my cooks either need to be fired, or promoted.

[arwan]

so my prison which has cells for over 400 inmates has 1 kitchen and 6 canteens due to segregation. now normally this is no problem. everyone gets fed that needs it and my trays all get washed.

BUT my prison seems to LOVE to order new food trays by the STACKS. not only this but when the prison orders food trays THEY PAY ME to take them. this has resulted in my prison (that originally only had 12 serving tables) having literally about 1000 food trays. i have since then trashed ungodly amounts of them but the cooks still order more seemingly every day. im not sure if its connected to the shake down moving the trays and then getting more ordered or not but im starting to lean in that direction.

regardless its rather silly when i sometimes look around my canteens and kitchens and see stacks of over 100 food trays here and there but not only that, there will be 2-3 stacks occupying the same square that size.

[Jackinator]

I had this problem, too. In my case, I had to hire more cooks, because they weren't able to finish cleaning the trays until the next meal time, so the game bought new trays to compensate... but you say they are all cleaned... maybe the program checks some hours before meal time if enough trays are available? Maybe it's because trays are sent to one or more canteens preferably (is it ok to say it like that? damn...) and then there are no more trays in other canteens?

[metalbunny]

Check that you have enough sinks, enough cooks to do the dishes, and that all your trays are actually clean at mealtime. If you don't have enough clean trays by mealtime the game will order more trays, and the trays come in stacks of 10 (I believe). IRL you cannot get the trays 1 at a time, you have to buy them in stacks - not sure how many are in a box, but the way they're made just makes it not economically feasible to ship them individually.

That said, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to make our own food trays in the workshop.

[arwan]

so i just loaded that prison up again so i could do a physical count of my food trays.

in my 5 canteens, split between 17 serving tables i have 19 stacks of clean food trays, (2 are on the ground under the serving tables) stacks are 36,48,49,34,46,68,65,60,73,40,59,75,40,42,48,42,47,46,40 total trays in canteens 958 trays

in my 1 kitchen, split between 13 sinks i have 15 stacks of trays 13 are clean and 2 are dirty, clean stacks are 12,34,23,32,20,16,11,18,20,28,36,40,10 and dirty stacks are 28,1 for a total of 300 clean and 29 dirty.

also i have 30 cooks.these numbers are taken 1 hour before a meal time.

i have 317 prisoners. total trays 1287 of which only 29 are dirty. and only 329 are not in a canteen ready to be used.