Prison
"Two stone wings off Central Plaza, behind the Bank. The clerks call it 'the back office' - the city watch calls it what it is."
Wildoria has a jail. It's not just lore - it's a real mechanic that locks your character to the prison area, hides most of the city from them, and runs a small economy of its own behind the bars.
The system is built around one principle: prison is not idle time. Sentences run long enough to feel like a sentence, but the gameplay continues inside the walls and the prison's own profession shifts let an active player cut the time roughly in half.
Why a character ends up in prison
Each sentence carries a reason code. Reasons differ in trigger, duration curve, and whether bail is allowed.
| Reason | Trigger | Base | Max | Bail? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Debt | Debt (compound interest) crossed the threshold | 6 h | 1 day | No |
| Capture | A wanted citizen taken by the watch on the road (Article M-501) | variable | - | No |
| Theft v1.6.0 | Caught stealing from an NPC or player | 6 h | 1 day | Yes |
| Assault v1.7.0 | A PvP or NPC assault offense | 6 h | 2 days | No |
| GM Custom | A GameMaster's manual ban | GM chooses | none | No |
Today's automatic triggers are Debt and Capture (Article M-501) - the latter when a wanted citizen is caught by the watch while travelling. A capture sentence scales with how badly you are wanted: the higher your notoriety, the longer you serve. Theft and assault arrive with the matching gameplay systems; GM custody is the moderation tool the team uses for emergencies. The full story of the road and the watch lives in The Roads and the Watch.
How time works inside
Wildoria runs at 6x real-world time (1 game day ≈ 4 real hours, see Day Cycle). Sentences are stored in real-world time in the database, but the character card displays them in game time - hover the timer for the real-world equivalent.
This is a deliberate choice, different from the Bank's interest rates: the Bank's figures are financial concepts and run on the real calendar, while prison sits closer to lore, so expressing it in game time keeps it consistent with the city's rhythm.
| Reason | Real-world | Game time |
|---|---|---|
| Debt Tier 1 | 6 h | ~1.5 game days |
| Debt Tier 2 | 12 h | ~3 game days |
| Debt Tier 3 | 24 h | ~6 game days |
| Theft (base) / Assault (base) | 6 h | ~1.5 game days |
| Theft (max, 2x repeat) | 24 h | ~6 game days |
| Assault (max, 3x repeat) | 48 h | ~12 game days |
The philosophy: a first sentence is 6 real hours (~1.5 game days). Repeats (theft/assault) or a debt cascade stretch punishingly longer. An active player can halve the remaining time through prison work shifts.
Repeated offenses on the same reason within 30 days (theft/assault) double
the base sentence each time, capped at the reason's max. A clean 30-day
stretch resets the counter - the State rewards a cooled-off citizen. Debt
uses cascade thresholds (x2.0 / x2.5 / x3.0) instead of repeat-doubling.
Multi-character semantics
Money in Wildoria is account-level (uid). The wallet, your loans, and
your savings all sit on the account, not the character. Punishment, on
the other hand, is character-level: the character who signed for the
loan is the one who serves the sentence.
MONEY layer → USER level (wallet, loans, savings)
PUNISHMENT layer → CHARACTER (jail, prison-bars overlay, area lock)
Three rules follow from this asymmetry:
- The debt is signed. Bank loans now record
signer_cid- the character active when you tap Borrow. If the loan defaults, that character goes to jail. Your other characters keep playing. - Capture stays user-level. The Bank's 50% income capture takes half of every coin earned by any of your characters until the loan closes. Sending a different character to grind doesn't escape the debt - it just funds it.
- New-loan lock. While any character on your account is in debt
jail, the Bank refuses to open a new loan from any character
(
household_in_debt_jail). One bad debt locks the entire household until it's served.
The catastrophic-default exception
If a user keeps stacking debt - tier-3 within the last 90 days and outstanding above 5x max_loan - the Bank invokes the household reckoning: every active character on the account lands a 6-hour debt sentence, filed as a household default. Normal play never reaches this trigger. It exists to make abuse more painful than just walking away.
Inside the walls
Prison is not a lockout - it's a restricted region of the game.
| Action | Outside jail | In jail |
|---|---|---|
| Chat (global, guild, party) | Yes | Yes |
| Inventory + use items | Yes | Yes |
| Savings withdraw | Yes | Yes |
| Loan repay | Yes | Yes |
| Marketplace buy | Yes | Yes |
| Marketplace list | Yes | No |
| Take a new loan | Yes | (household lockout) |
| In-city NPC interaction | Yes | (prison NPCs only) |
| Outside city (wilderness, mines) | Yes | No |
| Quest accept | Yes | (jail-only quests v1.7.0) |
| Profession switch | full list | jail professions only |
| PvP attack | Yes | No |
Digital ownership stays open (your gold, your savings, your inventory). Physical movement and new economic activity close down.
Working off your sentence
The prison has two official professions:
- Prison Laundry
- Prison Kitchen
For a jailed character the profession-switch screen shows only these two; normal professions are hidden until release. Each completed shift shaves 5 minutes off the remaining time. You can roughly halve a 30-minute sentence with about 30 minutes of active play. Even a 24-hour tier-3 sentence can drop to 12 hours with steady work.
The shift system is the existing one (characters_professions_shifts) -
no separate "prison work" ledger. The reduction simply rewinds the
sentence's ends_at timestamp.
Visual cue
A prison-bars overlay is automatically composited over the character's
portrait. The avatar render reads live from characters_sentences, so the
visual flips the instant a character is jailed or released.
How a sentence ends
Three exits:
- The clock runs out (
status = served). The sentence closes in the background and the character returns to normal. - Bail - buy your freedom with coin (only for bail-allowed reasons; mandatory sentences have no bail). The bail cost scales with the crime's base cost times its escalation multiplier, so a repeat offender pays more.
- GameMaster release - a moderator closes it manually
(
status = gm_release).
Leaving debt jail starts a 30-day debt-jail cooldown. During it no new debt-jail is triggered - your debt keeps growing, but you are given time to get back on your feet. Income capture continues through the cooldown, giving the player a real window to burn the debt down.
What prison is not
- Not permanent. There is no "lifelong record" penalty. The sentence ends, the character is free. Reputation can colour your score, but mechanically everything is forgotten.
- Not a tax. Prison is not a mechanism for punishing a player - it is a behaviour filter. Pay your dues and you never see the inside of it.
- Not pay-to-skip. Bail exists, but it is paid in coin, not WLD. Premium currency cannot buy down a sentence.
See also
- Citizen Bank - Loans - the source of the debt-jail trigger
- Citizen Bank - Credit Score - jail
history affects the
On-Time Repaymentfactor - City Buildings - the location of the Citizen Jail