So, hear me out. What if instead of a container... We had a VAULT DOOR?

The game checks if a room is enclosed and the only entry point is the *vault door*, then the room becomes a VAULT. (we allow building only ONE vault door per map). And then EVERYTHING inside that room is hidden from wealth calculation.

However! The SIZE of the vault room itself acts as wealth and calculated Exponentially!
So a big vault will leave raiders salivating, while a small one won't be notorious, but won't be nearly as effective for the overall wealth management.

I think this formula: ([room size]^2)*x would already work fine.
(where default x=50, and can be configured between 10 and 100 in the settings).

The reasoning here is as follows: most players use a least one handy storage mod. So even marginal increases in room sizes (from 50 to 60 for example) means a very significant increase in actual storage capacity. With the wealth scaling exponentially, we are punishing HUGE vaults and incentivise building a smaller one, but our formula is still lenient enough to allow moderate-sized Vaults.

Why power of 2 and then multiply by x instead of just power of 3? And why the range for x between 10 and 100? We anticipate that there will be no vaults built smaller than 10 cells and not much bigger than 100 (120 or 130 might still happen though). So if the player wants it, they can crank x up and the calculation will act similar to power of 3 for bigger rooms and worse for smaller rooms. Or they can lower it down to 10 and basically make wealth manipulation trivial, but still leave SOME wealth for at least small raids to happen beyond just 1-naked-pawn raid.

Default x at 50 is the middle ground. Huge rooms are still punished (vault sizes beyond 80 will invite lots of danger), and the sweet spot for building a vault will be somewhere around 30~70 cells for most players.

The player will have to balance the vault's own wealth vs actual wealth it conceals. If a player has 300k wealth in items but can fit all of them into a 50-cell vault, wealth will decrease to 125k only. Good!
But in practice, 300k wealth in items will probably not fit into only a 50-cell room. So the player either increases the size of the vault and deals with the increase in base notoriety; or the vault is kept at a reasonable size and whatever wealth doesn't fit is kept outside, thus, just the same, our danger level increases.

The main idea, is that with this kind of balance, first of all we don't remove difficulty from the game - but rather give the player a tool to *smoothen the growth spikes*. The player will be able to avoid situations where, for example their, wealth jumped by 100k overnight and then they get pummeled to death on next raid. Nope, no more.
And second of all, we also don't remove wealth as a factor altogether. Eventually, the player has to decide on their approach to vault management and still face the concequence of major over-time expansion.
Well, and thirdly, we leave the end user capable of using this mod in the way they prefer. If they want it to act as blatant difficulty decrease - they can do so, if they want to stay challenged - they stick to default x or raise it beyond default.

Of course, we still have the caveat of *empty vault still inviting danger*, so maybe we add a toggle state to the vault door, so when it's toggled off, the wealth masking is disabled and all wealth inside is counted as normal while the vault itself stops counting as wealth. This way the player is free to build a vault ahead of time and only turn it on when it makes sense to do so. Maybe we even tie the vault door to electricity, so it will also stop masking wealth during power outtages (probably better to make this optional and off by default).

And finally, the game already has a *security door*, so we can just use its graphics as base for the vault door.



Sorry, don't take it as "go and do it, modder ", just throwing it out as a suggestion.