Slavery

While slavery technically exists in the base game, the Ideology DLC significantly adds to the system, allowing them to work and perform tasks. Slaves in base game RimWorld can only be sold for profit, with no other use.

Core

Slavery is a quick way to get decent amounts of money quickly. Pawns will suffer a mood penalty of -5, stacking up to -25 for 3 days once slaves are sold. Unless you have a colony of psychos, selling slaves may bring down your colony by lowering the moods of pawns by large increments. There is no way to mitigate the negative moodlet. One way of dealing with this is to sell only 1-2 slaves every day in the late game, when pawns can take drugs and eat lavish meals, and avoiding slavery altogether in the early game. This has a downside, however. Traders generally only stay for around two days, and only appear occasionally, meaning that it will be hard making slavery the main source of profit for the colony. Alternatively, you can stuff all of your pawns into cryptosleep caskets or give them extra high accommodation to prepare for the massive mood debuff and have the best psychopath trader (if using the cryptosleep tactic, otherwise, use the best trader colony-wide) sell as many slaves as possible.

Ideology

Slaves are controllable, like normal colonists, but with unique mechanics and restrictions.

Pros:

• No need for recreation
• Slave specific expectations meaning higher base mood
• Ignore all work type incapabilities except that which slavery itself adds, therefore pawns with many incapabilities can actually be more useful as slaves.
• Will never insult or social fight with non-slave pawns
• <add others here>

Cons:

• Prison rebellions
• New incapabilities: cannot hunt, make art, research or warden. Currently unclear if they can do other social activities like trade.
• Suffers a -15% penalty to Global Work Speed which in turn reduces:

Animal Gather Speed, Butchery Speed, Construction Speed, Cooking Speed, Deep Drilling Speed, Drug Synthesis Speed, Entity Study Rate, General Labor Speed, Hacking Speed, Mechanoid Shredding Speed, Medical Operation Speed, Medical Tend Speed, Mining Speed, Plant Work Speed, Pruning Speed, Research Speed, Smelting Speed, Smoothing Speed

Acquiring Slaves

Slaves can be created by reducing the will of a prisoner to zero.

Slave Relationships

Slaves can start relationships with any other slave or even another colonist. This is troublesome, as slaves cannot be assigned to the same bed as a colonist, but can still sleep in the same room. If you want both to be together, you need to make either both slaves or both colonists.

Slave Rebellion

Slaves will occasionally rebel, staging something similar to a prison break. Slaves will turn hostile and uncontrollable, and will try to find weapons to attack nearby colonists. The rebellion interval is based on mood, suppression, proximity of weapons, and colonists present on the map, with a base interval of 45 days.

Suppression

Slave collars and body straps increase suppression. Marine armor and duster decrease suppression

Authority

Effects of dusters, authority caps, slave collars, slave body straps, terror sculptures, skullspikes, having weapons nearby, the public execution ritual

Version history

• 1.3.3072 - Tune slave rebellion chances a bit lower, and reduce the effects of some factors. Slave weapon noticing distance reduced from 10 to 6.9.
• 1.3.3074 - Slaves no longer slight or insult non-slaves, Slaves never start social fights with non-slaves if insulted, Meleeing a slave now increases suppression, Rebellion chance per slave now relates inversely to the number of slaves on the map, so overall rebellion chance shouldn't climb so aggressively with higher slave counts, Adjust slave rebellion base MTB 50 days back to 45 days.
• 1.3.3076 - Added Alert for likely slave rebellion.