My cooks refuse to cook!

[retrogamer]

Hey there,

I'm new to this game, so I'll start off by saying it all looks great so far......EXCEPT.....

My cooks refuse to do an actual work....they just seem to run around in the kitchen and don't actually make any meals....

I've moved all the cookers and fridges etc away from walls so there's nothing blocking them working, they have about 30 lots of ingredients, I even hired another cook to see if they were lonely but alas nothing....and my prisoners (especially the fat ones) are getting really annoyed now....

Any ideas?

[mSaNiAc]

I am also experiencing this problem. Not sure any specifics but I have tried similar things as you with new cooks, etc.

[retrogamer]

There must be something we are missing as I don't see many others with this issue...

[T00ms]

Maybe you have the same issue I and others have. Does your kitchens get any supplies?

viewtopic.php?f=43&t=51050

[BugPowderDust]

Can you upload your .prison savefile so we can take a look?

[retrogamer]

Well it seems the problem solved itself..... I reloaded the game and much to my amazement the cooks had decided to do some work....

I think it was the threat of being sacked and replaced with vending machines that did it....

[Alainaluvsu]

I'm having the same problem. It's happened in an Alpha 26 save, and a brand new prison created w/ Alpha 27. Sometimes the kitchen will recognize the wings and sometimes no. Even when they recognize them, sometimes they will not cook anything. Also, the solitary doors are shutting without anybody in them again, and it's backing up the cleaning staff.

I want this Alpha to work, I don't wanna wait another month to play

EDIT: After a little testing, I've noticed that my cooks who are carrying ingredients from delivery to the fridge are favoring the refridgerators that have not been rotated.

[Atra Demonica]

Same problem here. Just made basic "prisons" and none of them had cooks which wanted to cook. But i made working kitchens before. I even went to the new tab and organized the food chain by hand but no joy. The game is sadly completely broken for me in this state

[mdg900]

Also having this problem. Everything was fine for many hours of play, then the cooks started only cooking a few meals each time leaving most prisoners hungry. I built a new kitchen, and now they aren't cooking any meals at all. On the jobs list, I can see all cooks have jobs set to: 'Load ingredients into cooker (queued)'.

This is with alpha 27 on mac

[bigROB478]

i am having the same problem but only in one of my kitchens after i extended it the chefs have food on the stove but not doing anything with it

[Dam0]

I too have this issue on a brand new prison.

Has this issue been reported in the bug tracker yet?

[BugPowderDust]

I also now have this problem.

Jail was working fine, now as well as the food problem, my workmen won't unload trucks or carry on building foundations.

Couldn't see it in bug tracker, so logged: http://bugs.introversion.co.uk/view.php?id=7052

[CumpyLustard]

Yeah, I've been having a lot of on/off issues with cooks after A27. Hopefully it should be fixed or at least better next alpha, as it looks like they've gone through a lot of kitchen related bugs on Mantis. I'm just going to hold off on playing for now.

[WiseWoodrow]

I did a quick redesign of my prison's Canteen, so that the room is cut in half (You can now do that for canteens, slicing the "room" in the middle will make it into multiple rooms),
so now I can assign my max-sec to one half and the rest to the other half, using the new system. The supply/demand bubbles in logistics disappeared and my cooks are doing nothing, along with the prisoners, at lunch time, just ignoring the assigned canteen alltogether and sitting in both sides.


Luckily I thought something might just break and saved it to a different save, so my previous iteration is intact, but this bug has broken the game for me if I dare change my Canteen.
(that's assuming my regular one doesn't stop working too).


Lets upvote the hell out of that bug tracker.

[RichieGrape]

my new alpha 27 prison is 37 days in and cooks are working fine (5 kitchens & 5 canteens & 44 cooks) ...can you guys upload a save file so we can take a look and maybe figure out where things are going bad...

currently my only issue is trucks backing up and potentially causing food to not make it to the kitchens fast enough...workaround is to use search cellblock outside of your prison walls...guards will search everything on the trucks and place them on the ground effectively unloading the trucks themselves