Prison Architect’s newest update, The Slammer, has slammed the game’s Linux version into the ground, as users have been reporting crashes ever since the update dropped.
Prison Architect The Slammer Update has added a whole lot of content and reworked large portions of the game, but that’s not the source of the problem… The culprit is the newly-integrated Paradox Launcher, as it keeps crashing before Linux users can start the game.
Prison Architect The Slammer Update
There’s heaps of new stuff added with the Slammer Update, but also a whole lot of changes:
- Deployment context presentation and visuals improved. Now you can see your prison!
- You can now assign Armed Guards and Dog Handlers to patrols and zones.
- You can now have 2 different intersecting patrol routes.
- Patrol routes and zones can now be prioritized, to ensure your most important areas are manned first.
- 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.
- Keyboard hot-keys added for cycling through options in in-game item menus ([Z] and [X]), and for closing menus ([C]).
- Rotations for more of the existing objects and furniture that didn't have them (Workshop Saw, Press, Roadgate, Ironing Board, Altar, Bench).
- New Moving/Relocating Objects feature. Just double-click an object, re-position, and a Worker will do the rest.
- New Bureaucracy researched option. When starting a new game, you can begin with everything researched.
- Additional x10 game speed button.
- Filters and sort-by options added to the Objects menu.
For a full list of changes, check out the official update post on Paradox Plaza.
Prison Architect The Slammer Linux Crash Fix
It was to be expected that Prison Architect’s new publisher, Paradox Interactive, would integrate their proprietary launcher into the game, but Prison Architect The Slammer Update did cause problems that may seem difficult to resolve at first.
According to reports, the game now launches the Paradox Launcher when you click ‘Play’, which leads to an immediate crash on Linux. To resolve this problem, you need to do the following:
- Right-click on Prison Architect in your Steam Library
- Click on 'Properties'
- Click on 'Set Launch Options'
- Add the following line argument: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libc.so.6 %command%
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That should fix the Paradox Launcher problem. Note that you can also bypass the Paradox Launcher entirely, if you're up for it. All you need to do is make a new text file in the game's installation folder. Name it 'steam_appid.txt', and paste '233450' in it before saving. That's Prison Architect's Steam ID, and it's missing from the game folder by default, for some reason. When that's done, launching Prison Architect should bypass the Paradox Launcher. We hope this helps.
Though the original developers of Prison Architect moved on to other projects, Paradox Interactive has eagerly continued updating the game, as it still enjoys considerable success.
