Prison Architect alpha 33 makes prisoners comfortable

It’s that time of the month again: Prison Architect has gone and been updated with some shiny new features.

After last month’s bug fix-a-thon, we’ve now actually got a number of new features, largely focusing on making your prisoners a bit more comfortable.

First up is the Mail Room, a new room that lets your prisoners receive mail. Build this and staff it with inmates, and they’ll sort the mail and have it delivered throughout the prison. Those who receive mail will be a bit happier (it’ll increase their Family need, and possibly also Comfort and Recreation), but as with everything else coming into your prison, there’s the danger that it might contain naughty contraband.

More important, though, is that cells can now be improved. Everything from TVs to showers can be added to cells to make them more comfortable, and you can use these as rewards for well-behaved prisoners, which in turn will make them less likely to commit any offences – they don’t want to lose their new privileges, after all. The flipside to this is that it’s all based off of a system of averages, so you can’t simply add TVs to every cell to make everyone content and unlikely to offend. They’ll only get these bonuses if their cell is above the average… and those in cells below the average have nothing to lose, and are more likely to get pissed off. Cells are graded from 1-10, and prisoners are graded on what they deserve (based on how long it’s been since they’ve caused problems) on the same scale.

There are a few other bits and pieces – bug fixes, a new logistics screen to show cell quality, adjustments to behaviour to reflect all of these things – but you get the gist. You can see the video below.