Satisfying sky-high expectations

[Firestorm🗿]

How to go about it?

[Stormblade]

If I'm correct, you can't. All it means, really, is your colonists are no longer getting a free mood buff.

[di eshor ribly]

Satisfy the minimum standards for recreation (may vary by mods). Make a chess table (intellectual), a table/chairs (social), dart board/horseshoe pin/pool table (dexterity), make some beer or smokeleaf joints (drugs), grow some chocolate (food), build a television/arcade game system/personal computer (electronic)... (again, recreation availability will vary with mods).

That's it. Your pawns will no longer have negative moodlets solely based on their expectations and whether or not you have met those standards. Royals will of course be a further nuisance here.

[gussmed]

"Sky high" means no default mood bonus to everyone.

Even if you can't "satisfy" it, it's still a relevant question, every colony will eventually get rich enough that you get to 0 mood bonus.

What works for me is mood bonuses for food, dining room, rec room, and beauty. Those are all global. On the individual level, I try for moderate (+2 or +3) bedroom mood bonuses, and maximum bed comfort.

A single combined dining room / rec room with maxed beauty goes a long way. You can get +20 or so mood bonus from that, +5 for Impressive Dining Room, +5 for Impressive Rec Room, and +10 for Beautiful Environment. The Beauty bonus wears off eventually, but it will often be enough to keep your colonists happy for the day.

Comfort is similar. A bed + nightstand + dresser means the colonist starts off with a +10 Luxuriously Comfortable bonus at the start of the day, which slowly drops. If you have fabric armchairs at workstations, anyone working there will recharge that bonus. That doesn't help farmhands or anyone else who walks around while working, but it's something.

Fine meals give +5 mood. By the time you hit Sky High expectations, you should be able to afford Lavish meals for +12 mood. That costs calories, but some extra fields should satisfy the plant part of the nutrition. The meat part is often more of a struggle, and it can be tough without a lot of milk-producing herd animals.

[gussmed]

Originally posted by di eshor ribly:

Satisfy the minimum standards for recreation (may vary by mods).

While you need to do that too, recreation is only a small part of mood. You can't get more than +10 from fully satisfied recreation. You cannot offset Sky High Expectations just with recreation. Overall mood requires that you find a variety of mood bonuses.

Chess tables are early recreation. Poker tables are strictly superior, and satisfy the same recreation category (Intellectual). By the time you have Sky High expectations, you want a pool table, chess table, and TV. That and social / solitary recreation should be enough variety.

Chocolate is not special. It provides no mood bonus, unlike beer or tea. It's just a recreation type, "food," and the main benefit is that it provides a lot of recreation in a short amount of time.

Beer's an emergency measure. Beer and psychite tea can help a colonist in a crisis due to a temporary mood penalty, but it's a terrible way to deal with routine mood issues.

Smokeleaf is just awful. -30% consciousness while high on smokeleaf is severe, slowing them down 30% across the board, and making many detail-oriented tasks fail. A high-skill Construction worker on smokeleaf will botch constructions due to the penalty. Really, smokeleaf is a drug of last resort, when the other choice is a mental breakdown.

[Jigain]

Originally posted by gussmed:

Originally posted by di eshor ribly:

Satisfy the minimum standards for recreation (may vary by mods).

While you need to do that too, recreation is only a small part of mood. You can't get more than +10 from fully satisfied recreation. You cannot offset Sky High Expectations just with recreation. Overall mood requires that you find a variety of mood bonuses.

I'm pretty sure what they mean is that the only thing that needs to be "satisfied" with sky-high expectations is the need for additional recreation sources (due to recreation tolerance compared to lower pawn expectations).

[di eshor ribly]

Yeah, that's what I meant Jigain. The idea is to create at least a neutral environment, no debuffs because their rooms are too small or they don't have enough recreation or whatever. Depending on your story teller settings you can go quite a long time until RNG decides to throw an event at you. Lavish meals and drugs should be used after those events as a buffer against *those* effects.

Unless of course you're trying to "farm" inspirations rapidly. In that case go the whole hog on keeping your colony happy... but I think it's acceptable to just have them stable with minimal interference on my part.

[Praeceptorem Poloniae]

Originally posted by di eshor ribly:

Satisfy the minimum standards for recreation (may vary by mods). Make a chess table (intellectual), a table/chairs (social), dart board/horseshoe pin/pool table (dexterity), make some beer or smokeleaf joints (drugs), grow some chocolate (food), build a television/arcade game system/personal computer (electronic)... (again, recreation availability will vary with mods).

That's it. Your pawns will no longer have negative moodlets solely based on their expectations and whether or not you have met those standards. Royals will of course be a further nuisance here.

A little addendum to that list: if you have Royalty DLC, then there is one more rec type: music, provided by playing harp/harpsichord/piano

[Firestorm🗿]

I have pretty much done every comfort and recreation thing you lot have suggested. (excluding royalty and mods)

All colonist bedrooms have at least one pretty sculpture in them (except my ascetic) and they all have an end table and dresser. All beds are of at least good quality.

My very impressive (if I remember the mood buff correctly) dining/recroom-♥♥♥-workshop provides quite a big mood buff. When it comes to making fine and lavish meals my problem is getting vegetarian ingredients, not meat. Hell, I have sent 30kg gift packages of meat via transport pods to the other factions in order to get rid of excess meat while improving relationships a TON.

Not so long ago I started what is apparently called "Decor bombing", so I am putting beautiful sculptures in ugly places in an attempt to get rid of "unsightly environment". I have armchairs at ALL workstations.

In terms of recreation I have quite a diverse mix that includes telly, amateur astronomy, snooker, chess and horseshoe pin. I have far too much beer. I try to sell it off to keep the amount I have low but I just grow so much hops and I have so many beer barrels. I get quite a bit of silver from selling beer and crack alone. I only have a maximum of 5 smokeleaf joints in the colony at any given time and they are indeed for emergencies. A lot of my colonists like to have a cup of tea now and then, which I have a plentiful supply of.

I'm sure I am forgetting some things in this post but yeah, pretty sure I am already doing everything you suggested.

[Jigain]

Originally posted by Firestorm:

In terms of recreation I have quite a diverse mix that includes telly, amateur astronomy, snooker, chess and horseshoe pin.

Out of those, horseshoe pin and billiards is the same type (gaming dexterity), and will build tolerance for each other. Consider deconstructing the horseshoe pin, as it has lower gain rate than the billiards table (1.0 versus 1.3).

[Firestorm🗿]

Originally posted by Jigain:

Originally posted by Firestorm:

In terms of recreation I have quite a diverse mix that includes telly, amateur astronomy, snooker, chess and horseshoe pin.

Out of those, horseshoe pin and billiards is the same type (gaming dexterity), and will build tolerance for each other. Consider deconstructing the horseshoe pin, as it has lower gain rate than the billiards table (1.0 versus 1.3).

I decided to go for both as it seemed that not all my colonists ever went to the billiards table but when I gave them the pin back they went to the pin and those that did not seem to like billiards had their lack of recreation variety debuff gone. I have read that to some degree colonists have their own personalities and preferences and from what I have seen mine do I believe that.

[gussmed]

You need to look at the specifics of your bedrooms, rather than talking in generalities. “One pretty sculpture” generally isn’t enough to get the Moderately Impressive bonus, for example.

Bed quality is mostly about rest speed, not bedroom quality. Yes, Good beds are better than Normal, but for the bedroom bonus purposes, they only contribute a small amount of wealth.

If you’re having trouble getting the vegetarian part of Lavish meals, you need larger farms. By and large you should be able to produce an arbitrarily large amount of corn.

You have to be strategic about “decor bombing” (an Oxygen Not Included term, incidentally). Basically, use the Beauty overlay and look at colonist Beauty needs. Anything over the bar limit is of no value.

Where are your colonists spending their time? Usually sculptures have the most value in the recreation room and any workshops. If a farmer is having a lot of trouble with mood, consider putting sculptures in the field to boost beauty while they’re sowing and harvesting.

Recreation variety doesn’t really matter too much. Oh, sure, it matters, but only if recreation is very limited. Not having enough variety means your colonists aren’t getting up to 100% recreation before getting bored. Having more variety than you need doesn’t change anything.

One issue is that you need to assign recreation hours. During a recreation hour, colonists will favor recreation if they’re not above about 80% recreation. They’ll go back to work once they hit 100%.

You want recreation to hit 100% at least once during the day, and colonists won’t do that if they only have “anything” hours. Getting recreation up to 100% right before bed is fine, because bars don’t drop during sleep.

One stopgap is to assign nothing BUT recreation hours and sleep hours. Colonists will stop working every time their recreation bar dips to about 80%. It’s not a great solution, though.

You’re mistaken about the horseshoe pin. It’s strictly inferior to the billiards table. “Individual personalities” just means they prefer a type of recreation, not a specific recreation object. The behavior you’re seeing is that they’ll pick a recreation object at random provided they aren’t bored with the type.

Mind you, the horseshoe pin doesn’t give less recreation. It just gives it more slowly than the billiards table.

[gussmed]

Here are some examples of my current colony, which is at Sky High Expectations with and a total wealth of $386k:

“Farmer Gennady:”
+10 Recreation fully satisfied
+8 Minor Passion for my work
+8 extremely comfortable
+6 extremely impressive rec room
+5 Ascetic has awful room
+4 Nuzzled

Total +43
Actual mood: 73%

“Miner Petra”
+10 Beautiful Environment
+10 Recreation Fully satisfied
+8 extremely comfortable
+6 Extremely impressive dining room
+6 extremely impressive rec. room
+5 Ate fine meal
+5 Spacious interior
+4 Nuzzled
+3 Slightly impressive bedroom
-3 Ate without table

Total +54
Actual mood 83% (and climbing)

One of my better bedrooms:
Actual dimensions 6 x 4 (24 tiles)
1847 mediocre wealth
24 somewhat tight space
11.72 beauty
0 clean

300 points of beauty from sculptures, 27 from furniture, 48 from carpet. How that’s translated to 11.72 beauty for the room is not clear, it’s not simple division.

Total score 84, “somewhat impressive.”
+4 mood “impressive bedroom” bonus to owner

I’ve got a bit of a balancing act because 3 of the colonists are Jealous, and I have to upgrade their bedrooms at the same time.

[Firestorm🗿]

Originally posted by gussmed:

You need to look at the specifics of your bedrooms, rather than talking in generalities. “One pretty sculpture” generally isn’t enough to get the Moderately Impressive bonus, for example.

The majority of my bedrooms are slightly impressive. The only three exceptions are the bedrooms that my two jealous pawns sleep in, and my acetic.

[gussmed]

To be honest, the direct bedroom bonus is typically a low return on effort. Mainly because +1 or +2 isn’t that hard to achieve, but more requires a fair amount of beauty and/or wealth. Most of the benefit is from avoiding -4 for “awful.”

A less obvious benefit to a beautiful bedroom is that sometimes colonists will do recreation in their bedrooms, for “praying” or “meditation.” Sometimes they’ll just lie in bed meditating. If the colonist is spending meaningful time in there, there’s a lot of benefit to filling their Beauty bar while doing so. Anything to get that +10 for Beautiful Environment is worthwhile.

Anyway, I hope you found the examples helpful. It’s really not that tough to get the baseline mood for most colonists up to 70% or so. The real issue is problem cases with some ongoing issue, like death of a wife, withdrawal, chronic pain, or just a trait that lowers their mood or raises their break thresholds.

For example, I’ve got a Too Smart (raises the break threshold) colonist who recently killed his wife when she raided the colony. He’s flirted with the main researcher repeatedly and she’s not interested. He’s constantly drinking to take his mind off these things.