Workshop glitched, prisoners escaping near-daily

[OOZ662]

Something about this prison's workshop has prisoners thinking they need to travel to the upper left corner of the map when they have the "operate workshop press" job active. Guards will happily let them through all gates and doors past the staff-only and outdoor areas for them to complete their "legitimate" task until they near the edge of the map, realize they're outside, and book it the last ~5 tiles to freedom.

Besides the glitch, I really wish there were a "never let prisoners through this door" flag.

 

[badAim]

You just messed it up by creating an alternative way out of the prison for them. Take a look at the picture attached below. That's how they go out:


Staff door do NOT stop prisoners from going thru. They are called a staff door because only staff members can open them. Deployment is what restricts people from entering areas of your prison, not the door.

All you have to do to fix this is setting up a staff only zone in the corridor, area behind the staff door (marked purple on the screenshot below ):

Build a wall or fence where the blue lines are and put a door in there. Then mark the area between them as staff only and done.

Also, perimeter wall is good to have but later on, once you have money to finish it all. You should go with a normal fence for now which will do the job and replace it little by little as you get more money.

 

[OOZ662]

The problem occurred long before the staff door or the perimeter wall existed. They would leave through both front Large Jail Doors and the Road Gate. Plus if that were the case I wouldn't be watching prisoners walk all the way up to the last few tiles of the corner of the map "operating workshop press" before snapping to Escaping.

The perimeter wall is unfinished because I'm planning on building three more cellblocks and obviously it needs to wrap around them. A fence will not do the job, as the job is blocking tunnels.

 

[badAim]

Well, I don't know about how it used to be before. I just loaded what you've uploaded here and literally, you made a way out for them. Your prison is not secured at all in the current state. They are free to go whenever they want.

 

[OOZ662]

Dump the staff door and rebuild the wall then. I can do that and reupload the file if you like.

 

[badAim]

I'll check it out then. So you mean your prisoners were leaving thru the main gate where you have staff only area set up?

 

[OOZ662]

Yes. Even before the door control station was added, guards would walk over and open the gates for them both into the Staff-Only "truck area" and through the road gate to the outside. After adding it, obviously, the station opens the gates for them. The only way to stop them would be to open their menu and apply a punishment to them so they'd be cuffed and start walking themselves back to the prison, which would even work outside the gates before they "realized" they were outside. The game believes they have a legitimate reason to head outside because something about the workshop thinks it's up in the top left corner of the map.

 

[badAim]

I just tested it out and everything is fine here. No escapes. I gotta do it again on the same build.

The thing is, there used to be a bug that was causing a very similar issues. I had it only once and it was months ago. I think it was on The Clink version. I remember trying to reproduce it but never managed to do so.
I saw a few people complaining about such problem but very often they did not have any deployment zones set up.

Anyways, I am going to try and test again and post here shortly. I feel like everything is gonna be fine tho.

 

[badAim]

Yeah, so I blocked the staff door and let it go for some time. The work time passed and everything is fine. No escaped whatsoever.

I guess you're one of those "lucky" people affected by this weird ass bug. Would be nice if you could upload the debug.txt from there: C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Introversion\Prison Architect after running that prison and having some of the inmates escape the way you described it.
Adding one or two screenshots with prisoners going thru staff-only would be nice too.