Overview
This guide will help you get a small prison up and running. There are no advanced tips here. This guide is the result of a lot of trial and error on my part and describes Alpha 13.
Planning to Plan
You’ve started a new game and in front of you is a wide-open field. There are two areas, “Deliveries” and “Garbage.” Next to them is a road, and a truck filled with workers is approaching, ready to do your bidding.
First things first: pause time.
Now, accept all the “grants” that are available.
After that, while still paused, hire a warden.
Now use select the planning tool. This tool allows you to draw a layout of your prison without committing to any of it. Start your prison so the top corner is touching “Deliveries.” I usually make a 2-block wide corridor that runs the length of my prison, top and down the right side of it. This makes it easier for your staff to collect deliveries and remove trash.
Still paused? Good.
The Basics
At the very least, your new prison needs one office, a holding cell, a shower, a kitchen, a yard, and a canteen.
I like to keep all my administrators together. There is no actual reason to do this, other than I like that there’s an administrative wing of my prison. Offices need to be 4×4 blocks and have a chair, a desk, and a file cabinet. You can, if you feel so inclined, lay out an office with the “rooms” tool in the middle of the playfield, add the necessary objects, and have it satisfy the requirements for the room.
This is good, because you can layout your warden’s office before the foundation of your prison has been built.
With the game still paused (you still have time paused, right?), layout your first office and place your objects within.
The kitchen, shower, holding cell and canteen need to be enclosed. Lay these out with the planning tool to get a configuration you find agreeable. Personally, I spend a lot of time with the planning tool trying to most efficiently use the space. Does it really matter? Not so much.
Just remember, for enclosed rooms: If the minimum size is 5×5, you want to lay out any walls adding 2 blocks, one for each side. So a 5×5 room needs to be walled off at 7×7, 4×4 (offices) need 6×6, etc.
I like to configure my prison so that the holding cell leads into the shower, the shower leads to the canteen, and the canteen leads into the yard. This just means less wandering around for guards/prisoners.
More Rooms
Still paused? Good.
We have the basic rooms needed to keep the prisoners reasonably not furious. If you have 2-block wide hallways at the top and right side of your prison, make sure your kitchen touches at least one of them. This will make it easier for your cooks to pick up deliveries.
While we’re still using the planning tool, why not plan out a future workshop? When your prisoners are stamping out license plates, they pay for themselves. Put the workshop so it’s touching your hallway, again for efficiency of material deliveries.
I like to get my prisoners up and working right away, so I always include a blank room for a workshop in my plans.
However, to get them cranking out profits for me, there needs to be at least two more administrators: a foreman and a chief of security.
Go ahead and layout these offices and add the requisite objects to them (chair, file cabinet, desk).
Still paused, still in planning mode, your prison should have laid out:
- Three offices, 4×4 blocks, with object requirements
- Kitchen
- Canteen
- Workshop
- Holding Cell
- Shower
- Yard
Other than the Yard and the Offices, none of the rooms have been designated with the rooms tool. This is important. You are just earmarking space for when your foundation is in place.
The Foundation
So all the rooms are laid out in planning mode, and there are three offices and a yard laid out with the rooms tool. Go ahead and lay out your foundation. Fill every part of your planned prison with the foundation tool, but try to fill only the places you’ve laid out beforehand. If you just build a foundation by dragging out a rectangle of indiscriminate size, you waste time, space, and money.
Still paused, right?
Unpause.
Place a door at the corner of your prison. Don’t bother with a locked door, a staff door will work best if you’re using the access hallway method.
Your workers will get to work building the foundation and placing objects in your offices. Your warden can’t do anything until his office is completed, so hang tight for a bit. They’ll have him up and running in no time.
Now you need power and water. Power is the most important. Given the size of the foundation and future workshop, I recommend going with at least three capacitors. This will keep your power station from overloading. Place it centrally so you can run power cables from it in a way that maximizes distribution while minimizing the amount of cable you run.
Place your water station and hook it up with power. Run pipe from it to feed your toilets, showers, and kitchen. I usually align my kitchen and holding cell/showers so that I can feed them all with one straight length of pipe.
When your warden’s office is satisfied, have him research the foreman and security chief. This will take the better half of your “day,” and you probably won’t have the budget to hire them right away.
Another Brick in the Wall
Now that the foundation is finished, we can go ahead and use the room tool to assign the rooms we were earlier unable to assign. These are the holding cell, the kitchen, and the canteen. The shower could have been assigned without a foundation, but it doesn’t really matter. Assign that, too.
With the holding cell, it needs to be 5×5, so wall it off 7×7 (to allow for the block-space of the wall). It also needs to have a door. I always place my holding cell against the access hallway and place a jail door. Adjacent to the cell, but within the locked confines of the prison, I put a plain door to the shower. This satisfies the holding cell requirement to be surrounded by walls and doors, but allows the prisoners to move freely into the shower.
Put benches and toilets into the holding cell. Only one of each is required.
Place shower heads and drains in the shower.
Make sure the toilets and showers are connected to water.
Oh yeah, hire some cooks and some guards.
Assign with the room tool your kitchen and your canteen.
Wall off your kitchen and your canteen. Put a door between them. This allows you to assign workers to the kitchen later on. Put a locked door to the access hallway from the kitchen, but kitchen to canteen needs just a regular door.
The canteen needs a table, a bench, and a serving table. I usually put two tables in, with two benches on each table, and a single serving table. This keeps the canteen from getting overcrowded.
In the kitchen, put in a cooker, a fridge, and a sink. I always put in two of each. I don’t know what difference it makes, but it saves having to worry about it later. The appliances need to be powered, but placed adjacent to each other, they will daisy-chain. In other words, you don’t need to run a section of cable between them if they butt up against one another.
Make sure your sink/sinks have a water hook-up.
Put doors to the yard, which also needs to be fenced off. Fence goes up fast and (at the time of Alpha 13) is also totally free. So go crazy*
*not too crazy, you need your workers to do other work, too
Cell Block 4
You have the basics of a nice little jail now. A group of prisoners have arrived and are instantly annoyed by how there are no places to sleep. One of the grants you received promises $10,000 upon expanding your prison to 15-prisoner capacity. Well, that’s easy enough.
Get out the planning tool again. It should go without saying that at this point, whenever you use the planning tool, it’s a good idea to pause time in the game. It’s easy to get involved in planning and forget about all the angry prisoners who are one full-bladder away from rioting.
Cells need to be 2×3, so walling them off means 4×5. Find a nice place and make 15 cells. It doesn’t matter how you lay them out. Ideally you want them to be as compact as possible, to conserve foundation and therefore, money.
While you’re at it, plan out some cells for solitary confinement. Prisoners can’t be released if they’ve been slated to serve in solitary, but haven’t. The cells can be one block, if need be, and require no other objects. I usually make mine 1 block and don’t bother running power to them. That’ll teach ’em!
Cells need a bed, a door, and a toilet. That’s it. I always put the door in line with the toilet. This serves no function, other than to humiliate the prisoners when they’re taking a dump.
After you’ve planned out your new block of cells and solitary, go ahead and set the foundation. If it’s adjacent to your existing foundation, be careful. Where new foundation and old foundation meet, the wall will be demolished. This is a nice opportunity for escapes. So install a temporary jail door somewhere that prevents prisoners from making a run for it. They run fast and the guards are unarmed.
After the foundation is built, put up your walls, add the required objects and doors, and assign them with the rooms tool.
Now your prisoners will stop ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about being tired, and you’ll get $10,000.
Get to Work
Remember earlier, I recommended building three offices and having your warden research Foreman and Chief? I hope you hired them and set them up in their offices.
Have your Foreman research maintenance, then prison labor.
Have your Chief research deployment.
While they’re doing that, place a saw and press in your workshop and hook them to the power. Like with the kitchen appliances, placing them next to and touching one another means you need only run the cable to one of them.
Once the research is finished, you can use the new deployment option to assign your prisoners to work. Make sure all work areas are surrounded by walls and doors, or else you won’t be able to assign workers to it.
In the regime menu, set some time for them to work. Otherwise they will mill about aimlessly, just looking for trouble.
It’s tempting to make them work all day, bringing in sweet, sweet cash to your prison complex, but they hate that. Give them some free time and don’t forget to feed them.