The kitchen isn't working properly.

[ITISWAYTOOHARD]

The kitchen does work, but it doesn't cook all the food requested by canteen and doesn't work half the way it is made.
I've increased the number of cooks and equipment, but it's not solved. While the kitchen is not working, unpack the room and set it back to the kitchen to start working properly. But by the next meal time, the kitchen won't work properly again.
Please fix it.

 

[prospectus]

I have this problem as well, sometimes the cooks make all the food that is needed, another time they barely make enough to feed 20% of the prisoners.

 

[AirDoc]

Same. I am consistently getting 80-100% of required meals cooked in time for "eat" schedules. This is despite more than adequate cookers, fridges, and cooks. In fact, the cooks are often idle in the hour leading up to the "eat" time, during which they should be making more meals. Usually then about 30-45 minutes prior to the end of the eat schedule, the cooks start to make the remaining required meals, though they frequently aren't ready in time to be delivered to the canteens (right next door) with sufficient time for the hungry prisoners to eat before meal time is up. I didn't have this issue when my most recent prison was smaller and when everyone was just getting medium/medium meals. With a larger prison and my min sec prisoners getting high quantity / medium variety meals, this is more of a problem. However, the bugs prior to The Rock 1.04 prevented me from growing my prison, so I'm not sure if it's the larger size/meal changes or the 1.04 patch that created the problem. I'm playing no mods, only DLC is cleared for transfer.
One other possible observation. It seems like when the cooks produce a lot of food waste (drop ingredients on the floor), they tend to be more likely to come up short of the required meals. If there isn't as much food waste, there seems to be a better chance the proper number of meals are will be ready. So, I wonder if the game counts the total number of food items grabbed (from the boxes on the fridges) rather than the total number of food items that actually make it into the pots/pans and contribute to meals when decided how much food to cook. Thus, when there's food waste, the total number of meals ends up short because not all the ingredients that were grabbed ended up being cooked.

 

[prospectus]

Same. I am consistently getting 80-100% of required meals cooked in time for "eat" schedules. This is despite more than adequate cookers, fridges, and cooks. In fact, the cooks are often idle in the hour leading up to the "eat" time, during which they should be making more meals. Usually then about 30-45 minutes prior to the end of the eat schedule, the cooks start to make the remaining required meals, though they frequently aren't ready in time to be delivered to the canteens (right next door) with sufficient time for the hungry prisoners to eat before meal time is up. I didn't have this issue when my most recent prison was smaller and when everyone was just getting medium/medium meals. With a larger prison and my min sec prisoners getting high quantity / medium variety meals, this is more of a problem. However, the bugs prior to The Rock 1.04 prevented me from growing my prison, so I'm not sure if it's the larger size/meal changes or the 1.04 patch that created the problem. I'm playing no mods, only DLC is cleared for transfer.
One other possible observation. It seems like when the cooks produce a lot of food waste (drop ingredients on the floor), they tend to be more likely to come up short of the required meals. If there isn't as much food waste, there seems to be a better chance the proper number of meals are will be ready. So, I wonder if the game counts the total number of food items grabbed (from the boxes on the fridges) rather than the total number of food items that actually make it into the pots/pans and contribute to meals when decided how much food to cook. Thus, when there's food waste, the total number of meals ends up short because not all the ingredients that were grabbed ended up being cooked.

Sometimes I think the issue is cooks "incorrectly" distributing the ingredients for cooking. With high variety meals there's bacon, eggs, potatoes and cabbage. Cooks only can cook one ingredient type at a time on a frying pan/pot (2 spots per stove). If they put for example an egg on a frying pan, they won't put any other ingredients in that pan, only more eggs until the pan is full.

So sometimes my cooks grab a single ingredient like a bunch of eggs and distribute on every cooker spot a single egg, instead of doing the efficient thing and putting 10 or 20 eggs all on one frying pan on one cooker. Now since all the cookers are busy inefficiently making eggs, the cooks don't have any spots to make the cabbage, bacon and potatoes. So all they can do is keep adding eggs, until they run out of eggs in the fridges. Once out of eggs, the only thing they can do now is stand around and wait until the eggs are finished, take them to the serving tables and finally start using the other ingredients once the cookers are free.

My hypothesis would be consistent with my observation that cooks start making the required amount of food way too late, and sometimes I only have enough food to feed a quarter of my inmates. Once way to solve this is to just use the "none" variety option, since the fridges will be full with only one ingredient and it won't run out in the middle of cooking nor will it prevent cooks from using the other ingredients. Or build either way more cookers or way more fridges than what should be needed.

 

[AndrewT]

If you have save games showing this, please attach them here:

Cooks and Kitchens not working as intended - save files

Hello! We are investigating the bug reports we are seeing about Cooks and Kitchens not working as intended. If you experienced this bug in one of your prisons, we would appreciate it if you could upload the save file here.

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Thanks!