You want to reduce the amount of prisoner aggro and giving them shit to do seems to help with that a lot. The gardener seems to matter less but he’s still pretty important. If your prison gets real shabby the inmates rage out a lot.

Maintenance is pretty important because it unlocks the cleaners.

Some of it is kind of pointless and some of it is get it asap.

On the top left you’ve got an old white dude icon and when you hover on it says bureaucracy.

Easy money and it helps a lot with the startup a lot. Hit the grants one and hit the one for cellblock a and the one for building some office space, hiring a warden and an accountant. Hit the button with money on it which brings up a bunch of menus.

At the very start you have 30 grand or so but you can get a bunch of money through grants for stuff you are going to do anyway.

I found it useful to build a corridor from the delivery area to prison area so then you can really lockdown who has access to all the shit getting delivered to the front of the prison. Well there are other ways for contraband to come in but if you mess up and build too close to the road that’s one unlimited source. They can only throw 15 blocks I think so if your second fence is 16 all the contraband stays outside. You do this because the prisoners contact people on the outside and they chuck stuff over the fence that then gets picked up.

You build a fence round the prison at the start for the area to count as enclosed but you should also build a second fence inside the first.

Once you designate what the interior is the game will tell you what objects have to be in there to function as that kind of room.

You can’t just build walls and put stuff inside, you have to build foundations for it to count as indoors, that button is on the extreme bottom left.

Some advice if you go straight into sandbox and don’t mess with the campaign a bunch which is how I usually play management games. If you have any tips feel free to share with us! Things to Know Before Playing Before you play the Prison Architect game, you will definitely want to know these simple but useful tips and tricks.

Prison architect guide