Another Good game Broken

[Incalculant]

I've played Prison Architect over 1000h and never had bugs or issues but since last patch it seems the Devs don't care anymore. Countless bugs now. Staff don't eat... doesn't matter how you add it either in staff canteen or in staff room they don't eat staff meals anymore they all rather eat from snack machines. Also now food gets stored in Pantry from the kitchen(s) and if you have export linked on farms they now even fill up your export with cooking pots that you have to manually dump else export gets filled up and nothing export anymore. Workshops now just keep pilling plates up to the point where you also have to manually dump it all. Prisoners now steal everything they can from every single room doesn't matter how many metal detectors you have in the prison. Same with drugs... dogs don't detect them all anymore even if you have 500 patrolling or stationed they still somehow hide drugs and sneak it into cells past the 500 dog handlers. Now prisoners also don't go to yard during yard time anymore... they rather hang out in there cells and Overdose on all the drugs they sneak in past the 500 dogs handlers. If i guard goes to fetch a prisoner that Overdosed and your running the game speed to fast they run in circles till the prisoner dies(cos the guard got super speed now when carrying prisoners to infirmary). No more stopping those deaths. Now when you switch to high Quality fertiliser deliveries also don't keep up anymore and trucks just keep pilling up until nothing reaches the prison in time anymore. Prisoners are now so bad ass that even min sec kill guards just by looking at them funny. Not to mention the drinks machine that every single prisoner steals from but never from the snack machines. Supermax prisoners now kill so many guards and they are indestructible(2000 guard deaths later). Some of the panel are now out of screen at some resolutions like Quick build's new tabs. The buttons on regime is unclickable at the bottom outside the panel unless you know how to size it. The list goes on... One more game screwed up by the Devs.

[Playzr 🐵]

Yeah it's always broken. It does give us something to complain about on these forums. You might also treat the bugs like an additional challenge, but often it's game breaking. I think the issue is that the devs don't experience all of the same bugs we experience, maybe because they have all the DLC I don't know. So they act like the bugs don't exist. But nearly all of us encounter game breaking bugs. Then they release more and more bloated DLC which only adds more bugs and takes developer time away from fixing the bugs plaguing this game to fixing a handful of the bugs added by the DLC. They must see releasing DLC as the way to make money, but frankly if they just fixed the bugs with the base game then more of us would consider buying the DLC. We don't want DLC for a game that doesn't work.

[happynut67]

+1... Came back to this game remembering the good times when it was actually polished and functional. Juggled between playing with all the new stuff and reverting back to 2018 version, sacrificing the new items and other cool features. Will wait and see what patches the future might hold, until then it doesn't feel worth it to sink hours on the current version.

[adamtheblade88]

Indeed. Prisoner "Safety" is the exact same statistic across "Fulfilled" "Concerned" and "Desperately Needs", Handymen don't do laundry, instead preferring to hang out 100 to a cleaning cupboard, Prisoners are unhygienic despite ample opportunity to get showers, game is a complete mess, still, and reporting these bugs does nothing.

[Etherium]

I think at this point if you were to put Prison Architect Dev on a resume the AI auto filters it to the recycle bin.

[Incalculant]

I found that with using toilets and showers also in yard and canteens can solve the hygiene issue thru out prison. also by starting the day with an hour shower time after sleep time only 80 - 90% of them use the time for hygiene. The prisoners now go to the yard and common room during shower time even. Simple bugs they could have fixed if they actually played there own game.

[Playzr 🐵]

Putting your prisoners in sentence serving generic punishment pods drastically increases their survival rate, while forcing them to wake up in a future that they can't adjust to.

[Luzilyo]

Also experienced similar bugs as the ones mentioned here.

Cooks always take food (fruit or cooked from fresh ingredients) away from the serving tables in the canteen, especially shortly before and during meal time. This can be "solved" by just not using fresh food and simply only make meals from imported ingredients as those meals seem to be immune.

Janitors often just chill in the cleaning cupboard instead of cleaning anyting, then, maybe once a day, they rush out in a huge crowd, clean like 2 or 3 rooms, and once that's done they get back to the excrutiantingly hard task of relaxing in the cleaning cupboard, completely ignoring any other cleaning tasks.

Often in the morning after their sleep time ends, prisoner hygiene need is so high that, instead of using the shower (even if I put showers right there in their cell), they get mad and start rioting - ironically one of the first things they destroy is often their shower. "Solved" this by simply never letting anyone sleep for more than 2 hours at a time, with lockdown in-between so that they are forced to stay in their cells. This of course messes up my regime and results in prisoners often using regular free time and lockup to catch up on the sleep that they lost with the multiple showers they had to take during the night. It also means that I have to put a shower in every cell if I want to keep them locked up during the night.

Those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Seems to me that instead of doing any testing at all, the devs rather just let the community do their testing for them, so I'd say it's probably a good idea to treat this game like an Early Access title and not like an actually finished and properly tested game.

[Playzr 🐵]

I dunno about prisoners mentality regarding hygiene but in real life I can happily go an extra day without a shower without smashing furniture. Having hygiene build up in a 24 hour period is asking for trouble. Maybe without hygiene reaching its peak the prisoners wouldn't take care of that need since their bar isn't anywhere near full.
The game should go into late access and that should become a thing.

[Luzilyo]

Originally posted by Рlαγζr 🐵:

I dunno about prisoners mentality regarding hygiene but in real life I can happily go an extra day without a shower without smashing furniture. Having hygiene build up in a 24 hour period is asking for trouble. Maybe without hygiene reaching its peak the prisoners wouldn't take care of that need since their bar isn't anywhere near full.
The game should go into late access and that should become a thing.

Not even 24 hours, but specifically the sleep hours. They (ideally) shower in the morning, then, if they exercise they usually need to shower again right after which works decently enough (especially since my gym and fight club also have two showers each) and when they go to bed, their hygiene need is usually extremely low, often non existant. Then they sleep for 8 hours and when they wake up, all of a sudden their hygiene need is at 100 %. During a heat wave with like 35 to 40 °C that would make sense, there have been days with such heat where I also had to take multiple showers because of all the sweating, but in the game it is always like this, regardless of weather or temperature. Can be in the middle of winter with a huge blizzard and -30 °C and they'll still act this way.

[Incalculant]

Hygiene is the worst when they wake up and the whole prison almost at the brink of rioting. If the flower garden is removed hygiene is even better... The flower garden makes then all red in less then a hour. Another useless room since it also brings more weapons and tools into the prison and every single prisoner has to go visit the flower garden first in the morning right after they had showers. It would have been such a nice part of prisoner reform but instead its not worth adding just like other rooms, Gymnasium with drugs weapons and tools can get quiet out of hand too i don't even both building it anymore cos its much easier just to add the gym equipment into the yard. I used to be able to build 1024 prisoner prisons easy with out any single incidents now every single prisoner is a supermax legendary about even if they are min-sec cos they all have to steal everything 10 times a day. No prison in the world is like. The point is dev's don't test or even play there own game before releasing DLC's or so called "Free updates". Most of them not even worth having the DLC's or the rooms from them. Bakery is fine sometimes but hardly anything to sell. Same thing with restaurants. Another pointless addition that cause more issues then good. Other thing is you have to reform the prisoners but you always get a bunch that never will reform and always re-offend which you now have to pay 5000 for if they do re-offend. If they do reform its only 1000 which don't make sense either. Even the solar power cash has been cut in half. Instead the last patch the sorted the Utility tab as well with new buttons that makes it 10 times more frustrating to build with or sell and remove wires or pipes. Same with the "Quick build" tab that most players can't even click on the buttons at the top cos its not in the game view... unless you know how to move it every single time in order to use it. Don't even get me started on prisoner payments. Med-sec gives more then Max-sec and Supermax. So there's no point housing higher level prisoners if med-sec gonna bring in more income. There's so many other things.... Dev's can go much better. This is an amazing game and I'm sure a lot of loyal players will agree. Dev's your messing up the game.

[happynut67]

That rings like words of wisdom right here, kudos to that. Any loyal player enjoys this game for it's complex mechanics and the 'architect' aspects at it's core. Don't forget the name and story of this master piece, give new stumblers the tools to fall in love with the gameplay. May get many paying passer-byes with the ports and dlcs and marketing, which is all alright, but don't go too far astray. Any addition should imply expanding upon the existing systems as well as respecting a balanced gameplay. Sandbox with a pletora of mutators is there for funky experiences but take care of genuine gameplay improvement first and foremost. Must be hard to take on a game years in and maybe harsh to read this but still... is a scenario where the soul of the project has to be respected.

[Playzr 🐵]

It's my understanding that having all the DLC might reduce the amount of bugs you experience because that's the version the devs work on and would notice some of the bugs with that but not the base game. I bet it's still a buggy mess though even with the devs fixing some of the bugs they add.

[maverickmila]

The "prisoners on the brink of rioting when waking up because of low hygiene" is trivially solved by adding a "shower/lockdown" to your regime in the middle of the night (around 2 am.)

What I hate is the prisoner intake being wildly inaccurate -- like, if you tell me that you're sending me 8 min sec and 2 med sec, then actually send me that, not 20 stoic max sec. Or right now it's insisting I'm massively under utilizing my prison and there's 104 free beds, when any way I count it, I've got less than 20 (and those are protected or family cells.)

[Playzr 🐵]

Could do with some shower beds with morning wake up alarm mode.

[Luzilyo]

Originally posted by maverickmila:

The "prisoners on the brink of rioting when waking up because of low hygiene" is trivially solved by adding a "shower/lockdown" to your regime in the middle of the night (around 2 am.)

Similarly, I could say the issue of cooks constantly carrying fruits and food cooked from fresh ingredients back and forth between serving tables and pantries can be easily "fixed" by simply using only imported ingredients. Doesn't make the bug any less annoying, and is a bit of a silly thing to point out in the context of a thread for talking about annoying bugs. Like, yeah, sure, there exist some workarounds, that doesn't really change the fact that it's an annoying bug.