Ethical Kidnapping & Ransom - Prison Mod

Source & full guide: github.com/teamdemivfxfish-dev/ethical-kidnapping-wiki

Subdue, don't slaughter. Ethical Kidnapping turns a kill into a capture. Drop a player or villager into a bleeding-out crawl, drag them home on a lead while they fight you the whole way, and lock them in a cell you built by hand, with patrolling guards, real escape attempts, and a ransom on their head.

No hard dependencies. Built for SMP servers, factions, and modpacks where a fight should end in leverage, not a respawn screen. Plays nicely with MineColonies, real server economies, and your faction wars, and doubles as the roomiest, safest villager housing in the game.

Capture, Don't Kill

Enchant a weapon with Non-Lethal (or flip one config switch to make every weapon non-lethal). The blow that would have killed the target instead downs them into a bleeding-out crawl. No corpse, no respawn, no dropped gear.

• Works on players and villagers alike
• A downed victim glows, is slowed, and can only crawl at half a heart
• Allies can revive a downed friend by holding right-click, or a second hit finishes the job
• Bleed-out runs on a timer: rescue them, claim them, or lose them

Drag Them Home

Right-click a downed target with a Lead and haul them back to base, a custom rope for players, a vanilla leash for villagers. Captives are not cargo; they resist you every step, which turns the trip home into a genuine tug-of-war.

• Captives hold right-click to struggle; a live ESCAPE meter and a STRAIN meter show every heave
• The captor can fasten the lead to set that progress back, but each fasten frays the rope until it SNAPS
• Dragging slows the captor, and a loose lead means a quiet escape can go unnoticed
• No jumping, no ladders, no hopping into a boat; a held captive stays held
• Rage-log mid-drag and a stand-in stays on your lead, dropping into the cell the moment they return

Build the Prison

Craft a Prison Terminal (a single Lead ringed by 8 Iron Bars), seal a room, drop a bed inside, and register your cell. Glass, bars, doors, and trapdoors all count as walls, so a feeding hatch or a display window will not break the seal.

• Set the ransom price and how many prisoners the cell holds
• Build the prison you want: a glass-walled display cell or a buried bunker
• Doubles as honest "ethical villager housing", a genuine walk-in room, no harm done
• Prisoners cannot set their spawn at the cell bed

Post the Guards

Stock the terminal with iron and carved pumpkins and it raises Iron Golem wardens that actually understand the cell.

• 4 Iron Blocks + 1 Carved Pumpkin per golem; auto-respawn from stock, or hit "Spawn now"
• Set a Stationed Guards count and the cell keeps that many posted at all times
• Smart posting: sentries stand at the weak points (door, feeding chute, barred window, thinnest wall, exposed roof), face outward, and rotate posts like a real patrol
• The moment a prisoner breaches, guards chase, subdue, and drag them back, healed and re-imprisoned
• Running Hundred Years War? Feed soldier scrolls to post HYW troops as wardens instead

Real Escape Attempts

No cell is truly inescapable (unless you want it to be). Prisoners chip at the walls with bare hands and crude tools under heavy Mining Fatigue, scavenging scraps as they go, but every exit is covered.

• Tunnel into a thick wall and the cell simply grows to swallow it; break through to open air and the chase begins
• Teleport-proof: ender pearls, chorus fruit, /tp, and warp mods all fizzle for a prisoner, and they cannot ride out on boats, minecarts, or horses
• Escape line is the colony border (inside a MineColonies claim) or a flat distance you set
• Freed players get a few seconds of trap-protection so they aren't instantly re-downed
• One config switch makes a truly inescapable cell when you would rather not deal with tunnels

Name Your Price

Press K to open the prisoner and ransom tabs. Anyone can pay a captive's ransom in an item or in real server money, and the captor gets paid even while offline.

• Pick the currency with one config key: an item, SDM Economy, or Lightman's Currency
• Paying teleports the prisoner home with their gear intact
• Offline captives are freed on next login; nobody is stuck forever
• Balance-checked both ways: never freed for free, and an offline captor still collects

Built for Servers

Designed for live multiplayer, not a single-player gimmick, and the annoying loopholes are already closed.

• Anti-grief: a prison cannot tunnel into a MineColonies colony it does not belong to
• Rage-log protection: logging off mid-capture will not save you
• Post-release immunity stops spawn-camping the freshly freed
• Confiscation covers modded accessory slots too; no sneaking a spellbook into the cell

Controls & Crafting

Requirements & Compatibility

Ethical Kidnapping has no hard dependencies and works standalone. Everything below is optional and detected at runtime.

The mod is driven entirely by items and blocks and ships no player-facing commands. Deep tuning lives in config/kidnapransom-common.toml.

Supported Versions

Built for Minecraft 1.16.5, 1.18.2, 1.19.2, 1.20.1 and 1.21.1, on both Forge and NeoForge.

Make them pay.

Part of The Warborn Realm, by barunn