What weapon only knocks out pawns, not killing them

[Jumpingeal]

would it be a bludgeoning weapon like a mace?

[Lightzy]

Better chance to knock them out but they might still die. Yep. Clubs and such.

[Golden]

Any weapon can kill a pawn, including bare fists, expecially with a pawn who has levels in melee.  The best way would be to use one without any melee levels and bare hands - although you chance killing your own pawn I'd think.

[Bolgfred]

There are many threads about this topic, which had multiple strategies about solving this question.
In detail, pawns can be knocked out by high pain level or low conciousness.

PAYNE!
For high pain you need to apply much damage to a pawn with high pain multiplier. These are fire(~1,8 pain per damage) and blunt(~1,4 pain per damage).
So, you either have to set your new room mate on fire, your club them down, to knock them out with pain.
The benefit of this method is, that its simple and you only have to keep beating your opponent until he passes out.

consciousness
Consciousness gets lowered by pain and by blood loss, which is caused by ranged or edged weapons.
The Problem with these is that Cutting weapons tend to... well cut off body parts, so its better to us weapons with high attack speed, as they hit more different body parts instead of one-cutting one single thing.
The big benefit of this method is, that, if there are enough wounds applied to the enemy, you can retreat and let your enemy bleed out, until he passes out.

General Slavery knowlege

As we want to incapacitipate people, and not decapitate people we want to use weapons with low damage. By this we get multiple effects:
1. Body parts don't get destroyed in 1-2 attacks, so wounds can be spread into multiple body sections
2. AFAIK every wound adds a single pain value, which means, more wounds = more pain, so a wood or plasteel shiv or mace would be best as they have the lowest cooldown
3. Bad weapon quality lowers the items damage. By this you can  buildup more fantastic wounds before actually killing. So, put your worst crafters on crafting duty building maces and shivs. All weapons with awful quality get an amazing damage debuff of -60%!!!

[Shurp]

Keep in mind that any enemy pawn that is downed, for whatever reason, has an automatic chance to die just to reduce the potential pool of recruits you have.  As your population and difficult increases more of them will die on contact with dirt.

[Mday]

Psychic shock lance.
On hardest difficulty it cost about 750$ each. A raider has a bionic leg worth 2200$ and you want it bad?
You know what to do.

[Jibbles]

Beer bottle, wood. 

No, but Mday is right.  I usually use psychic lance if I really want that Rocket, or bionic parts etc.

[kubolek01]

But it also has lethality. I accidentally slain a Thrumbo with it... So have this in mind prior to using.

[VincentJ]

Hello, my best warrior has a wooden mace, which is very practical to knock out ennemies.

But I'm developping technologies, we can't stay neolithic forever. What do you suggere I craft for him ? I must precise I have medieval times mod.

I was wondering, if medieval times allowed me to produce war hammers or morning star, flails... staffs ? There's no staffs ?

[Dashthechinchilla]

A log is a melee weapon too. No crafting needed.

[Ukas]

Hello, my best warrior has a wooden mace, which is very practical to knock out ennemies.

Yea wooden mace is what I use too. I craft a bunch of them, and locate them near the prison, so whenever theres a prison break etc I get few guys near the exit before prisoners make it outside.

[TheMeInTeam]

Keep in mind that any enemy pawn that is downed, for whatever reason, has an automatic chance to die just to reduce the potential pool of recruits you have.  As your population and difficult increases more of them will die on contact with dirt.

I'm pretty sure if you make them bleed into being incapped it will bypass this check, though that's tough to accomplish in practice vs big raids.  Since shivs don't get quality anymore it's also harder to do almost no damage with the classic "awful wooden shiv", though I suppose you could still intentionally degrade them via unroofed.

[BetaSpectre]

Game calculates so all downed creatures have a base chance in insta death.

Get a no death randomness mod and set it to 0