Mental Breaks

[Jman117]

Hi everybody! Fair warning before you go any further, I'm a complete noob.

Anyways, I just got the game a few days ago when it was released to colonist backers. So far I've been really enjoying it, but I just keep getting destroyed really quickly. I've probably played through 7 colonies (all on the chill Cassie difficulty) and keep loosing really rapidly. I've lost once or twice to just random events coming at awful times, but most of the time I loose all of my colonists to a mental break. Clearly I'm doing something wrong.

I've tried giving each colonist a separate 6x5 bedroom with a lamp and a plant. I've tried putting them all in one larger bedroom with nicer furnishings. In one game I managed to get far enough to research carpets for the bedrooms, which helped a little. The base is always lit (unless of course there's a eclipse/flare) and I put up auto-turrets to defend against raiders. This is the easiest difficulty (besides the pacifist difficulty)-  Am I missing something?

So basically my question is this: How can I prevent mental breaks? I feel like they just occur no matter what I do. Any help would be appreciated. So far I'm loving the game but I can't get into a very enjoyable game before dying. 

[Ozymandias]

Well, what do their thoughts say? You should study that, since the problems faced by each colony are unique to the player.

Shouldn't place much of an emphasis on the plants, they really don't make much of a difference.

Your priority should be to build a nutrient paste dispenser. After that give them all their own room and a bed. You don't even need carpets.

The greatest source of unhappiness for me has been the corpses, if I stack them all up in a dump. Any time they pass by to drop a boulder, they suffer from that terrible negative effect. So make sure you specialize each dump, keep all the corpses piled up in the peripheries of the map.

[Vastin]

Unhappiness comes mostly from (in rough order of importance):

1) Hunger
2) Exhaustion
3) Injury
4) Corpses
5) Blood
6) Ugliness
7) Crowding
Darkness

The first two are critical - either can drive a character completely bonkers in short order, even if they are otherwise fine. Here's the single most important thing:

*Never leave a settler stuck as a soldier for more than a few hours.*

The moment you recruit a settler as a soldier you take total control of them, and they can't do anything to help themselves - no eating, no rest, no nothing. They will stand there until they break. It's especially easy to forget to tell a soldier to stand down after they return a prisoner from the battlefield, but they'll stand there quietly in the prisoners cell until they crack. You will see warnings of this in the top right corner of the screen.

Make sure you have a supply of nutrient paste food. They hate raw food (and it's inefficient).

Lighting everything only helps a little, but its fairly cheap.

After battles, it's good to make sure at least one of your settlers has a high priority on hauling, and a place well outside your base that is a designated body dump. Bodies cause quite a lot of stress and should be gotten rid of quickly. Use moltov cocktails on the body dump to clear it for the next run...

Once you have 6 or more settlers, it also doesn't hurt to manually change one of them to have a higher (3) priority on cleaning. Make sure your entire base and a little ways around it is defined as your 'home' zone, and they'll keep it all fairly tidy. If you don't make it a priority, they'll never get around to it, and its actually kind of important. Blood stains clash terribly with most colors of carpet, and this can cause terrible mental strain...

Lighting everything helps a bit, but isn't critical. Carpeting rooms and such helps a bit - but it mostly helps with movement. You can put potted plants in everyone's rooms, but they actually take a fair amount of maintenance, so, meh.

Usually as long as the place is lit, clean, and everyone is fed, gets regular rest, and are not stuck as a soldier, people shouldn't be breaking.

[Thunder Rahja]

If you're having trouble keeping colonists happy, perhaps try the fear approach by researching fear tech and making gibbet cages, leaving rooms dark, etc.

The most common way I lose colonists to mental breaks is if they're mining tunnels with a long return time to the food dispenser or their beds. Be sure to watch for the "mental break soon" hint at the top right of your screen, and switch them out from their usual jobs if you need to.

If they do break though and go on a rampage, try to melee attack them for your best chance to incapacitate them for capture. Though sometimes for me when they wander aimlessly or try to leave the colony, they turn hostile as soon as they are taken into a jail cell and attack their captor.