Prison Architect – A Modder’s Guidebook

Overview

*EDIT Although this guide is outdated, a lot of these features still work.So we’ve all played Prison Architect, at least the people reading this guide have, but it’s still in Alpha, which means it isn’t quite done yet regardless of the actual impressive work done by the dev team (much kudos).So the Alpha still has a few things wrong with it, be it bugs, or game play problems or other bits and pieces. This guide is a basic guide to modding the game to make it more or less enjoyable, challenging or interesting depending on your actions.Mod awayDisclaimer: Things in this guide may break or corrupt your save game, ensure you always make a backup before modding.Dislcaimer 2: This guide was written in Alpha 11, attributes and file contents may change in later versions.

Prison Architect

Prison Architect is an upcoming video game by the British software company Introversion Software.

The game is a top-down construction and management simulation where the player takes control of the running and building of a maximum security prison. The player is responsible for managing various aspects of their prison including staff, building new cells, finance, and keeping their inmates happy. The player’s role is of both architect and governor with sandbox micromanagement themes such as choosing where to put lights, drains and how they connect together
(credit Wikipedia)

However due to the nature of this game still being in Alpha, means that there are a few problems with it, while this is by no means the fault of the developers, I mean they didn’t purposely put the bugs there, they just happened. When the code you develop does something you don’t expect or plan for, that’s a bug. Alpha testing, like Prison Architect at current allows the public to try the game out and help find these bugs so that the game can become better upon next release.

Modding a basic guide

Modding, what is it? Well modding has a few different meanings, in this guide we talk about “modding” as modifying the games files to help (or hinder) you whilst playing the game.

In this guide we will be modifying the game files for the game Prison Architect to allow us to avoid some of the bugs but also let us do different things. In this experience of “modding” you will simply be changing text values that the game reads from a file, and then interprets into the game. This is NOT illegal, but could corrupt your save game if you attempt something and do it incorrectly.

Here be Dragons-
Note: Before modding anything it is advisable to backup your save game files for Prison Architect (here on referenced as ‘PA’) and I am not responsible for any loss of game files, prisons or the life of any prisoners that are lost into the binary 1 and 0’s of computer programming.

The Game Files

So once PA is installed on Steam in the location you specified for you Steam games, it also installs files that control the game options and settings. This is not unusual for a game, and PA is not the only game that does this.

These game files mostly contain things like graphics settings, resolutions, windowing, audio settings and others that you set in the in game menu from the Options tab… which brings us into our first file.

The files are relatively easy to find if you’re used to the file system of a computer.

The files on Windows will be similar for whatever version you are using, but some names maybe different, if you get seriously stuck, open the Windows search and look for ‘.prison’ and you should find something.

For those who prefer the manual way, the files we’re interested in modding are found here:

Windows 7:

Note: If you do this manually, you may not be able to find the ‘AppData’ folder as this is normally hidden. Searching via Google can help you find how to un-hide folders as that is out of scope for this guide.

Our first file mod

So we’ve found our files, what now?
Well the first file we’ll look at will contain the program settings, but before that, ensure that you have created a backup of the original file before editing anything.

The game settings are located in the file called “preferences.txt”, here’s mine:

ScreenW 0
ScreenH 0
ScreenWindowed false
ScreenMultiSampled false
ScreenSuperSampled false
SoundMixFrequency 22050
SoundVolume 255
SoundSwapStereo false
SoundEnableDsp true
RenderRooms true
RecentMap autosave.prison
FirstTime false
AutoSaveTimer 10
HardwareCompat 0
LastKnownVersion alpha-11-pc-steam
TimeLapseCamera 0
TimeLapseInterval 1
TimeLapseFPSNumerator 24
TimeLapseFPSDenominator 1
TimeLapseQuality 63

It may look dauting at first, but you may also notice some things you already know, let’s step through the file:
ScreenW and ScreenH – These indicate the resolution that the game plays in, “0” means the game with automatically decide on the resolution.
ScreenWindowed – If you desire to run the game in a window, select “False” and write “True”.
FirstTime – Change to “True” if you wish to re-play the tutorial.
AutoSaveTime – Hate the lag you get when auto-saving? Increase the time period between saves in minutes, e.g 60 = 1 hour, 180 = 3 hours.

These are the most common and useful functions, the others either don’t do anything when changed, or affect the way the game plays and worsens the experience.
So these are the boring options, what about the fun one’s!

The file of fun

So now you’re used to modifying files let’s find something a bit more interesting.

From the preferences.txt file location and if you’ve played the game at least once and SAVED, you should have a folder named “saves”, upon opening this folder you will see your saved prisons with 2 files for each, a picture of your prison and a file.

.png file is the picture of your screen of your prison at the point when you saved the game and will be displayed in-game when you go to load the same prison. If you had a riot when you saved, this will be shown in the image.

.prison file, this is the file that the game interprets to know where everything is, what people are doing, who the prisoners are and tonnes of other things that make the game work how it does, this is also the file we’ll be modifying.

Ok, so this isn’t a .txt file, this doesn’t simply open in Notepad like the last one did, to save on screen shots (I’m lazy) I’m attempt to describe how to open the file.

• Double click the file that isn’t the picture and Windows will be like, “whatawhatawhat?”
• Ensure the Select a program from a list of installed programs button is selected and press OK
• In the next window there will be programs in the list, use the list and click on your favourite editor, or just find Notepad and click that, the result will be the same. Press OK
  Note: For ease of use and to help with the breaks I use Notepad++ (Google for it)

Once the file has opened you’ll be shown a long list of text, in the next section I’ll be describing these lines and what they do.

The Prison Architect

So starting from the top, again I will be using the lines from my old prison file, these will be different to yours depending on what you’ve built, land owned, money gained etc.

Again, before you make any changes on your game, ensure you make a backup of the .prison file.

Version alpha-11
This is the line the developers change when they release a new version, take a look, wait for the next version to be released then check the file, it should increase 😉

NumCellsX 150
This is the number of land squares you can build on going left to right, increasing this value gives you free land heading right.

NumCellsY 120
Same as above, but gives you land going down from your current location.

OriginX 50
OriginW 100
OriginH 80
Changes the offset of the current prison land (probably best not to change on your proper game). I had a truck come through my prison.

TimeIndex 68076.4
Current time of the game (use with Intake.next), add on a couple of thousand e.g 73076 to advance the game by days (WARNING, all the previous days intakes will come at once, otherwise there is no real benefit.). Also puts your “Valuation- Time without incident up”.

EnabledElectricity true
EnabledWater true
EnabledFood true
These settings above give you free things, e.g changing “true” to “false” on the Electricity and Water lines means you no longer have to build Utilities 🙂

EnabledMisconduct true
Set to “false” to prevent prisoners from fighting and carrying contraband, destroying, spoiling and other nefarious tricks.

EnabledDecay true
Change to “false” to stop your prison getting dirty!

EnabledVisibility true
Change to “false” to turn of fog of war and let you see all your prison at once without the need for CCTV cameras or guards in every room

Intake.next 68091.0
Cuts the time you need to wait to prisoners, match the time on Intake.next to be 20 less than the current TimeIndex to get prisoners quickly.

Intake.numPrisoners 29
Let’s you change the amount of prisoners you want to come in the next intake in the morning.

So that’s the first lot of options, you can see by changing some of these values you can dramatically change your game, more land for free, lots of prisoners coming at once, advance days in the game, but there are still more options to look at.

After the above you will see “BEGIN Cells”, these lines are the control blocks to outline where you’ve placed your cells, theoretically from this you could spawn yourself lots of cells, but the code and coordinates that you need to understand probably doesn’t make it a viable option.

Next we come to “BEGIN Objects” possibly thousands and thousands of lines later, this, as the name says, and similar to BEGIN Cells outlines all the objects in your game. Which if you take the time to learn about how the file is structured, you could Clone yourself free objects.
One good line in this section however is the following:

This line shows that there is a storage box at that location with a drain in it. Well, we could say, swap the drain for something a bit more expensive

Other tricks in this section include searching for “Damage” and deleting any damage on the item, making it brand new by just deleting the word “Damage” and its value.
Change objects by typing another object name in the “Type” field (not much use until we can sell things I guess).

I’ve also noticed that there is a bug where prisoners in the Medibeds glitch and stay there even though they’ve been released, an example of this is the bar showing 16.1 years out of a maximum of 11 (screenshot on my profile)

If this occurs or a prisoner gets glitched in a wall, or the same prisoner just keeps causing problems, just get the name or ID of the prisoner, head to the file and remove him from it. Ensure you delete EVERYTHING relating to the prisoner, else the game may become unstable.

Furthermore you can also change bits about the prisoners, such as HeadType, Traits, Age, Sentence duration and any Convictions or Family! Make yourself a named family member of a prisoner, or the prisoner themselves! (only works in your game on your save file, unlike actually getting you name in the game so everyone can see you)

So that’s a bit heavy, one of the better modifications is the money hack, simply search “Finance”, “Balance” or “LastDay”, and that will take you to the line where your current money is. Editing the value after the word “Balance” will change your money the next time you load the game.

Note: I went up to ‘Balance 1522900154.0’ (1.5billion) and the game still worked and I could purchase things, however I’m unsure of the stability!

Further things include free electricity wires and pipes, that can be coordinated somewhere away from your buildings and then demolished to be stored for later use:

Breakdown:
BEGIN [coord X][coord Y] PipeType [1 or 2, big or small] PressureX -0.25662 END

Another bug at time of writing (Alpha 11) was with Research, well, by modifying the file you can have everything researched without spending any money, or vice versa if you have too much money and need to feel challenged.

Changed “Progress” to 0.000 means it HASN’T been researched, whereas 1.0000 means it has, in this example, I have both Legal and MentalHealth researched but not Finance.

Another good easy money maker is the Grants tab, these can be modified to give you free grants again, if you’ve already completed them, then you’ll just get the money rather than have them appear in the Grants tab again.

Change the code for “Status” back to “InProgress” to re-accept the grant and get free money (if you’ve already met the completion criteria.)

A few other interesting things found in the file that could be related to future releases that the dev’s haven’t implemented yet, or have implemented and changing them hasn’t shown any effects.

• BEGIN Penalties Points 3992.00
• In the Prisoner code there is “Gang” attribute and a value.
• BEGIN Thermometer Temperature attribute

Summary

So that’s how to modify Prison Architect files and a brief overview of what they do. Please bear in mind that this guide was written in the Alpha 11 version and so things may change in future versions, added or even deleted. Furthermore this modification of the game files may not always be possible; when PA goes to release or perhaps even beta release this game save file maybe encrypted by the developers and thus unable to be changed quite as easily so enjoy it while you can.

If you like the guide or have an update or change then leave a comment on my profile and I’ll try and include it and give credit when I can.

Thanks for reading, enjoy modding PA and happy prison building.