Happiness

[bcaton]

Coming from a Sims background, it seems weird to me that the amount of happiness something is worth is not defined.

Do rugs add happiness? Paintings? Radios?


What if someone has a mod that adds a garden path - would that automatically add happiness, or would a modder have to work out a happiness value for it to be more than cosmetic?

Everything I have read here and elsewhere seems to indicate that no-one knows, and the devs don't seem to be very open about such things.

It also seems to be incredibly buggy, taking nosedives for no apparent reason. The settlers have no complaints but the arrow is down? That's just bad coding. The player doesn't know if it's because some object has a negative happiness value due to a bug, for example. You'd think there'd be a data report so you could see it was a radio or something that needed to be removed.

[Fonger]

happiness comes from . . .

 

Bars and Surgery stations in your settlement

 

and you staying in the settlement --- not adventuring out

 

 

arrow nosedives if you leave the settlement

 

get the achievement - hint youtube - then ignore it ever-after

[Moraelin]

Well, this is not The Sims. For better or worse.

 

Far as I can tell, meeting or not meeting the needs on the bar above has the biggest influence. After that, yeah, shops help the second most, so to speak, and, hey, they make you some caps over time too. After that, basically the number of objects helps a little with where the average happiness tends to be. So it's not as much a case of whether you have the better chair or the worse chair, but just having lots of stuff around. People are people, basically; they like to have stuff.

 

This is also not quite the 21st century suburban middle class scenario that The Sims has. There it matters if you have a bigger TV than the Landgraabs have. Here it's more like Robinson Crusoe land. Having anything at all is already an achievement.

 

Having any rug is better than having no rug. Having a footlocker is better than stuff being in a pile on the floor. Having some chairs is better than sitting on the floor. Having a sleeping bag in a corner that you don't have to share beats hot-bunking, which in turn beats sleeping on the floor. Etc.

 

Also, I'd say it's more like staying away for long is what gets people somewhat uneasy. Doing a grand tour now and then to collect the taxes and see how they're doing (actually, with the seeing how they're doing part, I tend to call it more like the Grand Sneer;)) helps put their minds at ease.

 

But Fonger has a good point too. Unlike The Sims, well, happiness is not really a goal in itself. It just affects productivity, but even that only matters if you're relying on scrap stations. Just keep them reasonably content, and don't sweat it all that much if they have like 60 happiness or 80 happiness.

[mwhenry16]

My standard answer: Don't worry my friend, the modders will fix it!

[Moraelin]

Not entirely sure what's there to fix, though. The game just wasn't supposed to be The Sims. Those crap walls for example were not supposed to make the settlers unhappier than a modded wall, they were supposed to provide imperfect and DESTRUCTIBLE cover in a firefight.

 

I mean, sure, you can probably mod it to be more like The Sims, but I wouldn't call that a "fix". It wasn't broken in the first place.

[bcaton]

Four years later, it looks like some modders have added some patches to give happiness to some items.

But the fact remains that the tutorial for the game says that your settlers will be happier if they have these items, and they won't, without mods. Or paid for Creation Club stuff which might also do the trick.

I'd say the game was intended to give happiness for the items, but that was tossed to one side as it is too easy to cheese it by having a ton of coffee mugs in a room. Instead, people just have a ton of settlers redundantly doing exactly the same job.

e.g. https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/42776

[StormWolf01]

Some of the things that I have found to attribute to happiness is as follows -

 

Enough beds Y N Y = Happiness. N = Not happy.

Enough foods or more than enough foods Y = Happy N = Not happy. Over food = Good happy.

Same with water.

Power in your settlements also helps. Oddly enough, people like having lights.

I'm not sure if this was a vanilla function, or from a mod, but I found having animals in my settlements helped too.

Security. Having guards helped a lot. (Again, don't remember if that was vanilla or not) And turrets helped.

 

Fighting off a settlement attack, not happy. Especially if they lost.

Not repairing stuff, after it got broke. Not happy (Again, not sure if that was vanilla or not)

Walls - waste of time and resources. Only helps against enemies that spawn outside the build area, nothing against the ones that spawn inside the build area.

[metaphorset]

Four years later, it looks like some modders have added some patches to give happiness to some items.

 

But the fact remains that the tutorial for the game says that your settlers will be happier if they have these items, and they won't, without mods. Or paid for Creation Club stuff which might also do the trick.

 

I'd say the game was intended to give happiness for the items, but that was tossed to one side as it is too easy to cheese it by having a ton of coffee mugs in a room. Instead, people just have a ton of settlers redundantly doing exactly the same job.

 

e.g. https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/42776

That's just classic Bethesda here. Remember when Todd Howard said in an interview what amazing things come with Oblivion and "Radiant AI"? And how it had to be nerfed, so the game wouldn't depopulate itself? Remember when he said in another interview, that players would be able to influence the economics (eg. food prices will vary according to availability) of the holds in Skyrim by destroying farms or siding with a specific faction? Oh, "Radiant AI" got nerfed even more. NPCs wouldn't even have daily schedules anymore, like they had in Oblivion...

 

They always seem to aim for the Moon and then need to abandon stuff the get the base game into a playable state (well... almost. mods will fix the rest).

 

Kinggath's Workshop Framework helped me a lot in terms of settlement happiness, especially once you have robots there.