Source & full guide: github.com/teamdemivfxfish-dev/ethical-kidnapping-wiki
Subdue, don't slaughter. Ethical Kidnapping turns a kill into a capture. Drop a player or villager into a bleeding-out crawl, drag them home on a lead while they fight you the whole way, and lock them in a cell you built by hand, with patrolling guards, real escape attempts, and a ransom on their head.
No hard dependencies. Built for SMP servers, factions, and modpacks where a fight should end in leverage, not a respawn screen. Plays nicely with MineColonies, real server economies, and your faction wars, and doubles as the roomiest, safest villager housing in the game.
Enchant a weapon with Non-Lethal (or flip one config switch to make every weapon non-lethal). The blow that would have killed the target instead downs them into a bleeding-out crawl. No corpse, no respawn, no dropped gear.
Right-click a downed target with a Lead and haul them back to base, a custom rope for players, a vanilla leash for villagers. Captives are not cargo; they resist you every step, which turns the trip home into a genuine tug-of-war.
Craft a Prison Terminal (a single Lead ringed by 8 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 a display window will not break the seal.
Stock the terminal with iron and carved pumpkins and it raises Iron Golem wardens that actually understand the cell.
No cell is truly inescapable (unless you want it to be). Prisoners chip at the walls with bare hands and crude tools under heavy Mining Fatigue, scavenging scraps as they go, but every exit is covered.
/tp, and warp mods all fizzle for a prisoner, and they cannot ride out on boats, minecarts, or horsesPress 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.
Designed for live multiplayer, not a single-player gimmick, and the annoying loopholes are already closed.
| Do this | How |
|---|---|
| Down a target instead of killing | Hit with a Non-Lethal weapon (or set globalNonLethal=true) |
| Revive a downed ally | Hold right-click on the body with an empty hand |
| Finish a downed target | A second hit |
| Shackle and drag a captive | Right-click a downed target with a Lead |
| Struggle free (captive) | Hold right-click to build escape progress |
| Fasten the lead (captor) | Right-click the air while dragging; frays the rope |
| Release a captive | Two right-clicks with the Lead, to confirm |
| Register a cell | Right-click the Prison Terminal once |
| Open terminal settings | Right-click the registered terminal again |
| Open prisoner and ransom tabs | Press K |
| Craft a Prison Terminal | 1 Lead ringed by 8 Iron Bars |
| Raise a guard | 4 Iron Blocks + 1 Carved Pumpkin in the terminal |
Ethical Kidnapping has no hard dependencies and works standalone. Everything below is optional and detected at runtime.
| Mod | What it adds |
|---|---|
| MineColonies | Colony-aware escape lines and an anti-tunnel safeguard |
| Hundred Years War | Post HYW soldiers as wardens; they treat your army as allies |
| SDM Economy | Pay ransoms in SDM currency |
| Lightman's Currency | Pay ransoms in coins; offline captors paid into their bank |
| FTB Chunks and other claim mods | Respected; a cell on claimed land is still escapable |
| Any mob | Can be set as the guard entity via config |
The mod is driven entirely by items and blocks and ships no player-facing commands. Deep tuning lives in config/kidnapransom-common.toml.
Built for Minecraft 1.16.5, 1.18.2, 1.19.2, 1.20.1 and 1.21.1, on both Forge and NeoForge.
Make them pay.
Part of The Warborn Realm, by barunn
