Prison Architect Update 21 Adds Bazooka, Rambo, Surrender

It's possible that some of you have overdosed on Prison Architect update videos by now, but if you're like me and still in the throes of a monthly addiction to the incarceration management sim's new features, then this month's hit is a good one. As explained on the official forum, the major new addition: your prison's inhabitants can now smuggle in drugs, get hooked on them, and go into withdrawal or overdose. Inject the trailer below directly into your eyeballs to beat the blood-brain barrier.

It's worse than that time I got hooked on Adam.

The update introduces three drugs - cocaine (aka bazooka), heroin (aka Rambo) and alcohol - each with their own particular side effects. It also introduces new reform programs to help wean your prisoners back off the slang terms should they arrive or establish an addiction while bored in your prison.

One of the side effects of withdrawal from the drugs is that your prisoners will be quicker to anger. If the drug problem becomes widespread across your prison, you might then have a riot on your hands. A new feature to make those pesky prison-wide brawls less deadly is that prisoners can now surrender when faced with lethal force, rather than dimly fighting to their deaths against armed guards as they were prone to doing before.

If your experiences with Prison Architect's early access have thus far been stymied by existing bugs rather than a lack of features - and I've certainly encountered my fair share - then the next update, alpha 22, might bring some good news. For the next month, Delay and his merry band of imprisoned programmers are focusing exclusively on bug fixing. That means no new features for the update video, but perhaps fewer collision and pathing errors. The team currently have a database of 4000 recorded bugs, and the update forum post contains a video of how you can help prioritise what they fix.