Regime Prison Architect Guide

Setting a regime (a plan of each day) lets you control the prisoners and puts in order to functioning of your facility. In order to open the regime menu, you have to click on the reports icon in the lower right corner (screen above). Access to this option can be gained after hiring the Warden - before that it's blocked.

Using the regime tool, you can set an order of the day with one hour accuracy. The pattern from the above screenshot seems optimum, though further patches may change the proportions. Overall, you should stick to the below pattern:

• 11pm-8am - Sleep. Prisoners wake up automatically at 8am, so there's no point in forcing them to stay in bed until noon. An eight hour sleep time is usually enough to satisfy the prisoners.
• 8am-10am - Free time. The first two hour after waking up is a real moment of truth for the prisoners. Most of their needs will be in the red zone (see: Prisoners' needs) and satisfying them all at once is impossible. Therefore the prisoners will start getting angry because of their unsatisfied needs - even while they're effectively satisfying them. Therefore they should get some free time to solve their problems under a carrying eye of guards (just in case some quarrels break out).
• 10am-11am - Eat. Two meals a day are enough to fill the bellies and gain a high level of satisfaction. A breakfast at 10am is an optimum time - the prisoners will be hungry enough to come to the canteen but not angry enough to start riots. At the same time the newcomers will have enough time for themselves and will get some food as well.
• 11am-12am - Free time. This break is used to satisfy needs that weren't taken care of during the morning activities. The late prisoners usually use showers or TVs or run on the yard.
• 12am-5pm - Work. During 5 hours of work the prisoners can manufacture a big amount of licence plates (profit for you) as well as wash and distribute clothes (see: Deployment). The latter case is the real issue here - satisfying the need of clean clothes is pretty much impossible in bigger facilities as employees won't have time to deal with all the clothes. It's not caused by a wrong timetable but by bugs in the game which cause the prisoners to be idle or have problems with path finding. It should be fixed in upcoming patches.
• 5pm-7pm - Free time. This time lets the prisoners satisfy the needs accrued during the work time.
• 7pm-8pm - Eat. Just like with the breakfast, the time is well matched with the requirements of prisoners. Each one of them will have time to eat and won't be irritated.
• 8pm-11pm - Free time. Here the last needs of prisoners should be fulfilled. There is no need for separate time for shower and yard, prisoners can take care of themselves. A moment before sleep time, it's good to make a little Shakedown, looking for contraband.

The plan of the day.

Notice! There is a bug in the game which causes the prisoners to automatically wake up if you load a game saved during the night. Usually they aren't willing to sleep anymore, so you have to find them something to do. The best option here is setting free time so that they don't have reasons to complain. If they becomes tired later on and want to go to bed earlier, you should let them do so.