Prisoners and the Labor Pits

Not every enemy has to die. If you carry rope and wear a target down far enough, you can tie them up instead of finishing them, and the person you bring home becomes a prisoner. Prisoners are a currency of their own: Grom, the Pit Master, buys them, takes them as gifts or puts them to work in the camp. Everything below was checked against the game's own rules, so the numbers are exact.

Getting Reinforced Rope

Capturing costs one Reinforced Rope per prisoner, and nothing else will do. There are three ways to get it:

• Your starting stock. A new game begins with 2 rope in the pack, and Grom's opening transmission adds one more when you close it.
• The Workshop. One rope costs 5 Cloth. Cloth is also needed for bandages and upgrades, so craft rope in small batches rather than all at once.
• Kaelen's intel. One of the tips he sells hands you 3 rope from his own stock.

Two or three ropes per expedition is a sensible habit; more only helps if you are chasing a squad of weak enemies.

Capturing in combat

The Capture button sits in the bottom row of the battle HUD beside Take Cover, Bandage, Stimpack and Flee. It works on the enemy you currently have targeted, and it has no hit roll: if every condition is met, the capture succeeds. The button tells you which condition is missing.

A successful capture removes the enemy from the fight at once, adds 1 Prisoner, uses 1 rope and grants 25 to 40 XP on the spot. If it was the last enemy standing, the fight ends in a win. In the Classic View the range check is skipped, so you can capture from any distance, but the 25% rule, the rope and the 2 AP still apply.

The rare free capture

There is also a bonus you cannot plan for. After an ordinary fight is won, the game rolls a 0.5% chance (5 in 1,000) that one of the fallen was still breathing. If you carry at least one rope, you tie them up for free: you receive a prisoner, lose one rope, and a gold panel titled A Survivor Among the Fallen appears on the victory screen. Boss fights use a separate reward branch and do not roll for it. Treat it as a pleasant surprise, not a strategy: at those odds it happens about once in two hundred victories.

Some roadside encounters offer a different kind of bonus. Options with names like "Open fire and capture" or "Grom's capture" bind survivors automatically when you win, one rope each, up to the number you actually carry. If you arrive with no rope, the result text says so and you leave with nobody.

Grom's four offers

Open the Labor Pits from the Manage Labor screen in camp. The panel shows your prisoners in custody, your Camp Labor Force and Grom's affinity number. Each button below works on prisoners only, and the whole set is greyed out when you have none.

A few details are worth knowing. The Scrip a laborer earns is added during the morning report, after you sleep, and it is not limited by your storage capacity. I found no daily food, water or Scrip upkeep attached to laborers anywhere in the game, and nothing that turns a laborer back into a free survivor, so the hand-over is permanent. Affinity is shown on Grom's card and goes up with every gift, but the Pits attach no reward to it, so a gift is purely a roleplay choice for now.

Which option to pick

The comparison is simple arithmetic. A laborer pays 15 Scrip a day, so after four mornings it has earned 60 Scrip, which matches what a prisoner brings in a bulk delivery (300 for five) and beats a single sale's 50. Every morning after that is pure profit. What the laborer never gives you is the Scrap, and he gives nothing at all until you sleep.

Worked example. It is day 6 and you hold three prisoners. Selling all three gives 150 Scrip and 30 Scrap tonight. Handing all three over gives nothing tonight but 45 Scrip every morning from then on, which overtakes the sale by the fifth morning. A mixed plan works well: sell one for the Scrap you need now and hand over two. If you reach five prisoners before you have a use for laborers, the bulk delivery is the best one-time payout.

Convoy captives are different

The enslaved humans in a Reptilian Convoy are not prisoners in this sense, and rope plays no part in rescuing them. A convoy appears on the Sector Map at a random spot after your battles, with about a 50% chance each time (the Kaelen convoy tip raises that to 95%). The fight is three Reptilian units plus one Enslaved Human (Forced to Fight), a 30 HP fighter whose stats are not scaled to your level.

• The game's auto-target skips him, and toxin talents are coded to spare him. Area attacks from allies, such as a grenade or a spray, have no such exception and will hit anyone in the group.
• If he is still alive when the last guard falls, he joins your garrison as a survivor and your rescue count rises. If he died, you are told no one is left to free.
• The side quest Free the Captives tracks ten rescues. At ten, a rescued man asks you to help his family, which unlocks the assault on the Slaughterhouse in Sector 4: four waves, with toxic gas in one of them.

Inside the Slaughterhouse basement the story offers a choice that involves Grom, but that is a story decision, not a Labor Pits transaction, so it is not covered here.

Related pages

• Battle Screen Guide shows where the Capture button sits and how range zones work.
• Combat Guide explains Action Points, armor and cover.
• Survival and Economy Guide puts Scrip and Scrap in context.
• Base Building Guide covers the walls that protect your prisoners and workers.

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