The awful/broken state of Prison Architect

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MikeField

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Jul 19, 2020
5
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Hello,

I made this account to especially post on the forum here about the state of PA. I am a long long term player since before the game came out. I always came back to the game to build new prisons with newer and more powerful PC's. This is why I was overly thrilled that PA was bought by Paradox and will be getting updates and DLC's. I thought, that is absolute fantastic, more content for one of my most favourite games out there.

But now we come to the bad part: Ever since the latest updates and DLC's the game is utterly broken and it just keeps getting worse. This month I spent 5 hours planning and designing another prison with the latest DLC's. I put much effort and love into this once again. I am not a new player and I know the game in and out, all the systems and the mechanics, just, nothing works anymore! To my horror I discovered that everyone is just on strike in prison.

The problems:
1.: Janitors are not cleaning up. Even if you hire a huge ammount of them, they just go to the cleaning closet and just sit there and do nothing. I have another room just 10 tiles away (Intake) and the Janitors would just need to walk over there and clean it up but no, they don't do it. The whole prison is dirty, nothing gets cleaned and the Janitors are just doing nothing and literally squatting in the closet. If they go out to clean, they do it late and in small teams that get one job done and return back home ASAP. In the older version they would do a clear sweep and clean everything up to gether in one go, always instantly without pause. Manually sationaring th em in rooms does nothing to, they literally do not clean a room they are stationed in. They just move around and do nothing.
2.: Prisoners refuse to do jobs. They do not want to work in the laundry and the cleaning closet. They just sit around doing... nothing while everything gets dirty.
3.: Janitors don't deliver and clean clothes in the laundry. They sometimes do something then let everything just sit and just nothing. I tested around with this to see if I can get a temp fix for this somehow. I made a maximum and a supermax Sector with their own laundry. Didnt change anything, IN FACT, the janitors refused to touch the Super Max Laundry.
4.: Cooks don do their job: They do NOT cook. They just stand and do nothing. Sometimes you can somehow fix this with reloading and manually redoing the chain of room depencies. IF they cook then they start like when half of the mealtime is over. "Oh hey Jeff, is it mealtime yet? "I dont know, maybe in an hour" "ah, cool, we got 2 hours before we should start cooking some meals for the 500 prisoners" "sounds great" Just like this. In the old versions the cooks would take the number of prisoners into account and START COOKING BEFOREHAND to have the meals ready when meal time actu ally starts. Even with a huge kitchen, with 50 stoves, 200 cook and plenty of time, this changes nothing. Plus, they leave cooked meals on the stove if that happens. Cleaning up does not happen too. This means that prisoners are angry cause they get no food always.
5.: Guards find tunnels even when there are no prisoners around. They just keep telling me that there are loads of tunnels when there hasnt even been one prisoners in yet.
6.: Items get transported one after the other into the prison in a long colon of trucks, making it impossible to play bigger prisoners because the items cannot be brought in.

If you play a game you have Prisoners who are always angry because they have no clothes, Prisoners who are angry because they cannot get fed in a prison that would make Mexican Prisons look like a Hilton. Everyone is angry, everyone riots and thus it makes the game UNPLAYABLE IN ITS CURRENT STATE.

Please, please, please fix this ASAP or let us roll back to a state where you could actually play the game. Curently I cannot play Prison Architect because it is utterly broken and unplayable.

Thank you for much and I eagerly await the fixes.
 

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It's pretty broken now. My main issue is with deliveries, they used to work fine but now there's trucks bringing in 2 staff meals or one light - so there is an endless convoy of almost empty trucks. It also seems to break the prisoner intake, if you use "fill to capacity" and the prisoners do not arrive in 24 hours, you'll get another load. So once I cleared the convoys, I ended up with 100 prisoners over the capacity. I also got sent 6 max security prisoners, even though I don't have a max security wing.. so now I have 6 max sec guys stuck in the holding cell.

I haven't had issues with cooks yet. I do seem to get prisoners complaining about hygieny 1 hour before the shower hour starts so each day starts with prisoners getting angry, and then back to normal once they've had their shower. It didn't seem to help if I shuffled the hours around or added another showertime in the evening.

I've also noticed construction workers seem to get stuck in storage rooms, shuffling objects around.

In any case, I paid €5.99 for the game many years ago when it was in early access, and have 140 hours logged in, so I've got my money's worth. It's nice the game is being developed again, but it needs to be less buggy before I'd consider buying any of the new DLCs.
 
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Hello,

I made this account to especially post on the forum here about the state of PA. I am a long long term player since before the game came out. I always came back to the game to build new prisons with newer and more powerful PC's. This is why I was overly thrilled that PA was bought by Paradox and will be getting updates and DLC's. I thought, that is absolute fantastic, more content for one of my most favourite games out there.

But now we come to the bad part: Ever since the latest updates and DLC's the game is utterly broken and it just keeps getting worse. This month I spent 5 hours planning and designing another prison with the latest DLC's. I put much effort and love into this once again. I am not a new player and I know the game in and out, all the systems and the mechanics, just, nothing works anymore! To my horror I discovered that everyone is just on strike in prison.

The problems:
1.: Janitors are not cleaning up. Even if you hire a huge ammount of them, they just go to the cleaning closet and just sit there and do nothing. I have another room just 10 tiles away (Intake) and the Janitors would just need to walk over there and clean it up but no, they don't do it. The whole prison is dirty, nothing gets cleaned and the Janitors are just doing nothing and literally squatting in the closet. If they go out to clean, they do it late and in small teams that get one job done and return back home ASAP. In the older version they would do a clear sweep and clean everything up to gether in one go, always instantly without pause. Manually sationaring th em in rooms does nothing to, they literally do not clean a room they are stationed in. They just move around and do nothing.
2.: Prisoners refuse to do jobs. They do not want to work in the laundry and the cleaning closet. They just sit around doing... nothing while everything gets dirty.
3.: Janitors don't deliver and clean clothes in the laundry. They sometimes do something then let everything just sit and just nothing. I tested around with this to see if I can get a temp fix for this somehow. I made a maximum and a supermax Sector with their own laundry. Didnt change anything, IN FACT, the janitors refused to touch the Super Max Laundry.
4.: Cooks don do their job: They do NOT cook. They just stand and do nothing. Sometimes you can somehow fix this with reloading and manually redoing the chain of room depencies. IF they cook then they start like when half of the mealtime is over. "Oh hey Jeff, is it mealtime yet? "I dont know, maybe in an hour" "ah, cool, we got 2 hours before we should start cooking some meals for the 500 prisoners" "sounds great" Just like this. In the old versions the cooks would take the number of prisoners into account and START COOKING BEFOREHAND to have the meals ready when meal time actu ally starts. Even with a huge kitchen, with 50 stoves, 200 cook and plenty of time, this changes nothing. Plus, they leave cooked meals on the stove if that happens. Cleaning up does not happen too. This means that prisoners are angry cause they get no food always.
5.: Guards find tunnels even when there are no prisoners around. They just keep telling me that there are loads of tunnels when there hasnt even been one prisoners in yet.
6.: Items get transported one after the other into the prison in a long colon of trucks, making it impossible to play bigger prisoners because the items cannot be brought in.

If you play a game you have Prisoners who are always angry because they have no clothes, Prisoners who are angry because they cannot get fed in a prison that would make Mexican Prisons look like a Hilton. Everyone is angry, everyone riots and thus it makes the game UNPLAYABLE IN ITS CURRENT STATE.

Please, please, please fix this ASAP or let us roll back to a state where you could actually play the game. Curently I cannot play Prison Architect because it is utterly broken and unplayable.

Thank you for much and I eagerly await the fixes.
HI did you make a support ticket about the bugs i shouldn't be the only one to report bugs.
 
Oh, I know I said "I haven't had issues with cooks yet". I'm going to redact that statement after playing a few more hours. I now have a kitchen and canteen where they move empty trays around, but don't actually do anything with the food they cook.
 
Yes, I sent the issues in and they seem to be aware of them. The problem is that they do NOT seem to tackle them since a long time now. Those are bugs and issues that have plagued the game since a longer time now and nothing got done about it.
It is nice and all that they released an update 1.04 that "Reduced the Prisoners’ clothing and Hygiene needs." but it does NOT fix anything. It is just a bandaid on a festering wound and calling the job done. Right now the game is still broken and all the problems, bugs, issues that I psoted above still persist and make it impossible to play the game properly. My prison is still a mess and the prisoners complain that everything looks like a dump in here. They still don't get food and they are wearing dirty clothes for weeks.

I personally think that Prison Architect, the game, cannot handle bigger prison with alot of Agents in it. And if you buy extended land it just makes it even more worse. I noticed that if you buy land on the right side of the map it just makes it harder for AI to figure out how to handle this. If you want to play the game, I would strongly recommend to keep prisoners below 200 and same with Staff. This and keep things as tight and compact as you can. Janitors, cooks, etc, have real problems traveling distances that are longer than next room or two. You cannot tell them to hang out in a specific room so they hang out in exports. I took a Screenshot and gave some infos on it. As you can see they just chill in those areas in red, the orange path is how the AI does their cleaning routine. Half of the Janitors are just doing nothing, the other half are checking to see if some dirt is around and take the routes in orange, CLEAN ONCE, then return home without doing more than that. I suspect that the AI is programmed to do a job or two and then return home. Maybe to safe processing power if they constantly need to check? I dont know, I am not an expert but it sure seems to be like this. Maybe the Janitors only have a numer of clean dirts jobs allowed at once. In the old versions the Janitors would just continue to sweep anything that they find nearby until the job is finished. They did always fan out and finished the job until they tired out.

I do not know what they did with the AI but it is just not doing their job anymore. And why cooks aren't cooking anymore and late is something that I cannot explain. So, yeah, the AI is absolutely helpless in scenarios where they need to take care of more than 100 or 200 prisoners, need to walk longer paths and got more complex tasks.

In conclusion: The game is absolutely bug riddled in every aspect and the most basic systems do not work or in the best case scenario work sometimes. And since I made the first post nothing changed. So, please, please, please, please fix this.
 

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Utterly garbage game now. I've also spent an embarrassing amount of time building a prison, just to get screwed by these and more game breaking bugs, specially the stupid sound bug that has haunted this game since the beginning.
Here's a video of my major problem with the game
Maybe these guys should acquire some inspiration from the Factorio team on how to polish the game properly.
 

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I have to agree. I also go back to the game every half-year or year, and it's really gotten bad recently. Apart from small bugs and gamebreaking bugs like Workmen not building stuff because apparently there's "no path" (there is a path, you just built on the tile right next to it!), I also realized that staff meals are always coming in with one box per truck. I mean... Please fix the game before you throw more stuff at us. Make sure it works.

Also, being able to roll back would be very nice. I like a lot of the stuff that was added by Double Eleven. In principle. Being able to assign custom zones (e.g. "only mid- and max-sec) is AMAZING! I also like that more rooms have grading now. The extra furniture is also good, why not.

If only everything that was added also worked... and didn't break old stuff, that was working fine before...

In other words: I like what Double Eleven is doing in principle. I like the direction they're taking in terms of new features. It's just that the execution of it... isn't great. To put it mildly.

I usually start out with unlimited money, plan and build the whole prison before I let any prisoners in. Looking over the forum and bug reports, it's going to be a very bumpy ride.
 
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I initially made the first post 2 and a half weeks ago and nothing was addressed or mentioned until now. I do not expect them to fix the numerous problems that plague PA in this amount of time... but maybe a mention that it is being worked on would be great.

I want to play it again but it has been over a month now and nothing changed. Still the same game breaking bugs and problems that make the game not work. Not sure what else to do but report and make posts on this forum.
 
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