Laundry in a large prison

[Ripcord]

Does anyone with a large (200+) person prison have good laundry flow? Does all the laundry actually get done?


I'm having laundry problems. Laundry is getting done, just not as quickly as needed. In my two current prisons maybe half of laundry gets done daily. It seems like there's a serious bottleneck, like only up to 5 dudes will ever be doing laundry-related activities at a time, and I can't figure out why. And since the work finding algorithm is pathetically bad, they run all over the place (from one end of the prison to the other) to do whatever. So it's ridiculously inefficient.

Most, but not all, of my inmate workers just wander around aimlessly, and at any given time my janitors are mostly idle (though like 1-5 of them will be doing laundry things at any time, and the others will periodically skate off in mobs to do some mopping. But mostly just standing around in the cleaning closet. Huffing cleaning supplies I guess).

This has been a problem with 3 large prisons in a row (with very different designs) in Alpha 24 and 25. So far I've:

- Tried one huge central laundry with TONS of free space, 20 laundry machines, 10 ironing boards, 40 baskets (or much fewer), and 20 inmate workers.
- Tried 3 laundries similar to the above, with one set up so that laundry workers HAVE to go through the area I want serviced most (a maxsec area, where my legendary dudes are really unhappy they're not getting laundry)
- Hired over 100 janitors
- Tried throwing away all laundry and starting fresh
- Prisoners work the laundry for 6 hours a day, 18 hours a day in 3 shifts
- Tried reducing the # of prisoners down from 500 to 150 (don't ask how). Still not enough laundry activity to actually give everyone clean clothes.
- Tried all mods with the word "laundry" in the name, including the "Laundry and cooking ingredients stacks fix mod" (which helped with a few dirty laundry piles that seemed to get stuck, but that's it)
- Marked all cells as locked open, to help with delays waiting for locked cells to open, or dudes getting stuck waiting for them to open overnight (and do you know how big a pain in the a** it is to manually mark 500 cells open?

Laundry's getting done, and I don't think it's a pathing problem, etc. Just not nearly quickly enough. It's like the game algorithm limits how many guys can ever be doing laundry or something.

Not sure what else to do. I can't find any other recent thread on this and it seems like it'd be a major headache for 200+ prisons, so either it's me or I'm missing the threads or people aren't complaining.

[Travis182]

It's whatever. Yes we are all having some laundry problems. The workers just start loafing around after a short period of time "working." I have a small laundry room in each of my blocks of 56 prisoners and laundry gets like halfway done in seven hours. The game just doesn't logically prioritize tasks right now in general, but it's not game-breaking. What seriously hinders my game is the fact that I can't smoothly play with 200 prisoners. Fixes will happen over time though, I'm not worried about it.

[Ripcord]

Ok, so other people with large prisons agree? You've found no way to get laundry to get serviced properly?

I find it game-breaking, personally =) But not as bad as a lot of bugs could be (especially crashes), I guess.

[Ripcord]

Looks like Chris updated the general pathfinding bug and marked it as targeted for bugbash-2 (http://bugs.introversion.co.uk/view.php?id=752). Hopefully that happens and is good. That'd be a boon to the game, especially large prisons (though the laundry one especially bugs me since there doesn't seem to be some solution or workaround)

Although it was also marked as fixed in Bugbash 1, and that only addressed a very small number of jobs.