This is a collection of issues that I learned about the hard way after ~600h with this game. Some of these issues may have been raised before, but many haven't. Some issues have been around for a long time, others were newly introduced with "Cleared for Transfer", especially when it comes to custom security sectors.
- The mail room is broken. For some weird reason, mail is only delivered to cell blocks that are marked as the same security level as the mail room. A mail room marked as "shared" or "staff only" only delivers mail to "shared" cell blocks, if you mark the mail room as "Max only", the mail is only delivered to "Max" cell blocks etc. Currently, the only workaround is to have a separate mail room for every security level / sector and make sure they are marked as the correct sector. As long as no prison labor is assigned, guards will sort & deliver the mail.
- Custom sectors can lead to corrupted save games where the game crashes immediately every time upon loading the savegame. According to my error log this is because of a function called "SecuritySectorGrade::CalculateShowerGrade(bool)". My suspicion is that the sector grading calculates the score for hot showers for "shared" sectors, but crashes when a sector is "custom" rather than "shared". In my specific save game, I had only cold showers in SuperMax, and hot showers in all other sectors.
-> How I salvaged my save game: Open the savegame with a text editor and find all instances of "CustomZone0" -"CustomZone10". Mark them ALL as "false". Then search for "Zone" and replace "Custom" with "MaxSecOnly" or "StaffOnly". After I did that, I can reliably load the save-game again without any crashing.
- In Escape Mode, the player will ALWAYS arrive as a medium sec prisoner, even if the prison is exclusively Max sec or Insane sec. I regard this as a bug rather than just a design oversight, because the slogan for the game is "Build and manage a maximum security prison!" - If you do just that, what the game says it is all about, and you correctly mark sectors as encouraged by Cleared for Transfer, you cannot play that prison in Escape Mode, because you'll get stuck at reception without ever being assigned a cell.
- Reform programs will NOT take place in rooms that are marked as "custom" sectors. If prisoners are already doing alcohol group therapy for example, they won't attend anymore after you change the common room to "custom", and they'll fail. Worse even, guards will not bring overdosed prisoners into "custom" sector infirmaries and they are simply left to die in their cells.
- However, the game still assumes that "shared" rooms are part of all and every one security sector. For example, I have a Maximum security prison with a Supermax, prisoners are encouraged to behave in Supermax by creating a large gap in sector grading between Max & Super so that they are motivated to transfer. Unfortunately, marking any Yard as "shared" makes the game assume that Super Max prisoners have access, even if they physically cannot get there due to "staff only" sectors in between. The game will then award bonus points for yard access and the yard grading to the Super Max sector grade. The same happens with every "shared" common room, etc.
- When using multiple times in the deployment planner, guards & dog handlers will start moving to their patrol at assigned start of deployment planner, but in a large prison it could be 1-2 hours until they arrive at their patrol. This is because they only start moving there once their patrol is supposed to start. This is made worse by horrible pathfinding. Guards get virtually randomly assigned to jobs, patrols etc., and no consideration is made to how far they are from their destination when the job is assigned. So every time you have a major change in the deployment scheduler, guards will spend a long time moving from one side of the prison in total chaos, and in the worst case leave prisoners completely unattended for hours.
- When loading a new prison from the Steam workshop via prison sharing, all guards on patrol in that prison immediately abandon their patrol routes, leaving prisoners unattended, and are assigned again to patrols. In a large prison, this means that they travel all across the map for several hours, because assignment of guards to patrols seems random and not based on their physical proximity.
- Cells do not receive laundry and prisoners in lockup aren’t fed if the cell is not part of a cellblock, but is instead separately zoned. This happens if you have cells that have a door at the outside of a building, or if you build cells with 2 cell doors - for instance for your Super Max because that is the setup at ADX Florence. Additionally, zoning a canteen or common room etc. directly in front of a cell door will also result in this issue. This bug also affects solitary cells, but differently. If you have a solitary cell adjacent to a yard or any other room, guards won't feed the prisoner in that cell, Instead, they carry the food to the upper leftmost corner of the map when assigned the job "feed prisoner".
- During start of a work regime, prisoners can be assigned to jobs that are of the same security sector, yet that are not physically reachable to them because of "staff-only" areas in between. They then end up stuck in a hallway or in their cells "working".
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