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Ethical Kidnapping
A more considerate approach to involuntary guest relations.
Ethical Kidnapping is a medieval capture-and-ransom system for NeoForge 1.21.1. Down a player or villager without killing them, drag them home on a leash, and imprison them in a sealed cell you build yourself; set the ransom, post iron-golem guards that hunt down anyone who tries to escape, and collect. It also doubles as the roomiest, safest villager housing in the game, which is where the name comes from.
The capture flow
1. Subdue them (without the killing part).
Enchant a weapon with the new Non-lethal enchantment (obtained the normal way: enchanting table, loot, and villager trades). Any blow that would normally be fatal instead drops the victim into a helpless, bleeding-out crawl at half a heart. No death, no dropped gear, just a very bad day for them.
2. Down, revive, or finish.
A downed victim glows, is slowed, and can only crawl. From there:
- Their allies can revive them by holding right-click with an empty hand on the body for a few seconds.
- A second hit finishes the job if you would rather not take prisoners.
- They bleed out on a timer if nobody steps in.
- Or you arrive with a lead.
3. Leash and drag them home.
Right-click a downed body with a Lead to shackle them. They become your captive, dragged behind you on a rope (yes, the lead actually shows, and it stays smooth even from the captive's own screen). They climb ledges and stairs as you pull, and a captive who lags too far back gets reeled in, spam-jump to yank them hard into line. Changed your mind? Right-click your captive with the lead to cut them loose. Their bleed-out timer pauses the entire time they are shackled, because we are, after all, ethical. If a captive rage-logs mid-drag, a stand-in stays on your lead so you can still haul them home, and they drop into the cell as a real prisoner the moment they log back in.
A fighting chance
Being dragged is no longer a one-way trip. A captive can hold right-click to STRUGGLE against the lead, slowly building escape progress (shown on their screen the whole time). Reach the top and they wrench free and slip loose, silently, with no immunity, so a captor who is paying attention can down them again on the spot, but a distracted one may not even notice they are gone, since a captive trails a few blocks behind and out of view.
The captor is not powerless. Every so often a struggling captive makes the lead creak, the only tell that they are working at it, and the captor can FASTEN the lead (right-click the air while dragging) to set that progress back, on a cooldown. But fastening strains the lead, and every cinch risks snapping it and dropping the captive, so you cannot just spam it. Hauling a body is heavy work too, so a captor is slowed while dragging anyone. And to be safe, cutting a captive loose takes two right-clicks, so you never free a prisoner by accident. Both sides get on-screen prompts the whole time, so nobody has to memorise the controls.
4. Build a cell and a Prison Terminal.
Craft a Prison Terminal (a Lead ringed by eight Iron Bars). Build any fully enclosed room; glass, bars, doors, and trapdoors all count as walls, so a feeding hatch will not break the seal. Place the terminal touching the inside, right-click it once to register the cell (it scans the sealed space for you), and right-click again to open its settings: ransom price, prisoner capacity, and stationed guards.
5. Lock them up and name your price.
Drag your shackled captive inside the cell and right-click the terminal with the lead. They are imprisoned, their gear is confiscated (returned when freed, or dropped in a chest at the capture site; your choice in config), and the ransom is live. Press K (on Default) to open the prisoner and ransom tabs: anyone can pay a captive's ransom to teleport them safely home with their belongings returned, even if the captive is offline.
The Guard System (the good part)
A cell is only as good as its guards. Open the terminal's hidden compartment (shift-right-click) and stock it with Iron Blocks and a Carved Pumpkin (4 iron plus 1 pumpkin per golem). The instant it has enough, it consumes them and raises an iron-golem guard on the spot.
Set the Stationed Guards count in the terminal settings, and the dungeon keeps that many posted around the cell at all times. Lose one, and the terminal raises a replacement from whatever materials you leave stocked in the compartment, on a timer, so you never have to babysit it. There is also a "Spawn now" button to top your guards back up on demand. It is never free, so keep the compartment stocked.
And these guards are smart about WHERE they stand. The terminal scans the cell for its weak points (the iron door, the trapdoor feeding chute, the barred window, the thinnest wall, an exposed top) and posts a sentry at each one, standing beside it rather than blocking it and facing outward like a real guard, then rotating posts every few minutes like a patrol. Extra guards fan out to cover the rest of the perimeter.
The moment a prisoner breaches the walls of their cell, every guard drops what it is doing, hunts the escapee down, beats them senseless, and drags them straight back into the cell, healed and re-imprisoned. Escaping is not about slipping past the door; it is about outrunning a squad of iron golems. Good luck with that.
Bring your own wardens: set any mob as the guard type in config, or feed Hundred Years War soldier scrolls into the compartment to post HYW troops as your guards. They are smart enough to treat your own army as allies instead of targets, and you cannot accidentally march them off post.
Digging out
Prisoners are not helpless. They can chip away at their cell with bare hands and crude tools, scavenging rough materials (planks, sticks, logs) to fashion escape gear, all under heavy Mining Fatigue so it is a genuine grind rather than a quick tunnel. Smashing a block this way yields only what the scavenge gives, never the clean block. Dig into a thick wall and the cell simply grows to swallow it, so tunnelling into solid rock enlarges the prison instead of freeing anyone; break through to open air, though, and the chase is on. (Prefer a truly inescapable cell? One config switch makes it so.)
Built for multiplayer
- Anti-grief: a prison cannot be used to tunnel into a MineColonies colony it is not part of. A cell that legitimately sits inside its own colony still works normally.
- If a prison sits inside a colony, the colony border becomes the escape line, fairer than a flat block distance since colonies vary wildly in size.
- Capture works on claimed land, on offline players, and on rage-loggers.
- A player freed by paying their ransom or escaping their cell gets a few seconds of protection on the way out, so a captor who rigged the capture site cannot instantly delete them as they reappear.
- Prisoners cannot anchor their respawn to the cell bed, so death does not just drop them back in their cell.
"Ethical" villager housing
Here is the part that makes the name honest. A registered cell is a genuine, walk-in room, far roomier and safer than the one-block pit or bobbing boat most players cram their villagers into. Capture your traders, give them a proper home with a guard on duty, and sleep soundly knowing your villagers now enjoy more freedom and security than most players will ever provide them. Cruelty-free incarceration. It is a lifestyle.
Configuration
A full config file (config/kidnapransom-common.toml) lets you tune everything:
- Whether players and/or villagers can be captured.
- Bleed-out time, revive time, and heal amounts.
- Leash pull and teleport distances.
- Struggle and fasten: struggle chance and progress per success, the leash-creak sound chance, the fasten cooldown, strength, and break chance, and the drag slowness. The whole struggle mechanic can be turned off.
- Item handling: VAPORIZE (held and returned on release) or CHEST (dropped at the capture site).
- Ransom currency: an item of your choosing, or SDM's Shop currency if it is installed.
- Maximum cell size, and post-release capture immunity.
- Guard behaviour: the guard entity type, how far they patrol, how long they hold a post before rotating, and whether lost guards auto-respawn from stocked materials.
- Prisoner difficulty: Mining Fatigue level, whether prisoners can mine at all, and their odds of scavenging escape materials.
- Protection on release, and the colony anti-tunnel safeguard.
⚠️ The "global downing" option, please read
By default, downing requires the Non-lethal enchantment. If you would rather your whole server run on a downing system, set globalNonLethal = true and every weapon will down players and villagers on a would-be-lethal blow, with no enchantment needed. This effectively turns your entire server into a capture-and-downing free-for-all, so test it on your setup before committing.
Requirements
- Minecraft 1.21.1
- NeoForge
- No other dependencies
About
This is the first stable release, play-tested in multiplayer. It is genuinely fun and still growing, so expect the odd rough edge and please report anything you find. Feature ideas and bug reports are hugely appreciated.
JUST COMMENT FOR BUG REPORTS
Now go be considerate.
The Ethical Kidnapping (& Ransom) Team
Compatibility
Ethical Kidnapping has no hard dependencies and runs perfectly well on its own, but it plays nicely with a few other mods when they are installed.
With MineColonies, a prison built inside a colony uses the colony border as its escape line (fairer than a flat distance, since colonies vary wildly in size), prisoners can still dig out of a cell built on claimed colony land, and a built-in anti-grief safeguard stops anyone from tunnelling a prison into a colony it is not part of.
With Hundred Years War, you can feed soldier scrolls into the terminal to post HYW troops as your wardens instead of iron golems, and they are smart enough to treat your own army as allies rather than targets.
With SDM's Shop, ransoms can be paid in its shop currency instead of a plain item. Other claim mods such as FTB Chunks are respected too, so a cell built on claimed land is still escapable. And because the guard entity is fully configurable, you can set any mob, vanilla or modded, to stand watch over your prisoners. Every one of these hooks is optional and detected at runtime, so nothing breaks if a given mod is not present.
