Additional penalties for extreme room-sharing

[Rokiyo]

Reposting this suggestion from the losing colonists thread over in General Discussion.

The following room layout is consistently keeping my colonists at 50% happiness. All but one of the beds pictured are claimed, so this is a very cramped living situation indeed.



Clicking through each of my colonists generally displays the following kinds of thoughts:

• Very pleasant environment +10
• Had a social chat x3 +8
• Sharing bedroom -8

It is also worth noting that having prisoners share a cell seems to let them to have friendly chats with each other, increasing their happiness even if "No interaction" is selected.

While I think room sharing is great for the early game, I don't think the game should let me push it to such extremes without some consequence.

Some suggestions:

• The room sharing penalty could stack with the number of people a room is being shared with (e.g. a penalty of -3 per claimed bed in the room, instead of a flat -8).
• Floor space covered by beds could be ignored when determining if a room is "cramped". E.g. This would reduce the effective room size of the one pictured above by 32 squares.
• Sleeping colonists could experience further happiness penalties from hearing people chat or eat nearby. (e.g. being near a friendly chat gives -3 happiness if the colonist was asleep)

[IncognitoMode]

Good point.

[Tynan]

Good idea, I say.

[colonistPally]

Wow my mind is blown. :O I'm going to stop making separate rooms for each prisoner. Why didn't I think of this!

Very very very cool stuff and great suggestions.

[FowlJ]

I like this, but I think there should be a limit to the number of times the penalty stacks - colonists shouldn't be going insane just from sleeping in a community room.

[Tynan]

What I'd really like is a full evaluator of room quality, where colonists own a space and figure out how nice it is by considering their personal tastes in relation to the size of the space, its cleanliness, the items in it, and their quality. However, this is a non-trivial task so it probably won't happen for a few versions. I'm focusing on combat for Alpha 3.

[Coenmcj]

Combat you say? Yay for tactics!

On the topic though, Community rooms are good in some instances and bad in others. The isolated colonists require them to have such a large room it's almost impractical to build individual rooms for each colonist when you could simply pack them all in the same room, saving space and materials that you could spend elsewhere, a 27 (Approx) tile room is needed for a colonist to be "happy" whereas you could simply extend the room to about 37 to 40 tiles, put in 10 beds in the same room and put plant pots everywhere, making it almost pointless to make rooms for the individual.