DD Soldier Morale (With Pictures!)

A more in-depth description of MGSV's morale system with guides on how to tell your soldier's morale level based on their bar length.

What is Morale?

Annoyed about the vagueness of the Morale Bar when looking at your soldiers? Me too!
Luckily, with a bit of research and a lot of running around, we now have a slightly better understanding of how Morale works.

For those uninitiated, a soldier's morale can be seen from the staff management tab in the iDroid, and is the bar next to the diamond dog logo under their picture.

This guide details how Morale is split into a 15 point system. While it shows as a bar, morale is functionally a score that does the following based on how much morale the soldier has:

0: 4% chance to leave mother base after a mission / return to ACC / return to mother base trigger
1: 2% chance to leave mother base
2: 1% chance to leave mother base
3: nothing
4: nothing
5: nothing
6: nothing
7. nothing
8: +2 to all AP
9: AP + 4
10: AP +6
11: AP +8
12: AP +10
13: AP +15
14: AP +20
15: AP +31

(AP being another invisible point system that determines the staff's skill level in all areas, for more info, visit the guide linked above).

All soldiers will start between 4 and 6 morale, and will not go below 4 naturally.

How to Change Morale

How do you raise morale? Simply visit Mother Base and be near the soldier! Running up to them, or using Sonar within 15m of soldiers will boost their morale by 2 points each visit!
You can only raise each soldiers morale once per visit, but leaving on the helicopter and returning counts as a new visit, allowing you to raise morale again.
Do note that if a soldier's morale is full at 15 points, visiting them at mother base will not increase it further, indicated by no "Staff morale increased" message appearing.

What decreases morale? Having negative GMP, or too many troublemakers and not enough diplomats. This can cause morale to drop to the point of soldiers leaving the base.

Morale also slowly decreases over time naturally, but not below 4. Only the above can cause morale to drop to the point of soldiers leaving.

I don't know the exact rate of natural morale decay, but it seems to be around -1 morale per hour in-game.

How to Read a Soldier's Morale Level

You may have noticed the iDroid has a dotted background. This dotted background luckily can be used to accurately tell what a soldier's morale level is, if you know its secret.

You can tell a soldier's morale level by how many dots it extends to.
At 0, the bar can be said to be 0.5 dots (though i've never seen a 0 morale soldier, but bear with me).
Every point of morale adds 1.5 dots in length, so a 1 morale soldier will have a bar 2 dots long.

You will likely have many soldiers at 4 morale, or a bar length of 6.5 dots, and 5 morale soldiers with bars ending exactly at the 8th dot.

Here are pictures showing what the morale bar looks like from Morale 4 to maximum morale: 15.

Morale 4


Morale 5


Morale 6


Morale 7


Morale 8


Morale 9


Morale 10


Morale 11


Morale 12


Morale 13


Morale 14


And finally, Morale 15, the maximum it can be.

Note the yellow bar showing how much extra AP the soldier gets from maximum morale. It's worth the same as a medal!

Is it worth it?

Absolutely not.

The main issue is that high morale is simply a temporary buff to your platform research level, but research level is obviously not something that benefits from tiny, temporary buffs.
Morale is essentially a Distinguished Service medal that constantly decays if you're not running around Mother Base every hour or two.
If morale didn't decay, I could argue that it could actually be worth the effort, but unfortunately we don't get that luxury.

I do like making the bar go up, though.

[Mr Salieri]

Well if Guideman over here had a stat Id definitely put them in my intel team!

[Pckables]

Thanks! I remember many years ago when I first played this game, I was annoyed at how little info there was regarding anything morale related.
So I decided to detail everything myself.

[cyrthurix]

I actually love this in depth guide and definitely had to chuckle at "is it worth it? hell no lmao". Still, for early game I like these little optimizations so I'll definitely keep this stuff in mind.

[Mr Salieri]

Morale bar stonks