Salem

How can we bring someone to justice who continually steals?
I have built a fence, but since everything was taken from me, all I can do is obtain evidence of larceny...
I can track and find this persons homestead, but i cannot destroy it, or fight the individual since i am new enough to the point I do not have strengths to keep up.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

If i buy a lock for my gate, will that help?

tkbuffalo wrote:If i buy a lock for my gate, will that help?

You should've locked your gates the first chance you had. If your gates aren't locked the thief will simply walk in and take everything as if you had no wall!

A thief is very easy to raise, it's a throw away alt with 50 black bile and 10 humors on everything else! But to destroy a wall you need further investment
Go for stone hedge wall because even if it's not that strong if someone wants to take down your settlement they have to raise an alt with nearly 100 phlegm (have not tested) And it will take them like an hour to break in. And if you also have Tochposts or braziers shooting at them when trying to destroy your walls most people will walk away, spam them if possible.

As of now your best bet is to track down their settlement, take a screenshot of it and call for help in HoB, but don't post the screenshot or the thief might see it and run away.
Look for the revenge skill in the wiki if you have access to his leanto
Pay 500 silver and put him in the stocks a few times, he might perma die from madness or disease if you spam him there

Yeah, you really want a lock and key, and some passive defenses. It might be an involved task to gather all the resources for the stone wall, but if you are in a new area it's not too hard to find granite boulders, and you should be within reasonable distance of lime anyway. Stone is easy.

And the upgrade from split rail to stone hedge is not inconsiderable.

As a further measure also consider having a layer of split rail around the stone hedge, and then a makeshift around that. That way you have to commit a crime (and a moderately time consuming one, not like a REAL fence, but it would give people pause) to even get at the stone fence. For a lot of people, the prospect of that, the stone fence AND torches would be deeply unpleasant. Anyone who didn't know better to try something if you had that and Braziers would change their mind after they tried it.

Braziers require wrought iron, of course. You can do it yourself but it's labor and coal intensive, and no matter how you do it the outlay for mining and the picks is also high.

A lot of people would not want to go through 3 layers of fence (one stone) and braziers.

Especially if you didn't have anything SUPER valuable. Even if you did, it would give pause, because they would get hurt badly, even if it was worth it, and they would leave a fair number of scents, which you could still punish them with.