Agent has is to sell items that may be of use to you during your bounty hunting, be it handcuffs or transmitter collars or prisoner jumpsuits. Another thing thing to note about the Agents, if that they collect your fines. And they will also allow you to pay off any incidental crimes you have committed, resetting your crime rating to 0.

The Bounty Hunter Agent may also take jobs from you, in terms of auto-resolving those pesky Radiant Quests that Preston (or the MM radio station) gives you. If you have Defend Settlement, Rescue Kidnapped Trader or Eliminate Raider type Radiant Quests, you can hire the bounty hunters, for 250 caps, to take of the quest for you.

Note: The Agent will not give you any bounty jobs, or accept jobs from you, while you have a criminal rating. It must be at zero value in order to receive a quest from them.

There controls in the MCM to govern the quests the agent will give you, key among them being a slider that allows you to alter the percentage chance of kill quests to capture quests. Kill quests, by default, have a much higher chance of happening, since I know most people will not want a slew of captures, especially when they could be challenging level. As a note to this, if you have a capture set to challenging and then try to change it in the MCM after a quest has been given, this will not alter the currently running quest! That change would only take effect on the next one!

You can also make the captures a little more challenging by adding extra hit points to the boss, or by enabling a hardcore mod, which adds bodyguards near the boss, who also have increased hit points.