Dark/Grey areas in Prison Architect

Question

In my Prison I turned off Fog Of War, but in most areas where a Gaurd or Staff isn't present the area will turn Dark and Grey. The prisoners do not show and lights don't seem to do anything and when my mouse cursor goes over the area it doesn't light up. Do I need CCTV's there? When I place a gaurd he walks away, is there anyway to make him stay? (I'm relatively new to the game. )

Answer 1

It sounds like Fog of War is actually turned on. To fix this without having to start your prison from scratch:

• Navigate to your save folder (which you can open from within Prison Architect, or the default path is C:\Users\<User Name>\AppData\Local\Introversion\Prison Architect\saves)

• Open the .prison file of your prison in Notepad, or your preferred editing program (make sure you're not running Prison Architect while you edit this file)

• Look for the line EnabledVisability = true and change it to EnabledVisability = false. (There are a number of other things you can tweak in this file, like giving yourself extra money - Introversion deliberately made this easy while the game is in alpha, because it's not 100% balanced yet)

• Save the file, and re-open your prison

To answer your other questions, yes CCTV would also fix this problem (so long as you had a guard within range of a CCTV monitor). To get a guard to remain in a room, you need to unlock "Deployment" in the Bureaucracy menu (this requires a Warden and a Chief). Deployment allows you to station guards in specific rooms - useful if you have a lot of prisoners in the same place at the same time, such as the canteen. If you want your guards to stand in a specific spot in a room (such as beside a CCTV monitor) you can also designate patrol routes from the Deployment menu.

Answer 2

I believe This happens when you use a "simple door" instead of a "prison door." The area greys out, because the door is solid and you can't see anything there. However, a guard entering this area briefly would solve this problem, or just simply having CCTV's. Unfortunately, there is no way to disable this feature (unless via mod) as this effect is embedded in the game code. To Make him stay, you must research Deployment, and make him patrol the area.