Prisoner Settlement System
Last Updated: January 7th, 2020
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Within this system, you have a new means to build your settlement populations, or to collect those raiders like they were Pokemon.

Obtaining Prisoners

You gain prisoner settlers by capturing surrendered enemies in combat. There are a few different types of prisoners you can have, be they raider, gunner, trapper or anyone else who qualifies for surrendering to the player. Once you enter into dialogue with a surrendered enemy, you will have a speech challenge option available to convert them to a prisoner. If you succeed, they will be cloned into a workshop capable NPC with some customer scripting on their actor records to use this system. At this point, you need simply tell them which settlement they are to be assigned to and they will function just like any other settler NPC, albeit with those added script functions attached to them.

Note: The system is built to try to prevent you from spamming your settlements by blocking the addition of prisoners when you no longer have space in your settlements. Since there are numerous around this, via console or other mods, I have hard coded the limit to be charisma plus ten. Yes, I know you can simply alter your charisma, but this was done for a reason, to protect your game from bloat and instability from putting 200 settlers in each settlement. In cases where the settlement system has no yet recycled it's counts, be smart about it - don't overload your settlements with prisoners. Try to use a little common sense.

Understanding And Preventing Revolt And Uprising Events

Every settlement location stores data relating to it's current prisoner count and prisoner uprising potential. When you assign a prisoner to a settlement, not only will you suffer a happiness dip, but you will find that as time progresses, unmonitored prisoners will grow more and more bold, seeking to escape or maybe even trying to take over the settlement. This check occurs every couple of game days, although you can configure the duration between checks via the MCM. Of course there are ways to manage it and remove the possibility of an event occurring, but most of these would be considered negative karma actions.

The simplest, and incidentally, karma neutral way to do this is to always ensure you have more normal settlers than prisoner settlers in any given settlement. The idea here is to approximate a "lead by example" setup. In instances where you do not have more settlers than prisoners, you can simply build a lot of settlement defense items, like turrets or guard posts.

The other way to handle this is through punishment items, such as pillories, jails, suspended cages or shackles. For the most part, these will not incur a karma penalty on you, as these are not overly considered to be cruel and unusual punishments. Docking a prisoner in a gallows will incur a penalty however, as that is akin to murdering a non-combatant. On the upside, it will lower your settlement's uprising rating by 25 points. Its a trade off.

You can manage your prisoners via dialogue, where you can use positive or negative reinforcement to try to stem to flow of revolt. Note that beating your prisoners is remembered and is cumulative. The more you unload on a prisoner, the less likely the beating will have an impact in lowering revolt chances.

And finally, after the requisite amount of time has passed, you can simply speak to your prisoners and convert them to normal settlers, which removes them from the prisoner settlement system within CAP and hands them over to the workshopparent script in the base game.

Note: Prisoners that are locked in jails using the animation markers or locked in shackles, cages or pillories (and gallows too!) are excluded from uprising chances, not because they wouldn't want to revolt but more because blocking them from this prevents AI package conflicts and potential issues in trying to get them involved in such things. Their scripting for being docked in their assigned places is fairly iron clad and there is no real way to break that without completely unraveling them from the settlement system and workshopparent. Its not undoable, but the system is script heavy enough as it is and the benefits of breaking them out of the system, to the resource overhead costs were not equal.

What Can Happen If Prisoners Rise Up?

Two possible events at time of the mod's initial release.

One, a random prisoner will try to make a break for it. You can choose to go after them, ignore them (allow them to escape) or you will have a very small window of opportunity to press CAP's contextual hotkey, which will detonate their collar, separating head from body.

Two, all prisoners that are not hung in a gallows will immediately turn hostile and attack the settlement. It will be up to you to quell the rebellion and restore order. You have 24 hours to get to the settlement to resolve the issue or the settlement will be lost. If you are forced into surrender while trying to retain the settlement, you will lose it. If you lose a settlement, the only way to retake it is to kill all of the prisoners and any turrets that have taken over. If you do lose one, any companion NPCs assigned to that settlement will automatically be moved to the nearest owned settlement and automatically assigned to it. That same goes for "unique" NPCs, like the Sanctuary Five for example or the Abernathys. Random spawned NPCs will be killed, as if the prisoners executed them. Babies will remain, as will children, if you have that system enabled. Children will convert to a raider lifestyle and if they happen to grow into settlers, they too will be converted to raiders.