Crew happiness?

[blablabla]

In the last patch notes 18 Juli 17 the developer says that a happy crew needs less food.

So how do I make them happy and where do I see the happiness? is it the moral bar? do i need furniture or what?

[elipod]

Janiator, chairs at consoles, chairs and tables next to food dispenser, beds, and captain on a captain's chair. All that helps, but not inportant enough to rush early. Egineers are cronically unhappy anyways
You need mining to grow your ship. In general, you want to work up your mining to have enough water for even unhappiest crew.
Anyone with intelligence 2 or higher, assigned to planter box should keep them fed. I found, buyng food early, helps. But never had to buy water.

[Duncan @ reconnect]

It's only if they are very low. It wasn't added, always been like that. Seeking feedback. Need to add other ways to boost morale, but eat at table, sleep in bed, work in chair and clean ship help.

[elipod]

We don't have much feedback from crew, eighter.
Rather than sayng, that mechanic is too harsh or too easy, it's right now "too invisible".

When they are hungry, health bars start showing up over their heads and then they die, easy to see cause-consequense here.

When they are stressed, nothing visible happens, food and water meters shrinking are not an indicator, they are always shrinking. Unless I sit there, writing values per time and making charts, there is no notable difference.

Did morale do anything? I didn't know, unless it was said here on forums. How much faster do they burn trough their meters? I still don't know. Was there a break point? I didn't know, untill you said that now.

If meter decay speed was visible in UI, that was some information to work with without resorting to dedicated testing. Or, exact mechanic decription could be provided, similar to evade/accuracy tooltip.

Another feedback: look into egineer's morale, they are harder to please than other specialists.

[Pebble]

Perhaps a change in the morale mechanic?

As it is currently it feels like morale changes too quickly.

My suggestion:

Let morale have a baseline / default value of say 70. That's when the crew is content.

Sleeping accommodations would have the following base morale change (applied each time crew sleeps): Floor +0, Bunk Bed +1 (if implemented), Luxurious Bed +2 (that's the current bed).

When morale reaches 80, sleeping accommodations bonus would get a -1 modifier, meaning sleeping on a floor would give -1 morale, bunk bed would be +0 and luxurious bed would be +1.

At morale 90, the modifier would now be -2.

If morale falls to 50, the modifier is set to +1, and if it falls to 20 the modifier is set to +2.

I'm using sleeping accommodations as an example, this would work for other activities as well, like food, where at 70 morale it could have a +1 modifier, and +0 at 80. Meaning you wouldn't be able to go above 80 with food.

Also change to morale from some activities like eating or sleeping should probably only be applied once every x in-game minutes to prevent players from just spamming those to raise morale.

Other activities, especially the negative ones (like losing a crewmate) would not have said time limit.

Alternatively, it could be based on the amount of Hunger or Sleep points recovered, and it would only be applied for every 100 such points. So you could force a crewman to sleep every time he loses 5 points of Sleep, which would then only recover those 5 points. At that rate, you would have to force the crewman to sleep 20 times before the effect of sleep would be added to morale.

[Japanese Schoolgirl]

Well, since the game is really simplistic in terms of stats and what crew can do then morale will obviously not be able to affect that much. As of right now the typical logical scenario is that low morale slows down work speed and in worst case reduces skill level whilst high morale does the opposite. 50 morale is the midpoint with no pro's and con's. And yes, the morale needs to change slowly over time instead of the blazing speed it does now. It also needs to be very hard to keep maxed out.

Furniture, entertainment etc could be positive contributors. Wounds, excessive work etc could be negative contributors.

In the end it will also boil down to the core concept of how do you want to utilize your free space in your ship?