Greetings, Dark Lord! (A Simple Guide to Free Labor)

Your dungeon is growing, your ambitions are grand, but your minions are... well, finite. Every skeleton you send to the mines is one less skeleton guarding your halls. But what if you could have a workforce that costs you nothing but a little bit of floor space and some leftover gruel? Welcome to the wonderful world of prison labor in KeeperRL! The catch is that prisoners are terribly lazy. Left to their own devices, they'll work at a snail's pace. To get any real value, you need to assign your own loyal minions as guards to... "motivate" them. This creates a fascinating puzzle: how many guards are enough? Too few, and your prisoners do nothing. Too many, and you're wasting your own valuable minions!

This calculator is your personal dungeon foreman, designed to solve that exact problem. It does the complex math for you, showing you the perfect guard-to-prisoner ratio to achieve maximum efficiency. It even tells you the most important number of all: how many of your *own loyal minions* your prison workforce is equal to in terms of pure output. No more guesswork, just cold, hard data to help you build the most productive evil empire possible.

How to Use The Calculator

Finding your prison's true potential is brutally simple:

1. Count Your Captives: Enter the total number of prisoners you have assigned to a task.
2. Judge Their Skill: Give a rough estimate of their average "Labor" skill. A captured peasant might be around 20, while a captured blacksmith could be 70. A good guess is fine!
3. Assign Your Guards: Enter how many of your own minions are guarding that specific prison.
4. See the Results: The calculator instantly shows your "Effective Labor Output". This tells you how many of your *own* minions this prison crew is equal to in work power.
5. Save Your Plans: Use the "Copy Share Link" to save your setup or share it with other keepers! Your numbers are also saved automatically in your browser for your next visit.

Tips from the Depths of the Dungeon

• The Golden Ratio (4-to-1): The absolute sweet spot for motivation is **one guard for every four prisoners**. This gets you 100% efficiency from your guards' motivation bonus. The "Guard Efficiency" bar in the results shows you exactly how close you are. If it's not at 100%, you're wasting potential labor!
• A Skilled Prisoner is Worth Ten Peasants: It's tempting to capture every goblin that wanders by, but quality is far more important than quantity. One captured dwarven blacksmith with a Labor skill of 80 will produce vastly more than a dozen peasants with a skill of 15. Make it a priority to capture high-skill enemies; they are the backbone of a productive prison.
• The Specialist Prison: Don't throw your master jeweler in with the rock-breaking rabble. It's far more effective to create specialized prisons. Have one high-security prison for your few, high-skill crafters, guarded by your best minion. Then, have a large, open-air quarry for dozens of low-skill prisoners to just dig, guarded by a handful of imps. Specialization is the key to a booming evil economy.
• The Cost of Business: Remember that prisoners aren't entirely "free." They still need to be fed. Make sure the resources they are gathering (like gold or wood) are worth more than the food you're providing them. A prison full of starving workers is a prison full of corpses, not a workforce.