I have now reached the point that my colonists have 0 mood buff because of the their 'sky high expectations'. Add the sh*t storms of things Extreme Randy can send at once, and sometime it goes bad.
They are eating fine meals (some are eating lavish if they are 'fragile') and each have an excellent bed (+10 mood buff). I'm also doing the obvious (no bad apparel, very nice dinning room and recreation room).
What can be the modd buffs I might overlook for this extra +5 that would help?
Beauty: Having very nice art in the major rooms will keep their beauty need from dropping too far. A positive beauty score will net you anywhere from 5 to 15 mood. To me, this is the biggest one....a few good-excellent large sculptures in the guest room, hospital, workroom(s), dining room, laboratory, and prison have solved most of my mood issues.
Psychite tea or ambrosia, allowable once per day at 25% mood or less. You could use smokeleaf or beer if you want, but they reduce productivity. Psychite tea and ambrosia are both "low addiction" drugs so they're what I use, when I have them available.
Lights? It's an obvious one, but if colonists walk around, or more notably, hang around in the dark, they get a -5 mood penalty from that.
Finally, cutting wealth. Not quite what you asked for, but if you put in a few statues in high-traffic areas and skimp on individual rooms, you'll get the beauty buff, you'll lose the nice bedrooms buff, but if you reclaim "high expectations" instead of sky-high, you'll almost certainly be at a net gain of mood. Alternatively, you could set up a nearby second colony with a skeleton crew and defenses and storage area to store your wealth you're not actively using (excess food, steel, wood, stone, silver, etc.)
Oh, you could also shorten the workday by giving 2 hours of recreation time twice a day....when they wake up, and halfway through the day. If their recreation meter is kept up, thats another 5-10 mood all the time.
The best way to make people happy is to get them thier pair.
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^^Aye. Which works out splendidly until they break up and you get a horribly mood penalty for 30 days or however long it is ;D
I'm at the same point too, sky-high expectations. Getting harder to keep people happy, especially when bad stuff happens like those negative waves from space. Prefer to run a drug-free colony, but have had to opt for the odd ambrosia (I set it at 30% once per day).
Another big thing, if you have people like this, is to keep Greedy and suchlike pawns happy. Otherwise the mood swing is pretty large when you don't have the lower expectations to rely on.
Note that you can combine your rec room and your dining room, which makes increasing its impressiveness easier (just one room to take care of). Make sure it stays clean!
If a colonist is a bloodlust you could try to leave raiders alive and make him or her kill all of them.
Tend to their needs to avoid mood hits. -Also make solutions to constant problems like -ate without table -disturbed sleep etc.
Stack lavish and fine meals if desperate.
Drugs - don't be scared ;).
Max Recreation by locking them in room & schedule if you're desperate.
Relationships & Animals tho I personally don't rely on these.
Foil hats to combat psyche events.
Nice rooms
beauty throughout your whole base - deal with corpse and ugly areas.
pawns get scheduled to night shift if they cause issues for everyone. -brings you back to my first point.
Quote from: Pangaea on July 25, 2019, 04:32:55 PM
^^Aye. Which works out splendidly until they break up and you get a horribly mood penalty...
Well, I use dev tools to check for compatibility between my people before I allow pawns to be recruited or fall in love, so there is no way they break up at all.
Also, allowing wife and husbund to work together gives them chances to deep talk one another which ensures high social relationships between them and reduces chance of break up to zero (you can easily check it yourself, just turn on dev tools and open social tab).
Quote from: Shurp on July 25, 2019, 05:38:58 PM
Note that you can combine your rec room and your dining room, which makes increasing its impressiveness easier...
That's the must!!!
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Unless it gets reworked the best move is to manage wealth. Whatever benefit you're getting from all these big ticket items gets yanked away by the expectations modifier delta, and the game's balance goes off the rails in very large colonies.
yes, I have been surprised to reach sky-high expectations so soon. I can't say I feel my colony is a fortress of defenses and wealth.
How do pawns set their expectations? I assume its from colony wealth, right?
I never liked how wealth was calculated as the silver value of all items in your colony. A military base would have a high value, but you wouldn't expect to be comfortable there, would you?
Exactly the point -- "Hey we have all these guns and turrets and traps and mortars... can't we have a television too? There's more to life than killing raiders!"
If you fed up with killing and don't know what to do... GoT has an answer!!!
I try to get a combo dining room and rec room early on with the following features:
- 11x23 in size (internal)
- 3x3 wooden dining table surrounded by 12 wooden chairs
- stone chess table with 2 x cloth armchairs
- stone pool table
- horseshoe pin
- two standing lights (keeps the whole place lit)
- TV (megascreen when you can) with at least 4 cloth armchairs watching it
- fully carpeted
- I don't bother with art
- I don't bother with temperature control
This will give my colonists the following:
- extremely impressive dining room +6
- extremely impress rec room +6
- spacious interior +5
- recreation satisfied + 5 (or more)
This will give enough buffs for most of the early game. Later I will upgrade bedrooms to cope with late game:
- 5x5 in size each (internal)
- double wooden bed
- wooden end table
- wooden dresser
- fully carpeted
- heater or cooler (or both depending on map temperature)
This will give the following:
- Luxuriantly comfortable +10 (the dresser/end table combined with the occasional use of an armchair elsewhere gives this)
- decent bedroom +2 (add some art to get it a point or two higher)
I find this is enough to cope with the +0 sky high expectations and even allow the odd organ harvesting without too many issues.
Throw in some recreational drugs and the colonists rarely do anything except an occasional dazed wander.
1 really nice piece of art can add a HUGE beauty boost at a reasonably low cost....that would allow you to seriously downsize your room, saving a LOT of wealth (cut 11x23 to 11x15, you save 88 tiles of carpeting and a bunch of walls, use 2 or 3 2x1 tables with 8 or 12 chairs....probably only 2 of them with 8 chairs, considering you generally don't get 9+ people eating at once).
I used to not use art either, but putting 1-2 good+ quality large sculptures in my workshop, lab, dining room, and hospital has done AMAZING wonders for pawn mood...It's not just the quality of the room, but the beauty boost all on it's own. With 2 nice pieces of art in my dining room, not only am I getting +5 mood for nice dining room, and +5 mood for nice rec room, but I'm also getting +10 to +15 mood for beautiful surroundings on top of that....and if after eating, they go to the lab or workshop, that mood will hang around most of the day.
Think the main rule of thumb is to have a spectacular eating-and-dining-area. If you are concerned about "value" just attack and "don't touch this" the beautiful art you place.
Quote from: Limdood on July 30, 2019, 01:51:03 PM
....and if after eating, they go to the lab or workshop, that mood will hang around most of the day.
I think this is worth repeating -- if you keep wherever your pawns hang out most of the day looking good, their mood will reflect it. Sprucing up the bedrooms is nice but it's much more important to keep your lab/workshop clean and tidy. A -10 ugly environment penalty will undo much of the good you're getting from anything else.
So I've added some art (as advised) to my dining/rec room and my workshop and, yes, I am now an art convert.
I get at least +6 "pretty" stats, mostly +10 "beautiful" and sometimes +15 "gorgeous" for my pawns, all from about 8 bits of excellent art put around the place. It's also upgraded my dining/rec to unbelievably impressive.
yeah, the only annoying part of art is constantly deconstructing until you get excellent pieces.
I've used art in my hospital (pawns in there are often sick (-5) and in pain (-10 to -20) and the art wonderfully offsets that...as sick pawns are often the ones you can't afford to have sad wander
I've also used them in my prison....I tend to release bad pawns, and keep good ones around even if they're 99 resistance and 99% difficulty. I also imprison addicted pawns until their addiction wears off, and the permanent +15 mood is HUGE for preventing berserks that might result in accidentally killed useful colonists. YMMV on prison art though.
Quote from: Limdood on July 31, 2019, 04:45:45 PM
yeah, the only annoying part of art is constantly deconstructing until you get excellent pieces.
Huh? Why do that? Just put them somewhere or sell them.
Or put them around the base. With luck raiders will get confused, ogle at the art, and leave happy and content.
Maybe.
Excellent and masterpiece quality sculptures have best beauty/price ratio (2.00) so these pieces to be placed and everything else to be sold. Well, with not so skilled sculptor some compromise is necessary.
Also, it's more advantageous to sell pieces and not to deconstruct them, as there is x1.10 extra price multiplier for them no any other item has. Even if resources are scarce buying them for sold sculptures will be much more profitable then deconstructing the latter for the former. The only exception is awful quality pieces which have x0.50 quality price multiplier.
deconstructing reduces the wealth immediately. If i have a dedicated artist, I could be sitting on quite a few normal - good quality sculptures before a trader comes along, and then I need to hope they have sufficient silver/goods to cover everything that I've accumulated.
Deconstructing immediately removes the art piece and wastes 25% of the materials (I don't make things like silver or gold or jade statues) - effectively undoing the craft and wasting your artist's time, but at the same time I won't have a dozen unused sculptures littering the stockpile.
Embrace it.
Once they are at sky high expectations it wont get any worse. So just make sure everything is looking good. Wall off areas where unattractive stuff goes, Chunks/Corpses.
Recrooms need to be flash as well as dining rooms. For crafting areas a good Large sculpture covers off a lot of stuff lying around on the floor.
Fine meals also help as well as keeping people out of shabby clothes by adjusting your clothing/outfit options.
If you play an unmodded game then statues here and there help keep beauty up. If you play a modded game there are lots of options.