A guard is attacking me and I don’t want to fight. Can I surrender, and what does it cost?

Steps

1. Sheathe your weapon. That is the surrender input, and the game prompts it: “Sheath your weapon to surrender.”
2. Expect the guard to speak first. His challenge line is the same in four separate recordings: “Had enough, you fool. Give it up or I’ll run you through.”
3. Answer him. Two players read out what appear to be the available replies — a refusal and a payment — and both choose payment: “I’ll see you in hell. No, I’ll pay the gold.”
4. Have gold on you. The amounts spoken in the three recorded payments are 40, 50 and 100. One player, reading his reply aloud, gets as far as “I surrender 100 gold. Do I even have” before the exchange resolves.
5. Check your inventory afterwards. In the co-op session the guard confiscates stolen goods in addition to taking gold.
6. Do not confuse this with praying. Sheathing surrenders; crouching is what shrines mean by “stay your weapon”.

What the four recordings actually show

RogueHeavy is the source for the prompt itself. At 04:28:27 he reads “Sheath your weapon to surrender” off the screen and then spends a minute refusing to do it — “Why would I want to surrender?”, “Do I freaking surrender?”, “What happens if I surrender?” — which is why this page can quote the game’s wording without any player having yet acted on it. Two hours later, at 06:26:50, he takes the deal: the guard’s challenge, then “What did I do? Here’s 40 gold. Leave me alone.”

okmall’s incident at 00:36:08 starts with him opening a container in front of its owner. “What? I didn’t steal anything,” he says, then “Excuse me. I surrender.” The guard gives the same challenge line, and it ends “All right, I surrender. Pay you 50 gold.” He reloads immediately afterwards and works out the trigger on camera: “So, you can’t just open it up. Like, the moment I opened it, she was mad at me.”

PatricianTV’s session is the co-op one and the most expensive. At 00:26:56: “Oh, I think this is a guard. All right, I surrender 100 gold. Do I even have” — then “Oh, he confiscated my stolen goods”, and, as the guard turns to the other player, “He hit you up and now he’s hitting me up, too. It’s a shakedown.” Because the two players are not labelled in the captions, this page attributes the incident to the session rather than to either man.

Extra Crust is the outlier and the reason the price is printed as a spread. At 00:05:48 he punches a fisherman — “Can I punch him in the face? Shouldn’t have done that” — keeps punching, then surrenders twice: “I surrender. I surrender.” The result is “Oh, he just forgives me,” with no payment, followed by “I leveled up.” Three minutes later he draws an actual guard and pays.

Why the fine is printed as three numbers instead of one

40, 50 and 100 gold, in three unrelated sessions. It is tempting to call that scaling — by the crime, by the player’s level, by what is in the pack — and every one of those explanations fits three data points. So would coincidence.

None of the four players says what determined the amount, and no source reads a formula off the screen. The page therefore reports the three figures and declines to explain them. What a reader can take from it is practical rather than precise: keep at least a hundred gold on you if you are going to test a guard’s patience, because the largest recorded demand is exactly that.

The zero-gold case is not a fourth data point in the same series. That player had attacked a townsman, not a guard, and was forgiven rather than fined. Whether ordinary NPCs always forgive, and whether guards always charge, is unrecorded.

Nobody is ever jailed

This was searched for deliberately and the result is negative. Across eight post-release recordings there is no arrest, no cell, no bounty counter and no crime that has to be cleared later. Every consequence in the pool is settled inside the conversation that follows the surrender.

One thing does persist, from one session only. PatricianTV, after dying and respawning in town, finds the same NPCs still hostile: “They still got it in for me even though — even though I died.” Dying is not a way to wipe the slate. That is a single co-op recording and it is graded as such.

Guards also warn before anything happens. “You’d best behave, stranger. No bad deed goes unpunished on my watch” is recorded on two unrelated channels as an idle line, which is the game telling you the system exists before you trip it.

Requirements / limits

• The prompt “Sheath your weapon to surrender” is read aloud in one recording. The other three surrender without anyone reading the instruction, so the wording rests on that single reading while the behaviour rests on four.
• All four are machine-generated captions. What a player says is reliable; what the game writes on screen is a transcription of someone reading it aloud, not the text itself.
• The three gold amounts come from players reading their own replies aloud. Nothing confirms that the number is fixed by the game rather than chosen from a list, and no recording shows the amount deducted on screen.
• PatricianTV is two players in co-op with no speaker labels. Nothing on this page is attributed to one of them individually.
• No recording shows what happens if you refuse. Both players who read the refusal option aloud chose to pay instead.
• Update 7 says nothing about surrender, fines, guards or crime response. Its only adjacent lines are “Pickpocket/lockpicking XP increased” and “Krizur and [secret merchant] now accept stolen goods”. All four recordings here predate it.

Common mistakes

• Crouching instead of sheathing. Crouch is what shrines want; it is not what a guard wants.
• Assuming a fight to the death is the only way out. Four separate sessions end the fight without one.
• Expecting the same price twice. The three recorded demands differ by more than a factor of two.
• Assuming a townsman and a guard behave the same way. The one player who surrendered to a townsman paid nothing.
• Dying to clear the trouble. In the one session that tests it, respawning leaves the NPCs just as hostile.
• Opening a container while its owner watches and expecting that not to count. In okmall’s recording that alone is what brought the guard.

Still unverified

• What sets the size of the fine?Not verifiedThree recorded amounts — 40, 50 and 100 gold — across three sessions. No source states a rule, and level, crime and carried gold all fit equally well.
• What happens if you refuse to pay?Not verifiedTwo players read a refusal option aloud and neither takes it. Nobody in the pool has recorded the outcome.
• Is there a crime record that persists between towns or days?Not verifiedNothing in eight post-release recordings shows a bounty, a jail or a wanted state. One player finds NPCs still hostile after dying, which is persistence within a session, not a record.
• Do guards always confiscate stolen goods?Single unconfirmed reportOne co-op session has goods taken along with gold. Two solo players pay and keep what they were carrying, and neither says whether they were carrying anything stolen.
• Do ordinary NPCs always forgive?Single unconfirmed reportOne player is let off after attacking a fisherman. That is the only recorded surrender to a non-guard.
• Did Update 7 change any of this?Not verifiedNo changelog line touches surrender, fines, guards or jail. Every recording behind this page was made before 21 August 2026.