Mercy of the Strong

Adds an individual "No Mercy" toggle to each pawn under your control.

When disabled, the pawn will not target enemies who are fleeing, leaving the map, or carrying their own downed allies away, and will stop attacking a target that enters one of those states.

Enemies trying to steal items, kidnap colonists, prisoners and slaves remain valid targets regardless.

Like Vanilla's "Fire at Will", merciful mode only affects drafted pawns and mechanoids and has to be reengaged each time they are drafted.

Warning: fleeing enemies that bump into your merciful colonists and try to brawl their way out are likely to not get attacked too.

Updates

2026-08-25:
- Added support for turrets (becomes available once you complete corresponding research)
- Added two optional checkboxes to mod settings that prevent "No mercy" and "Fire at will" button states from being reset when pawns get undrafted (so that you won't need to tell them to hold fire every single time you draft them anymore).

Incompatibilities

Mod affects pawn's target acquisition logic and might conflict with mods drastically changing pawn AI or targeting algorithms. So far I did not notice any incompatibilities with mods like Pawn Target Fix, CAI5000, etc. Based on reviews, it is compatible with Combat Extended as well.

If it just refuses to work for you without any errors - try moving it down in your mod list, if it does trigger errors - please try to identify which mod it conflicts with and report your findings with a link to the log itself in the comments.

It should be safe to add or remove it midgame.

Performance

Mod does a few extra checks whenever pawn decides who to attack next which might affect large scale fast paced battles but... We tried to minimize it as much as possible and it should probably be fine. Report any anomalies in the comments if you encounter them please.

Recommendations

Meant to be played with (but not required):

- Enemy Self Preservation: original; 1.6 continued

- No One Left Behind: original; 1.6 continued

Honorary mentions:

- Pawn Surrender: original

- HostageTaker: original

- KlopKots Target Priority: original

Contributions

Concept/design: erandelax (Ra)

Implementation: valzietine

Source code

Mod is distributed under MIT license, you can check out mod's source code in Workshop files or access it through valzietine's Github page (repo might lag behind a bit since language files and stuff gets added to workshop item directly instead). Bug reports appreciated.

Mod was commissioned at the Rimworld Mod market.

How about adding...

Mod is intentionally made simple and close to vanilla behavior to serve as optional extension for two other mods, If your idea feels right we might consider adding it but so far there are no plans to expand any further.

Translations

If you are a native speaker and want to contribute by creating new translation or fixing the existing one, grab existing translation from mod Languages folder (files MercyOfTheStrong.xml and MercyOfTheStrong_Research.xml) and post translated or fixed version in the comments, corresponding discussion thread or in any other way submit the translated version - I'll check it out, add it to the mod and add your name to the Contributors list.

PS. Responses & updates might get delayed due to Randy's will and IRL circumstances. If there are no responses for a considerable amount of time just feel free to fork/continue mod at your own discretion. No permission needed.