Panopticon Prison

If you commit a crime in Freedom City, and get caught, brutalized and killed by the police, you will be sent here. Serve your time, find the appropriate terminal and pay your fine to get out immediately (you can walk out without paying your fine, but this is not recommended). Prison might be harsh, but it has its benefits; it's a good place to grind craft and locksmith for example.

Upon getting in prison, you will notice a new implant - Panopticon Cortex Bomb. You should be able to guess what it might do if it sets off, and you will get it regardless of spawning in the clone vats or walking in. If you decide to turn yourself in, you can do that by walking into the prison while being wanted; but you can't carry any weapons, armor, or containers with you. But you might get a skilled friend to hand you something from the outside...

Beware, though. Other prisoners may be hostile, or in desperate need of sex - and they won't ask nicely. This warning especially holds true for any nerds who might think prison is a good place to practice certain skills (see below sections), since if another prisoner decides to shank you, then you'll most likely lose all the XP and IP you earned doing menial tasks.

You won't starve in here, as you can get food from the only slightly outdated prison labour program.

Panopticon is located in Gangland: to reach it, exit Freedom City from the road just north of the Helliday Inn, go west and north at the first intersection, and voila - there you are.

Benefits in Prison

What to do if you find yourself in prison

So you decided to butt rape Janet while wandering around Freedom City and you find yourself in prison. You are more than likely going to be stuck there for at least 20 minutes and maybe much longer unless you decide to pay the fine. So you have a few options of things to occupy your time:

• You can up your crafting skill by using the license plate press downstairs.
• You can find schematics for lock picks upstairs in one of the cells. Cells are usually locked but they will open periodically.
• You can use license plates in conjunction with the schematics to create lock picks, and then grind out your picking skill on the locked cells upstairs.
• The prisoners have a fighting ring in one section of the yard; if you think you're any good at bare-knuckle boxing, you might want to give it a try.
• There is a weight set on the second floor that you can use to increase your brawn skill. For further information on working out, check out the Working Out entry, by LochLain
• Some prisoners have useful knowledge, and may be willing to teach you a thing or two for a fee. Try to find them.
• There's a phone and phone book available to make prank calls with.

Grinding Craft and Scavenge

For crafters, violating the law in some menial way (or spectacular and hilarious way, depending on your style) can create an opportunity to grind your first few raw in craft, and pick up some easy XP early on. This is thanks to the license plate press and the labor yard up above. To begin the plate-making process, get a pickaxe from the commissary on the lowest level of the prison and head up into the yard, then west. There you'll find rocks upon rocks for you to mine chunks of iron ore from. Pick up the ore as you mine it, otherwise the mineral harvester will eat it. Once you've got a fair bit of ore, toss it all in the auto-forge sitting there to turn it all into metal plates. Don't leave the plates lying around either. Gather up all those plates and take them down to the workshop (you may wish to go to the showers to get all that mining soot off of you first), then stick them in the press.

Now comes the fun part part where you turn that metal into something useful. Type make 1 on press, and watch that metal turn into sweet craft IP. Repeat this process until you've got your craft and scavenge (from mining) IP, and you have a big stack of license plates. Why not use them to get XP?

This is accomplished one of two ways, depending on your circumstances:

• The Hopeless Slackass Method - Find a shiv or potmetal lockpick diagram, either is fine (Grumbard-Sanders sells shiv diagrams for a dollar if you plan on walking yourself in - note you will need to smuggle in the diagram before you go in) and use follow diag to make picks/shivs until your sissy fingers bleed. Then, drop them all, head back to the press, and get more plates. This has the advantage of being easy, and allowing you to queue 25 actions at a time just like with the press. You'll get anywhere from 1-5XP (it'll decrease the more you do it) for making these each time, sounds miniscule but it takes a couple of seconds for each one and if you have the inclination you can make literal thousands before your craft is up to 3 or 4 raw.

• The MacGyver Method - Unsurprisingly, this involves the 'improvise' function, which allows you to make stuff without a diagram or schematic. 'Why the hell would I do that when I have a schematic, jackass?' Well, first of all I'm trying to help you, there's no need for that kind of language. Secondly, it's because you get more XP from improvising (up to about 10XP for each successful attempt), meaning a higher rate of efficiency on all those plates you just half-assed the production of. To improvise a shiv or pick, use the command improv <shiv/pick> with license. As a bonus, if you've never successfully improvised an item before, you'll get a free clone update and a journal entry (you'll never guess what it's called) for your efforts . This can be either extremely useful or midly amusing, depending on how much fatal sodomy you're being forced to endure. The downside of the improvisation method is that when you're too low skill to make a sharp implement out of two already fairly sharp pieces of metal, your character will scream something and gain a bunch of stress. Given your presumably low crafting skill, this is pretty much guaranteed to happen a lot if you decide to go MacGyver on that shit. It can be counteracted somewhat by sitting in the shower and hugging your knees while you improvise, which de-stresses you fairly quickly, but make absolutely sure there aren't any other players around if you're planning on that. The store on the north side of the work area contains a 'FINAL SOLUTION' button that gasses the showers, which will probably make you scream obscene things in real life once you realise all your mindless button-stabbing was wasted by some other guy's singular mindless button stab. Another unfortunate facet of using improvise is that you can't queue a series of similar improvise actions: your character will get confused about where that license plate you were planning to use has gone (apparently none of the other hundred or so is fit to take its place). This means that you'll have to babysit your character through the frustrating process a lot more actively, leaving a lot less free time for your obsessive depravity (it's a disease).

Don't forget to fill your pockets, armpits and less... sanitary orifices with license plates for Avram when you just can't take the crushing disappointment that this is what your life has become anymore. Or, if you're like me (indifferent to the fact you're virtually doing a task that you wouldn't stoop to in the real world) leave once your craft hits 4 raw. Past that point you'll have to grind away on bigger and better and deadlier things. Like making clothes.

Grinding Locksmith

Pretty simple, get a hold of a potmetal lockpick (by crafting it, or one of the thousands dropped by the poor souls following the advice above), head up the stairs, over to the eastern cells, and pick <direction>. You'll probably fail, a lot, but with sufficient perseverance you too can gain easy skillups from your violation of the law. If the brutal anal rape and frequent beatings aren't your cup of tea (protip: they are, but whatever, you can live in denial) you can always go to the northern basement door of the Sharpton Projects to grind your lockpicking (from outside Sharpton head NE, NE, S). There will probably be a couple of Chobos, which may or may not be a problem for you, and you'll want to bring a bunch of spare picks for when yours break, as they inevitably will.