Please note: The visuals and gameplay footage showcased in this video are from earlier development phases and may not accurately reflect the final game. Anticipate improvements in quality upon release.

What’s up, fellow architects?

We’re back to preview more features on Prison Architect 2, before its release into the wild. This week we’ll be talking about some of the tools at your prison-running disposal (no, not the type of tool that Prisoners use to tunnel).

The Sharpest Tools in the Sandbox

There are a whole load of tricks at your disposal when you’re running your own prison, and we’re going to dig into a handful of them today. Whether it’s the essentials of staff recruitment and prisoner Intake, or the minutiae of prison policies, we’ve got you covered.

Sorting the Wheat from the Staff

How are you going to run your prison without staff members? Poorly, that’s how. Luckily we’ve provided a wide range of employees to bolster your lockdown. You can hire various staff members by accessing the Staff menu at the bottom of the screen.

From there, there are three ‘types’ of staff you can hire: Workforce, Security, and Admin. The workforce makes up a bulk of the people who will run your prison; the Workers who build it, the Janitors who handle laundry, and the Cooks who provide square meals to your prisoners. Security staff are the ones who ‘handle the inmates’, they are made up of various Guards, Enforcers, and Snipers, who will physically intervene in an attempt to keep peace and order in the prison. The admin staff is your managerial team, who provide access to important Bureaucracy upgrades and earn you XP for the time spent at their desks. To hire your staff member, all you need to do is go to the Staff menu, choose the tab with your employee type, and then pick the role you’d like to hire from the list on the left-hand side. You’ll be shown their daily wage on the Hire button. You can also fire your employees from this menu, by right-clicking their headshot in the staff list. Furthermore, you can select individual staff members in the world and fire them from their personal info panel.

Make sure you’re not over-staffing, as the wage list for your prison is normally the largest expense. You can check how your cash flow is doing from the Finances tab in the Admin menu (but we’ll talk about this more in a future article).

All you do is Intake, Intake, Intake!

Once you’ve got enough staff to handle your prisoner population, it’s time to Intake! By going to the Prisoners menu at the bottom of your screen, you can choose how many prisoners you want to bring in, of the different security classes available to you. You’ll start with access to Minimum and Medium security inmates, and higher securities can be unlocked in the Bureaucracy menu.

There are a bunch of additional options you can apply to your intake. If you have the new Arrival Times upgrade unlocked, you can choose what time the bus arrives, as opposed to the standard 9 am drop-off. You can also choose whether you want the intake to repeat daily, whether you want your intake to keep your prison at max capacity, or even allow for over-filling your prison. Be aware though, that without a high turnover of prisoners and plenty of holding cell space available, overfilling your prison (while lucrative) can be a disaster.

Policy, Camera, Action!

Once you’ve got plenty of Staff and Prisoners, you will probably want to start thinking about the Policies you have in place. Your Policies can have a really big impact on how your prison operates. You can find your Policies by opening the Administration menu. Prison Policies are things that impact some global rules on how your lockup operates. You’ll need to unlock Policies through Bureaucracy, but once you have them, you can make changes such as choosing which Staff Members carry keys (balancing efficiency and security), or even at what point of their sentence the prisoners are able to apply for Parole (balancing increased release rates against prisoner morale from failed hearings).

The next tab, Punishment, is how you control your Staff response to Prisoners misbehaving. You can choose from some global presets (all the way from Lax to Extreme), or even change the individual severity for each misbehavior, as well as whether the punishment should also trigger a search of that inmate or their cell. This is more impactful than you might think; inmates will respond less positively to harsher punishments and it could lead to further misbehavior, violence, and escape attempts. On the flip side, inmates know what they’re being punished for and how severe it is. The new feature, Punishment Memory, is taken into account the next time that an inmate is making a decision whether or not to misbehave. If they’ve had a recent punishment, and that punishment was strict, they may change their mind about doing it again. This means that you may be able to curb specific issues like high contraband levels, by punishing those misbehaviors more severely. Just be careful; it’s a very fine line to balance.

We got ahead of ourselves!

This week’s video also dives into Programs and Labour, which we also touched on a couple of weeks ago! If you want to read more about the classes and courses you can run for your inmates, or how to manage the labor distribution of your prison, you can find more information on the Steam post for Feature Highlight #5.

As always, thanks for reading. We’re spending a little bit of extra time ironing the game out ahead of its full launch, eagerly awaiting the day we can get it into the hands of you players. We love the game and can’t wait to hear what you all think

Prison Architect Dev Team ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾

Next up: Developer Highlight 2 - The World of Career Mode

Our next video featuring the devs at Double Eleven is coming up soon! Tune in to learn more about how Career mode was made in Prison Architect 2.