Ethical Kidnapping & Ransom - Prison Mod
Every SMP veteran knows the feeling: you win the fight, the enemy respawns, and nothing changes. Ethical Kidnapping & Ransom - Prison Mod flips that loop on its head. Instead of a kill, you get leverage. Subdue a player or villager, drag them home on a lead, lock them in a cell you built by hand, and slap a ransom on their head. Fights end in negotiation, not a respawn screen.
If you have ever wanted combat on your server to actually mean something, this is the add-on that delivers it. It is built for factions, SMP servers, and modpacks where politics and economy matter as much as sword swings.
Capture, Don't Kill: The Core Loop
The heart of the mod is the Non-Lethal mechanic. Enchant a weapon with Non-Lethal, or flip a single config switch to make every weapon non-lethal, and the blow that would have killed your target instead drops them into a bleeding-out crawl. No corpse, no dropped gear, no instant respawn. The victim glows, slows to a crawl at half a heart, and starts a bleed-out timer. Allies can revive them with a held right-click, or a second hit finishes the job for good.
Dragging Captives Home
Right-click a downed target with a Lead and the real tug-of-war begins. Captives are not cargo. They struggle, heave, and fight you the whole way home. A live ESCAPE meter and STRAIN meter track every attempt, and your captive can fasten the lead to set progress back, though each fasten frays the rope until it snaps. Dragging slows you down, and a loose lead means a quiet escape can slip by unnoticed. No jumping, no ladders, no boats. A held captive stays held.
Rage-logging mid-drag will not save anyone either. A stand-in stays on your lead and drops into the cell the moment they log back in.
Build the Prison and Post the Guards
Craft a Prison Terminal by ringing a single Lead with eight 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 display window will not break the seal. Set the ransom price and how many prisoners the cell holds. Want a glass-walled display cell or a buried bunker? Both work.
The terminal also doubles as honest ethical villager housing, a genuine walk-in room with no harm done. Prisoners cannot set their spawn at the cell bed, so nobody respawns inside your walls.
Iron Golem Wardens That Understand the Cell
Stock the terminal with iron and carved pumpkins and it raises Iron Golem wardens. Four Iron Blocks plus one Carved Pumpkin per golem, auto-respawned from stock or spawned on demand. Set a Stationed Guards count and the cell keeps that many posted at all times, standing at weak points like the door, feeding chute, barred window, thinnest wall, and exposed roof. The moment a prisoner breaches, guards chase, subdue, and drag them back, healed and re-imprisoned.
Real Escape Attempts and Ransom Payments
No cell is truly inescapable unless you want it to be. Prisoners chip at walls with bare hands and crude tools under heavy Mining Fatigue, scavenging scraps as they go. Tunnel into a thick wall and the cell grows to swallow it. Break through to open air and the chase begins. Ender pearls, chorus fruit, teleports, and warp mods all fizzle for a prisoner, and they cannot ride out on boats, minecarts, or horses.
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. Paying teleports the prisoner home with their gear intact, and offline captives are freed on next login. The balance is checked both ways: never freed for free, and an offline captor still collects.
If you want a smoother setup, the foxygame.net launcher bundles Ethical Kidnapping & Ransom - Prison Mod into its add-on catalog, so you can install it alongside your other mods with a single click and let the launcher handle version matching for you.
Supported Versions and Loaders
The mod is built for Minecraft 1.16.5, 1.18.2, 1.19.2, 1.20.1, and 1.21.1, running on both Forge and NeoForge. It has no hard dependencies and works standalone, though it detects optional integrations at runtime, including MineColonies, Hundred Years War, SDM Economy, Lightman's Currency, and popular claim mods. Deep tuning lives in config/kidnapransom-common.toml.
How to Install
- Confirm your Minecraft version and loader match a supported build.
- Download Ethical Kidnapping & Ransom - Prison Mod for Minecraft from the official project page or your launcher's catalog.
- Drop the jar file into your mods folder.
- Launch the game and check the config file for global non-lethal and currency settings.
- On a server, install it on both client and server for full functionality.
Learning how to install takes only a few minutes, and the payoff lasts entire server seasons.
Final Thoughts
Ethical Kidnapping & Ransom - Prison Mod for Minecraft turns every fight into a story. Capture instead of kill, build a prison worth defending, and let ransom negotiations drive your server's economy. Whether you run a faction war, a roleplay SMP, or a modpack full of colony mods, this add-on gives combat the consequences it always deserved. Make them pay.