Overview
I made this guide to help the people who are having the same troubles as I had in the fray of Prison Architect. Hope you approve and find this useful :)Also I will be updating/continuing this into a full guide of Prison Architect, of all the features and gameplay.Enjoy!
Introduction
Hey there 😉
This guide aims to assist with designing and optimising your prison. You can find optimal room sizes, tips, tricks and more in this guide. I hope you enjoy and find this useful.
Let’s go!
Written by sealionforever
Edited by [GM]>ara_overlord
Editing and feedback by Joesf
Also a portuguese version by MMello
Getting started
The layout of a new prison is super important because it will set the trend and direction of your growing prison. You will build the required buildings for the first two grants (these being Administration Centre and Basic Detention Centre). Just keep this guideline in mind when contructing these buildings: “This is only the beginning, don’t close yourself in with the first rooms!” Make sure to have room for expansion and plan ahead! It is advisable to have either a grid system of building (where you have blocks of four buildings with paths inbetween) or a central path system (where you design your buildings around a central path, usually two squares wide, with branches of square-wide paths sprouting off it leading to other sections) (hint: there is a planning tool).
Note: When I mention room dimensions (eg 5×4), I am refering to the inside of the building. In many other guides, I read this and made the mistake of creating 5×4 buildings rather than 7×4 to accomodate for walls. It really srews you over if you planned everything ahead. So if you build a room mentioned in this guide ‘foundations’ button, don’t forget to add 2 each dimension. (5×4 is equal to 7×6 in foundations)./b]
(Order of) placement
There is no perfect order of placement, and I think this is the fun part of the game. However, I have some advice for constructing certain buildings. Let’s go!
First of all, place your cells and other places where prisoners frequently visit away from the borders of the prison walls. If you follow my other tips, this will make it harder for the prisoners to escape or receive contraband. Ensure you fence around your entire prison so prisoners have to tunnel for longer to escape.
Your kitchen, storage and delivery rooms shouldn’t be too far from each other, to decrease time workers and cooks take to retrieve supplies from the delivery room.
Your visitation room is best placed close to your entrance, but not next to it. It is advisable to include a seperate entrance to the visitation room so visitors can easily enter and exit your prison without clogging paths. You don’t want visitors running past riots and fights in your prison.
Cells, showers, yards and common rooms should be placed in groups to supply for separate cell blocks (see Cells).
Always start designing with the planning tool. Don’t focus too hard on the Basic Detention Grant requirements when planning at the start of the game and plan these rooms first:
– 5 offices
– a staffroom
– a visitation room
– a kennel
– an armoury
– a workshop
– a cell block
– an infirmary
You can fulfill the Basic Detention Grant by building the requirements in planned areas, but remember to deconstruct them later!
It’s important to designate specific areas for future building. I like to have a central path with administration and such next to the road (a fallen over T-shape). In the spaces to the left, I build cell blocks and expand them gradually out.
Office
The optimal size for an office is no bigger than required as they won’t be used for anything requiring extra space. A 4×4 room is just fine. Place the Office Desk, Chair and Filing Cabinet where ever you feel like, as placement doesn’t matter.
Note: You can combine all those offices into one building that takes up 6×18 squares (including the walls).
Holding Cell
This room is used for keeping a group of prisoners without an individual cell. There is no real optimal size for this room, it really depends on how many prisoners you actually want to keep in it. Later in the game, it is a good backup to store prisoners if you accidentally take too many prisoners in than cells you have. I usually make them as big so 8 prisoners could live there without problems. More than 8 is also possible but you need to make sure a guard is stationed in the cell because fights will surely break out. You’ll need 8 beds, 2 toilets, 2 benches and a small showerblock built in the back of the cell. See the picture for an example Holding Cell with these requirements.
Cell
Cells should always be as small as possible. It only needs a bed and a toilet. Unless you feel bad for your prisoners, cells shouldn’t be bigger than 2×3. TV’s and bookcases don’t really have a use to lower riot chances because a good common room will do the same (and is way less expensive).
The location of the toilet matters more than you would think. Prisoners tend to want to escape, and they will sometimes dig a tunnel to freedom. This tunnel ALWAYS starts underneath the pooping place. Make it harder for your prisoners to escape by placing it as far as possible from the outside. Note that the only way to find these tunnels is by catching prisoner digging it at that moment. Perform shakedowns! Also note, windows diminish the need for a tunnel so if possible, let them see the green outside.
The real challenge is not constructing a cell, but an efficient cell block. There are of course many ways of doing this and I suggest making a design of your own, but you can use these tips for a sustaining cell block:
– construct a showerplace
– have a yard
– have 2 or more solitary cells as well
– best no more than 50 or so cells per block
You can use this one (mine) as an example:
Solitary
In solitary cells, you put prisoner with a misconduct. You can change punishments for certain misconducts in the policy tab (unlocked by warden’s research: Prison Policy). Prisoners go supereasily to solitary at standard settings. I suggest creating a new policy with less heavy punishment, since misconducts happen frequently so prisoners will line up for solitary cells you probably won’t have. Use this basic rule: 20 prisoners should not need more than 2 solitary cells.
!IMPORTANT NOTE!
I know I said that in a cell block of 50, 2 solitary cells would be enough and that this doesn’t converge with my basic rule here. My answer is that you should build solitary cells in leftover spots in your cell blocks (spots not big enough for a regular cell) and have a BLOCK of a couple solitary cells.
Shower
Again there is no optimal size for this room. It isn’t even required to surround the room with walls and doors. I usually create the shower so it fits nicely with the rest of the rooms. A good rule I use is 1 shower head per 2 Ã 3 prisoners.
Most people don’t know how drains function in the game. I’ve seen some just put drains in their entire shower, which is just a waste of money honestly. The way drains work is that they block off water on the floor so you only need to place them by the entrance of your shower block (or in the door opening itself). Place 1 drain per square gap in the entrance plus 2 more on the sides. This way no water will come through.
Kitchen
The optimal size for this room is quite big, namely 240m². This is created by any of these combinations: 15×16, 12×20, 10×24, 8×30, (6×40, 3×80, 2×120 you normally don’t want these odd-shaped room sizes but if you’re feeling courageous…)
If you unlocked Prison Labour through Bureaucracy, prisoners can work in the kitchen as chefs. They need 12m² each as workspace. That’s the reason for the 240m² large kitchen. You won’t need a kitchen this big in the beginning but plan ahead so you can expand it or create another one someplace else.
The basic rule for amount of equipment is really simple and correct:
2 fridges = 4 cookers = 1 serving table = 2 sinks = 4 cooks
The quantity of meals you have, influences the efficiency of cookers, fridges, cooks and serving table. With high quantity: 1 cooker serves 10 prisoners, medium quantity: 20 prisoners, low quantity: 40 prisoners. Using the basic rule, you can calculate what you need for your set quantity.
A trick you can use, is that cooks don’t need squares in front of cookers, fridges or sinks to use them so you can put them all adjacent to each other.
Note: You can only change these settings if you unlocked Prison Policy through Bureaucracy.
Canteen
This room depends on how many prisoners you have or plan on having. To optimally use your benches and tables, place them in this order: bench/table/bench. This lets 8 prisoners eat at that table. For the amount of serving tables in your canteen, see Kitchen.
You can put all the tables and benches adjacent to each other. Prisoners can still move through and this saves a lot of space. See the picture for an example Canteen.
Yard
The yard is one of weirder rooms of Prison Architect since there is no best way to create one. I use a couple guidelines for my yards:
– make sure there is a 2×1 entrance so prisoners won’t cramp up there
– add A LOT OF phones in your yard (it decreases the FAMILY need of your prisoners)
– add a couple weight benches as well (it decreases the EXERCISE need of your prisoners)
– don’t forget lights!
– keep an eye on your yard, if it gets too busy –> build a new one or expand…
I always like to make the floor of the yard grass, but this isn’t necessary at all!
Laundry
The laundry is a pretty important room since it relieves the need for clean clothes of the prisoners. Don’t wait too long building it! A nice thing about the laundry is that prisoners can work there without any schooling. Next to prisoners, the janitors will also work there. Now on to the numbers!
Max 20 prisoners can work in the laundry and since every prisoners requires 4m² workspace, the optimal room size is 80m². A good rule of thumb is: 1-2-4-64. 1 laundry machine is enough for 2 ironing boards, 4 laundry baskets. With this set-up you will efficiently serve 64 prisoners = 1-2-4-64! With 20 working prisoners, the most efficient room is 4 machines, 8 ironing boards, 16 baskets and this will serve 256 prisoners. Any additional machines will be operated by janitors!
There are 2 possibilities for laundry placement namely one big central one or smaller ones spread out the prison next to cell blocks. I recommend the second strategy since the travel time is greatly reduced!
Workshop
Finally, the highly requested workshop! For now, this only covers the production of license plates. Carpentry is for now not accurate!
Your workshop is a big source of moneymaking and you want it to be up and running asap! The ideal size for this room is 240m². Every prisoner needs 12m² working space. This way, the maximum of 20 prisoners can work in your workshop. Any of following combinations will do: 15×16, 12×20, 10×24, 8×30, 6×40, 5×48. You can go as small as 4×60 but that is the absolute limit!
The way Worksop Saws and Presses work is the same as the monitors. They are 3×1 and the middle square in front needs to be clear for the prisoner to operate the device. For general fluity of the proces, keep all 3 spaces in front clear. Every saw/press requires 1 prisoner to operate, so logically you need 10 saws and 10 presses to be most efficient. And this works… to a certain degree.
See, to cut the stacks of metal sheets into blank license plates, it takes 45 seconds. To press these blanks to full license plates, it takes 60 seconds. So for suppreme efficiency you would need to add these factors in the equation. I have been trying to find the best combination but 10 saws and 10 presses seem to work most ideal. If someone can come up with a better, more efficient solution, please let me know in the comments! 🙂
Workshops also require tables to stack the sheets of metal on. Since I have 10 saws, I would need 10 spaces to place the stacks. Three tables will provide 12 spaces, giving a full ‘refill’ plus 2 extra. But I use 5 tables since they allow two ‘refills’ of metal sheet stacks.
For the carpenter’s table, just place a couple in your workshop. If you have qualified prisoners to create superior beds, they will cut up logs from your forestry into planks and those into superior beds. Unfortunately you can’t use these beds in your prison… yet! They sell at 400 bucks a piece which is a big gain in money since you spent 100 bucks on the tree that provides wood for 2 superior beds! Do the math… 😉
Cleaning Cupboard
The cleaning cupboard is a storage for bleach which is used for cleaning, hence ‘cleaning’ cupboard. The size of this room influences the amount of prisoners that can work as janitors. Every prisoner need 4m² workspace and as the workshop a max of 20 prisoners can work as janitors. This all leads up to an ideal size of 80m². Any of the following combinations will work: 8×10, 5×16, 4×20(, 2×40, 1×80).
Make sure you have rooms you don’t want prisoners to go (for instance the storage) designated as staff only, because otherwise cleaning prisoners will wander off to these places!
Storage
This is the most underrated room in the game. Many people build it late or not at all. A mistake, according to me. This room is a center gathering position of your resources. You need to build it close to the deliveries tab near the road, but a bit more away from the road since it nearly has the same function as the deliveries tab. Storages in the center of prisons speed up building processes immensily, since the travel time to get objects is so much smaller (assuming the object is in the storage).
The reason why I find this room so important is because there have been so many times in my games where there are a couple chores for the workmen to do that require different items. You don’t have too many workers because you want to save some expenses. These items pile up at your deliveries ‘platform’ and a huge pile of deliverie trucks are stuck on the road because the game won’t let them pass until they are empty. Equals problem. It just blocks up the flow of your prison. The storage gives extra space for all these items so this will only happen or if you have a massive amount of chores, or you have only 1 worker. Also when you dismantle things in your prison, they just keep lying there. This is exceptionally annoying in door openings. If you have a storage, workers will automatically take these dismantled objects there. Problem solved!
It is important to enclose this room and have a staff door so workers can go in and out real easy. If prisoners have acces to this room, they will steal tools and weapons. It’s not a bad idea to install metal detectors by the entrance (and exit) of your storage.
Common Room
No perfect size, but I use some guidelines to construct my common rooms:
– make sure to have a couple pool tables (if you have quite some prisoners)
– 2 TV’s or more, however you like it
– you MUST have a couple sofas/chairs for the AA program (ideally 20 seats)
– make it as big as needed so it won’t get overcrowded
Staff room
Your staffrooms size doesn’t have to be bigger than the suggested 4×4. The location however is much more important. You need to have the lowest travel time for your staff to the staffroom. To pick a spot, you need to know who will go to the staff room to rest (=taking a nap on the job). These conclude guards, cooks, workmen, everyone with an office, janitors and gardeners. (SIDENOTE: Armed guards and dog handlers will rest respectively in the armoury and the kennel) Since you will have more guards than any other type of staff, try placing it near the center of your prison and near the biggest deployment group of guards. However when you have a bigger prison, create more than one staff room all over your prison.
Security
If I’m honest, i never really cared for the security room. It doesn’t have a ‘clear’ purpose. Yes, I do know everyone and his mother uses the room for CCTV monitoring, door control and now the phone taps. And yes, that’s exactly what I use it for but still… it’s sold as a guard storage.
Anyway your security room should be big enough to house a desk, a chair, a file cabin, 2 CCTV monitors, 2 door control monitors and frankly, as many phone taps as you want although you should never have more phone taps than phone booths of course (I’ll explain how they work in the next section). Basically make it as big as you need it to be.
Phone taps work in a pretty interesting way, namely the guard checks every phone booth for a call (one at a time) and when a call is found, he listens to it. While listening to a conversation, the phone tap stops checking other phone booths. Logically you need as many phone taps as phone booths to check every conversation BUT there are a few buts: First, not every phone booth is required to have a prisoner calling at the same time so you may not need as many taps as booths. Second, (regarding the first point) the usage of phone booths increases greatly with the amount of prisoners. Few booths with many prisoners always ends up with every booth used so you do need as many taps. Third and lastly, DON’T FORGET THE AMOUNT OF GUARDS YOU ARE ABLE TO PUT BEHIND THE TAPS!!!
CCTV monitors are used to use the cameras in your prison. However you can only view 8 cameras at a time. This DOESN’T mean you can’t hook up more than 8 cameras to one monitor, the guard will cycle through the cameras instead.
Door control as the name suggests control doors (only those with servos). There is no limit on how many servos you can link to the door control, but one door control can max open 2 doors per second. Every extra door will be added in a queue.
Armory
The armory is used for armed guards to rest after a long day carrying a heavy shotgun. The room shouldn’t be very big. I never needed a lot of weaponized peacekeepers in my prisons, around 5 should be plenty. To have enough space for a table, weapons rack and 5 lockers, a 4×3 is big enough BUT it cramps up the room a lot. It should be large enough though. I prefer something more like in the picture.
Kennel
The kennel is the home of my favourite employee in prison architect: the K-9 Unit. They can detect contraband, discover tunnels and most importantly, their leashes have the magical property to extend to any lenght imaginable. 🙂 But seriously though, I am overly fond of their game mechanic. You can control contraband in your prison so much better than placing metal detectors everywhere (which is quite annoying and expensive).
Before I go in the specifics, not many people know that dogs can sniff out escape tunnels. You get a small notification and a yellow flag is dropped on the ground. The problem is you have to pay attention since the alarm is small and the little yellow flag doesn’t stay forever. It’s also no garantee you find the source of the tunnel… That said, let’s move on to the specifics!
The kennel’s best size is 5×5, as suggested in the tooltip. You can place 10 dogboxes in the room (5 on each side) with a pathway in the middle. This should provide enough restplaces for 25 K-9 units. Since your prison will grow exponentially, place multiple kennels around the prison to decrease travel time as much as possible, but don’t exaggerate! Also if you really want to, you can place 2 more in the pathway. It shouldn’t interfere with the movement of the dogs.
Visitation room
This room has no size optimisation, but I never needed a very big one. As long as you have phones, the FAMILY need won’t be superhigh. You’ll probably max need 5 visitor’s tables which are 2×3. Because characters in the game can just walk over these tables, the room doesn’t need to be larger than 10×3, 15×2 or variations.
Infirmary/Morgue
I put the infimary and morgue in one segment because I always build them adjacent, sometimes even in the same room.
Prisoners who overdosed will be taken immediately to the infirmary to be treated. If you don’t have an infirmary or there is no medical bed available for some reason, that prisoner will die…
Injured staff will automatically come to the infirmary to be healed by doctors. This is not the case with prisoners. They will only be taken to infirmary if heavily injured. To bypass this, you can manually send a doctor to the injured prisoner. Note that doctors will always heal everyone in their vicinity. So after a small group fight, if you send a doctor to one prisoner, he/she will heal every hurt prisoner.
The infirmary needs a maximum of 10 medical beds (mainly for the drug addiction treatment). The room has thus a size of about ?x? since the medical beds are 2×2 and you can put them adjacent as long as there is a pathway of some sort in the middle. See the picture as example.
The morgue is used to ‘store’ dead bodies until a hearse arrives so unless you plan on having a massacre bloodbath, you won’t need more than 4 Ã 5 morgue slabs. The morgue room I have is normally 5×3. See the picture as example.
Classroom
In the classroom your prisoners will be educated in the complex studies of a regular education. A number of programs will take place here, but the most important one is the Foundation Education Program. At maximum, 20 prisoners can follow a class at the same time (in one classroom). The ideal size of this room is 6×7. Since every ‘student’ and the teacher (who spawns near your prison at the start of every class!) needs a desk, the room will look something like this ideally.
Also guards will need the classroom. When you researched the TAZERS4EVERYONE-thing, guards will need to follow a safetyprogram before they can actually use tazers. Don’t forget to activate this program when you want your guards to have tazers!
Library (NEW)
Build the library as big as you want but the bigger you make it, the more librarian’s desks you need to place. The way the ‘book system’ works is boxes of books will be delivered and placed in the library but there are unsorted. So the prisoners that work there will sort them and place them in the bookshelves. The bookshelves will fill gradually which you can clearly see by the amount of books on them. Introversion put a LOT of time designing patterns for booksorting so show them some love for it.
If you want 20 prisoners to work in your library make it 240m². Like a few other labour rooms, 12m² per working prisoner. Make sure you have prisoners who have completed the Foundation Education program because only they can work in the library.
Prisoners will borrow books and read them in the entire prison. When they are done, the book will be returned to the library and will also need to be sorted again. It fulfills their Literacy need.
Books will also wear out and will be replaced with new books in boxes.
Chapel (NEW)
Also known as the Multi-Faith Prayer Room is a very interesting room. I’ll explain the effects a little lower. The size needs to be as big as you want it to be. Base it of the amount of prisoners you have. About a third of them will have the spirituality need and will go the Spiritual Guidance program. Keep this in mind when designing your chapel.
Only build 1 altar and as many pews and prayer mats as you want/need.
Now the effects are superinteresting. When a prisoner leaves from the chapel, he is calm which equals to no riots from him BUT that’s not all. He will also function as a beacon of calm meaning he will talk to other prisoner who may want to kick off a riot and talk them out of it. This means that if 25% of your prison goes to the Spiritual Guidance program, more or less double that amount will not cause you trouble. Unfortunately/Logically this is only temporary. I recommend 2 services a day.
Parole room (NEW)
DON’t MAKE IT BIGGER THAN 5×5!
You can only have 1 prisoner paroled at the time anyway. You can build multiple rooms since the change the warden and chief aren’t necessary anymore but don’t… oversize… the room! Sorry for the emphasis but I have seen some stupid designs with even stupider thought behind it.
In short:
– make it a 5×5
– post a guard in there during parole hours since the prisoner will probably be pissed off if he gets denied
– apply the program ‘Parole Hearing!
– set the release bar what you want but be careful!
If you release a prisoner early and he doesn’t reoffend you receive $3.000. If he does reoffend, there is no $10.000 fine anymore luckily. I set my release bar around 25% (found in the policy tab).
Forestry
A lot of people forget to build or designate an area for the forestry but it really helps out a lot in terms of profit, especially when you have a workshop with prisoners capable of carpentry. The problem with the forestry is that almost everyone builds it in one time. This results with waiting a couple days and then having way too much wood for you to handle*. It’s way better to gradually expand your forestry everyday since this will result in everyday profit. Select an area you know you’re going to have the forestrt BUT DON’T designate it yet in the rooms tab. Start in a corner by designating a 3×3 and continue expanding everyday with another 3×3. You can have larger intervals of course if you want. Make it as big as needed!
(*anyone spot any inuendos there ;-p)
Exports
This is like deliveries, garbage, forestry just an area. Make sure it is next to the road so trucks can pick up your freshly crafted license plates, logs and improved beds will be placed. If your prisoners have acces to this area, they will help loading up the truck and transporting the goods from the workshop to the exports area. In this case don’t forget to put road gates to prevent escapes, maybe even 2 on each side…
Roadmap
I haven’t forgotten about the other rooms and gameplay, I’m still working on completing their sections. I will finish the guide and adapt it for future updates of the game. Here a list of remaining sections and whether they have been edited yet:
Introduction (Edited)
Getting Started (Edited)
Placement Order (Edited)
Office (Edited)
Holding Cell
Cell
Solitary
Shower
Kitchen
Canteen
Yard
Laundry
Workshop
Storage
Common Room
Staff Room
Visitation room
Infirmary/Morgue
Classroom
Library
Chapel
Parole Room
Cleaning cupboard
Forestry
Security
Armory
Kennel
Exports
Roadmap (Edited)
Outro (Edited)
Edited by [GM]>ara_overlord
Outro
After many months, I finally covered all the rooms in prison architect (so far). This does NOT however mean the end of this guide. I will keep updating/improving this guide with all future updates in the game. Suggestions are always welcome and as you may have noticed, often listened to as well! Thank you so very much for all the positive feedback I’ve been receiving, I’ll certainly keep up the good work!!!
‘Till next time
Thank you for reading our guide. We hope we have helped or even inspired you. If you have any comments, tips or remarks, leave them please in the comment section below.
[GM]>ara_overlord
As it’s my first guide it would mean the world to me if I could get some feedback.
‘Till next time!
sealionforever