tl;dr - if you care about tl;drs, then the only use of this mod for you is to forcibly recruit NPCs to your own squad. That's easy to figure out.


This has got to be the mod with the most confused comments in this workshop. To my knowledge, the mod is both outdated, and there's a quirk in the game engine that makes it difficult to use slaves as a replacement for your own people for things like menial labor in your personally owned bases.

GETTING SLAVES: Easiest way is to patch up wounded raiders attacking your base or kidnapping NPCs from elsewhere and putting them in prisoner cages. You then craft a slave ring from the appropriate bench (you only need a slave ring, not shackles), and put it in the prisoner's inventory. After a few seconds (it varies, up to a minute), a pop-up "buying slave" will happen and then the slave purchasing screen will pop up. If this doesn't happen, then the code is bugged and you have to save, exit, and then reload the game. Buy(sell) the slave, and now that prisoner has a "Slave" status. However, they are still hostile to you, and you have to talk to them and get their obedience. They will either give a "..." as confirmation that they are obedient and will accept orders, or will hop out and attack your characters, which is a fail scenario.

Here's some criteria I've determined for maximizing your chance to actually gain obedience: 1. the longer they're in the cage with the "slave" status before you try to force obedience, the better 2. the hungrier they are, the better 3. the weaker they are (stats-wise and gear), the better 4. the stronger (stats and gear) your character that is trying force obedience on them is, the better

NPCs in cages with the "Slave" status will never starve below 100, so don't bother feeding them. If a slave hops out and tries to fight you after failing the obedience check, they lose the "Slave" status, and after defeating them again you can just drop them back in a cage and you'll get a chance to re-enslave them a few minutes later. If you're collecting NPCs for manual labor workers, or to join your squads, I would highly suggest stripping them of all gear to make the obedience process easier. For building a slave combat squad, you will need to keep their gear on them typically, as far as I can tell the only way they'll equip things as obedient slaves is after fighting, if they have the guard and loot order turned on.

IMPORTANT NOTE: the player character that gets obedience from an NPC slave will become its' "Slave Master", this is not marked anywhere but if the slave gets too far away from their master, they become an escaped slave, which is set to hostile (though they keep doing as they were last told). If you have gate guards with harpoon launchers, I suggest building a high wall or buildings between them and slave areas, so they don't massacre all your slaves and anyone next to them.

SLAVE WORKERS: Effectively, you must build a work camp away from your own base (or NPC bases/cities, as slaves will go work in their fields/mines if you do) using the building sets that start with a *, like *Buildings. Using these will prevent a new player base from popping up, with the associated raids/visits/etc, but they can't use electricity, are of lower quality in terms of efficiency, and the enclosed buildings are bugged to hell for using them for anything other than slave tasks. To build stuff in them, you have to clip into the building with your camera to see the inside, and whenever your builders enter, they won't exit automatically when they need more materials - you have to do that manually. Also, keep a Garu nearby, because you'll have to manually move resources from one station to another. Fortunately, storage is deep on output stacks.

Big oof bug I recently discovered: allying with the trade guild allies you with the slave traders, who will send slavers to your base if you have people in your prisoner cages...and promptly turn them into their own slaves and set them free. They will also intercept any non-recruited slaves you have outside cages and make them follow them home as well...so either use slave camps that the AI will not register as a player base and visit, or don't be allied with the slave traders...

SLAVERY AS A RECRUITMENT TOOL: The most non-buggy and common use of this mod is to just recruit NPCs to your player squads. Get them obedient, then talk to them again and navigate all the way through three menus of options to "Join player squad". Release them from the cage and boom, you have a new character in your squad. They still have a "Slave" status, so you can roleplay them as a slave and use them for menial base labor. Couple bugs to note however: Some NPCs (like starving bandits) will only have their old AI logic for food replaced after saving/loading the game again, meaning you need to reload each time after collecting batches of new player slaves so that they eat and become actually useful workers. Recruited slaves can be used as wall gunners, however you need to have at least one non-slave character on a gun, otherwise the friend/foe IFF won't work and it causes a glitch during enemy raids. The same "escaped slave" logic also applies as NPC slaves for slave master distance. Also, obviously, recruiting slaves to your squad counts towards your character limit (get the 256 character mod).

SLAVE COMBAT SQUADS: I haven't fooled around much with slave squads or other features, other than to get a massive gaggle of low ranked slaves merked by berserkers. If anyone has something to add for this here, please comment. Basic rules is you recruit a bunch of slaves with a single slave master, get obedience without the shackles (so they're faster), and then order them to follow that character around so that you can then go watch your cannon fodder fight other NPCs. Don't lose your slave master character in the meantime however...