Kitchen bug

[Red Earth]

I don't know where to report Prison Architect bugs, so here I go, posting everywhere.

Kitchens sometimes shut down and produce no meals. Cooks stand around and do nothing. One or two items are on cookers but logistics doesn't count them. Supply is always 0(+0) regardless of demand.
I first fixed it by removing all objects and putting them back. Later I found selecting the items on the cooker and dumping them unstuck the kitchen.
Lately I've had to check every kitchen each night to make sure they don't have leftovers stopping everything.
I think it's caused by a cook picking up an ingredient and while they're moving to a cooker, eat time ends. They place it on the cooker and it just becomes inert and blocks all cookers in the kitchen from working.
At least that's what I think is causing it. Either way, it's coming up a lot.

Edit added for clarity: I got bins and garbage. The ingredients don't even have the To do: Place in bin order on them. I first observed this 100 days into a prison and I'm at over 500 days now. I've put a lot of research into this to confirm it is actually a bug and not just me not understanding the way it works. Also I've got over a million dollars but only 360 prisoners because I spend so much time just observing behavior to understand how the simulation works. So I'm certain there's a bug here.

[Rogue]

hmmm, never had that problem. I have found that the following almost always solves kitchen problems.

1. Need more cooks
2. Need more sinks
3. need additional serving tables

At the minimum you should have 5 stoves, 2 sinks, 6 refers, 3 serving tables and 8 cooks.

[Red Earth]

Like I said, the cooks are just standing there. Also, dishes are clean; serving tables are empty of food and full of trays because the kitchen is producing nothing.

[Marcuz]

Can you upload your prison.

[Red Earth]

Originally posted by Marcuz:

Can you upload your prison.

I can, however I finally got access to the bug tracker system and someone already reported it and said reloading unstuck the kitchen. So I'll upload it tomorrow, but it might not show anything right away.

[still.wav]

i have a bug where suddenly all cooks on my biggest kitchen stopped cooking !!! restarting the game many times lead to them to begin cooking normally one of those times but when i got out and in again the bug was back.... they just run along the kitchen, food is over the fridges but they don't cook it. also my prisoners stoped eating at canteens !!!! (the other kitchens work just fine) and started starving to death and attacking guards.... i think the game is lost but really i have found A LOT of bugs like these playing the game for a week ...... instead of getting paid dlc's out they should do somethng to fix it

[Chingón, C.M.]

It's a game-breaking interaction between two bugs on the_rock_1.02.

For one, cooks seem to have this weird behavior where they will cook small batches of 1-2 meals and then send them to the canteen, using up a spot on your serving tables on only those 1-2 (they don't get filled up to 10, they stay until all meals run out and the spot is open again). Because of this once your spots are all filled up the kitchen will stop making meals and as a result the kitchen will practically never make enough meals to feed all prisoners unless you have an overkill amount of serving tables. I presume this is what the "Kitchens are now severely under-producing enough meals" that Paradox are aware of is.

What this causes then the second issue: Once eating time comes up prisoners will grab meals and as spots open up in serving tables cooks will begin to cook new meals to finally meet demand. However, the cooks never end up catching up to the demand because meal time (if 2 hours or shorter, at least with 300 prisoners) will end before they can send them out. This causes some meals to remain on the cookers after meal time since the cooks didn't have the time. The existence of these meals already cooking (even if it's 1 or 2) will cause the cooks to believe they're already cooking next meal time so they will no longer cook any more meals, not a single one, until those meals are reset.

The way to fix this is to dump (to remove) or search (to reset - after the search the meals will be taken to the canteen) every cooking meal after mealtime. This can either be done manually or by shaking down the kitchen after every meal time.

[Amity]

Seems like this bug is still not fixed, and two of my moms almost starved to death for this. Thanks to the helpful tips that they survived (and saved me from going insane as well)! I had to dismantle all my stuff from the kitchen and reinstall them - but hey these poor starving moms were saved and that's all I cared.

[READTHEE]

Originally posted by Amity:

Seems like this bug is still not fixed, and two of my moms almost starved to death for this. Thanks to the helpful tips that they survived (and saved me from going insane as well)! I had to dismantle all my stuff from the kitchen and reinstall them - but hey these poor starving moms were saved and that's all I cared.

It hasn't been fixed, I faced this issue recently and it was "fixed" by selecting "deployment" and connecting kitchen to canteen (even though it already was connected).

Good thing they worked on DLC's though.