Multiple kitchens/cooks/canteens is still horribly broken.

[Doom-Slayer]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=284861168

So my current setup is like this. Its a pod based prison and previously I had it working perfectly. Now for some reason all my cooks have gone completely mental and wont distrubute food properly.

For some reason they distribute ALL the food to the servining tables in the LEFT block, despite serving tables being 1 block them where they are cooking. Even like how I have it now, with ALL the canteens and kitchens unallocated in the left block ,they still wont distrubute food properly.

I even attempted to wall off the left block and they then put food into the canteens where I had no prisoners, and not one of my prisoners got food.

Any ideas why its suddenly gone mental?

[Rogue]

Well if your prisoners prefer the left canteen then that is where the cooks will take the food. You can't force the prisoners to eat in the right canteen unless you rezone the left. It looks to me like you have too large of a canteen for the amount of prisoners. If nothing else I'd join the two together and zone the whole thing under one canteen zone.

[Doom-Slayer]

Originally posted by Slowmo:

Well if your prisoners prefer the left canteen then that is where the cooks will take the food. You can't force the prisoners to eat in the right canteen unless you rezone the left. It looks to me like you have too large of a canteen for the amount of prisoners. If nothing else I'd join the two together and zone the whole thing under one canteen zone.

I think you misunderstand. I mean the entire left hand block. Prisoners right now are fixed inside their own little 12 person cellblocks. They cannot move to any other adjancent cellblock. Each little 12 prisoner cellblock has their own canteen, with 1 kitchen serving the top and bottom cellblocks in each row. So right now I have 6 canteens and 3 kitchens.

In the left hand block I have the entire area marked staff only, prisoners cannot go there, or be place in those cells. On top of that, there are no zoned canteens or kitchens(I just have the stoves and serving talbes)>

THats my main problem, my cooks are preferring to take food to a serving table NOT in a canteen, in an area where there are no prisoners. That makes zero sense.

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/39721291232530483/1C81F5CF2326DB89F2CE8655741162F6E730301C/

Thats my current zoning. Each 12 man cellblock has 1 block block staff only buffer zone to prevent them from moving between cellblocks. That means technically the cooks should priorotize where the prisoners can access and take food to those specific canteens. They seem to do the opposite.

[Princess Greg]

Why don't you just combine the kitchens/canteens, or leave the objects in storage until the cell block has prisoners?

There's always going to be a huge issue with multiple canteens/kitchens, unless you are able to perfect the pathing, number of cooks vs prisoners vs cookers/fridge, etc. Not forgetting that when cooks go to the delivery zone/staff room, they will displace themselves and you'd have to figure out how to keep each room functional.

Honestly, I'd just recommend you just knock down the walls between the kitchens/canteens and have 1 big one. For the moment, you need to compromise design for functionality.

[Doom-Slayer]

Originally posted by Domina:

Why don't you just combine the kitchens/canteens, or leave the objects in storage until the cell block has prisoners?

There's always going to be a huge issue with multiple canteens/kitchens, unless you are able to perfect the pathing, number of cooks vs prisoners vs cookers/fridge, etc. Not forgetting that when cooks go to the delivery zone/staff room, they will displace themselves and you'd have to figure out how to keep each room functional.

Honestly, I'd just recommend you just knock down the walls between the kitchens/canteens and have 1 big one. For the moment, you need to compromise design for functionality.

Mostly because its a test of mine, and because ideally this is the most efficient method possible.

Combining canteens means you allow prisoners into each other cellblocks. Allowing them to do that means they will spend a vast amount of time just moving between every action they want to take because they dont prioritize based on distance.

Also on top of that, this design WORKS. Ive done it in my last prison with the only difference being the cellblock design(this one is smaller/compact) I just find it wierd that the cooks are doing things that make no logical sense. In my previous prison they would always prioritize putting food into the canteens where prisoners were, and would put the spare food into canteens where there were less prisoners. Now they dont seem to go by any rules and put them in completely random serving tables, regardless of distance, how many prisoners or even if they are in canteens or not. Just seems odd.

Also with this design I can hypothetically fit 1152 prisoners into a single large peice of land with no land purchases :) That and this design means you can potentially expand this prison almost infintely, with the only negative factor being the distance travelled by the cooks to get delivered food.

[Mendacious Calamity]

What with it being an alpha full of unoptimised code, perhaps it only worked the first time by chance and you just think it was due to good planning. Have you saved and reloaded? If so, perhaps reloading did something screwy to your staff and now their perception of which serving tables they should put food on has been adjusted. Maybe?

[Princess Greg]

Well, I can understand the need for efficiency, though I somewhat have the same thought as my•glass•eye, where things might've worked well in your previous prison by chance. As far as I know, the AI hasn't actually been buffed enough to display such prioritization.

They did touch on cooks for a bit during the bug bash, though the fix was a hit and miss, so that could account for the different behaviour (depending on when you built your old/new prisons). Have you tried loading up the old prison (if you still have the save) to see whether it is still working or whether it's gone wonky as this one has? Also, beyond size of the rooms, is everything else the same?