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Now that Paradox own the rights to Prison Architect and Double Eleven are in charge of development, they're continuing the free updates.

The Slammer update was released yesterday and one of the major changes is an overhaul to Deployment. The presentation of visuals of the interface were improved so you can see your prison, you can assign Armed Guards and Dog Handlers to patrols and zones, you can have 2 different intersecting patrol routes plus routes and zones can be prioritized.

Double Eleven also added in some fresh content to play with too:

  • New Walls & Doors: Yutani Wall (Sci Fi), Visitor's Door, Secure Door (with a flap to deliver food trays to prisoners inside a cell), coloured Fence Gates.
  • New Floors: Mud, Grate, and Solaco (Sci Fi - goes great with the Yutani Wall).
  • New Objects: Table (Small) Bench (Small), Bleachers, Bush, Trees (Snowy Conifer, Palm), Lights (Flood Light, Street Light, Wall Light), Shower Pillar, Ironing Board (Small), Office Chair, Door Mat.
  • New furniture such as new chairs, short benches, short tables will fulfill room requirements.
  • New Jungle plot and Snowbound plot options added, to start a new prison on.
  • New Guard Pavillion towers are unlocked for players who sign up for a Paradox account.

There's plenty of other changes like new hotkeys for cycling through options in in-game item menus, more rotations added for older objects, the ability to easily move objects by double clicking and after you move it a worker will sort it, the option to start with everything researched and so on.

The update didn't come without issues on Linux though, as it seems to open the new Paradox Launcher and then instantly quit which isn't great. Although, this problem might be just for newer distributions.

FIX: To make the Paradox Launcher work with the Steam version, add this as launch option (right click -> "Properties" -> "Set Launch Options…"):

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libc.so.6 %command%

That will make the Paradox Launcher work fine.

If you wish to completely bypass the launcher make sure it has the steam_appid.txt file which it's missing inside the folder where you installed it, all it needs inside is "233450" (the ID of Prison Architect on Steam). To find the folder, right click on the game and go to "Properties" and then -> hit the "Local Files" tab and press "Browse Local Files…". Once done, just run the game directly to bypass the launcher. I've sent a message to Paradox today about the issues.

You can get Prison Architect from Humble Store, GOG and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments

robvv Sep 18, 2019
Thanks for this as I was having trouble launching the game on my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed system!
Brisse Sep 18, 2019
Launched fine without the workaround for me on an up to date Debian Sid machine.

Edit: Nevermind. This time it didn't work, despite running fine earlier today.


Last edited by Brisse on 18 September 2019 at 6:44 pm UTC
HerrLange Sep 18, 2019
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Thanks for the workaround. I wasn't able to launch since yesterday.

BTW, has there anybody some info regarding future plans of Paradox/Double Eleven regarding Prison Architect?

EDIT: the game is still not working - something is running but I do not get an UI. Two days ago everything was still fine.

EDIT2: I think my issue was a mixture of the update (removing sound libs: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/the-slammer-update-for-prison-architect-is-now-live.1246200/#post-25823859) and/or the recent update to pulseaudio 13.0 i did on the same time.
I had the follwoing error message: Initialising SDL Audio:FATAL ERROR : Failed to open audio output device: "Audio target 'pulse' not available"
According to https://wiki.archlinux.de/title/Pulseaudio#Konfiguration_SDL_f.C3.BCr_PulseAudio i had set SDL_AUDI'O to pulse. This seems to be not working anymore. I set SDL to alsa and now it is working again.
See also: https://www.gog.com/forum/thimbleweed_park/linux_unable_to_init_sdl_mixer_alsa_couldnt_open_audio_device_no_such_device/post4


Last edited by HerrLange on 18 September 2019 at 3:18 pm UTC
Kimyrielle Sep 18, 2019
Works fine for me on Ubuntu 18.04. Love the new features! :)
WorMzy Sep 18, 2019
I had to stop playing a few months ago because the game causes burn-in on my monitor. No idea why, it just leaves a ghost image of the menus, etc. even if I switch to my PS4. It eventually fades away, but it's very distracting when it's present. Might give it another go, just in case it was a driver bug or something.
dpanter Sep 18, 2019
Libc issues, really? Oh boy... whatyearisit.gif
But wait! There's more!

Launching from terminal...
error: missing libsndio6.1 - My distro is on libsndio7.0. Quick copy old lib from another location into the Prison Architect/lib64 dir, ok.
error: no appID found - Create steam_appid.txt as described above, ok.

Hey presto, game runs from terminal. Launcher still borked in Steam.

I needed to alter the path to libc thusly.
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 %command%

Hey presto again, both launcher and game runs now from Steam. Ugh.
WorMzy Sep 18, 2019
Yeah, I just finished fighting the game to get it to launch on my system too.

The ancient sndio library dependency comes from the libSDL2-2.0.so.0 the game ships with. I avoided that by preloading /usr/lib/libSDL2-2.0.so.0. Even when preloading /usr/lib/libc.so.6 I can't get the launcher to show up, so I ended up just forcing steam to launch the game binary directly. So, TLDR, I set my launch command in steam to:
LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libSDL2-2.0.so.0" ./PrisonArchitect.x86_64 %command%
(That %command% still seems to be needed, despite the "command" being explicitly set...)

I've never had this problem with Prison Architect in the past. It's quite.. disappointing.
Cyba.Cowboy Sep 19, 2019
This only affects the Steam version though, right? If you bought a copy from GOG.com, it should be fine, shouldn't it?
torham Sep 19, 2019
If you bought the game direct from Introversion, it seems you are just screwed out of any updates. I know people love Prison Architect but it has always been buggy and incomplete, last thing I'll buy from these guys.
dpanter Sep 25, 2019
New patch released, The Slammer Hotfix 1.02
"Requiring unsupported libraries will no longer crash the game on Linux."
Still needs the same fixes as I posted earlier.
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