Food trays.

[scuba_alext]

My prison keeps getting extra food tray, enough to fill up the sinks and start backing up on the tables in the canteens, every now and again I dump every food tray but it keeps getting to the stage that they are overflowing again. I've got 493 inmates, does that mean that there will be 493 food trays and I haven't got enough serving tables?

[Jet City Gambler]

I ran into a similar problem when I recently hit about 450+ prisoners, They just couldn't clear out the trays from the previous day by the time breakfast came around. I had a ton of sinks, but prisoners were starving because there were no clean trays.

I finally had to hire a bunch of cooks and dump a few hundred dirty trays before it seemed to sort itself out. Finally ended up with 50 or so cooks for 500 prisoners, seems to be doing OK now.

[lissa_981]

Cooks, sinks or serving tray are usually the issue. Each serving table can hold 40 trays (I usually plan it as 30 for eventualities) so that a good start. If the trays are sitting dirty on the tables unstacked you need more cooks to clear them up, if they are stacked , but dirty you need more sinks to get them clean.

[Jet City Gambler]

Yeah, that's what I figured, mine were piling up on the tables in the Canteen with a ToDo "Move to Sink". One stack was 92 dirty trays!

I don't know how I got so far behind in cooks, usually I have too many employees in my prison.

[scuba_alext]

I've got 50 cooks and 27 sinks for nearly 500 prisoners, shoud I buy more sinks and see how it goes?

[Jet City Gambler]

Like lissa said, you need to see where the bottleneck is. If the trays are piling up in the Canteen after meals, either hire more cooks (or schedule a nice long work block after meals, so you can use prison labor to clean up the mess). If the trays are getting stacked but all the sinks are already full of dishes, then you need more sinks.

Sounds like you have plenty of cooks and sinks though. It helps to mess with the regime to make sure you have work blocks before and after meals, so the inmates can help out.

If you've gotten so far behind that you have stacks of dirty trays everywhere, sometimes it's best just to dump them. Be sure you have bins in your canteen, makes it much easier to get them out of there.