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SpringFall Wiki

Mood & Morale

Overview

Mood is how a colonist feels right now. Morale is the deeper measure of how well they’re holding up. Every unmet need pushes both down, and a colony of miserable people works badly.

The useful thing to know is that the game will tell you exactly why someone is unhappy. You never have to guess.

How it works

Each need that falls below its threshold applies a named condition — hungry, tired, lonely, filthy, uncomfortable, unhappy — and each condition carries a stated cost. Those costs stack, and they’re listed in plain language on the character panel.

A mood condition is on or off: once a need crosses its threshold it applies its full listed cost, whether the colonist is slightly peckish or genuinely starving. Mood is the part you read at a glance.

Morale is where severity bites, and it behaves differently in two ways worth knowing:

The cost accelerates. A need costs morale nothing at all until it becomes genuinely critical, and from there it climbs steeply rather than evenly — so the difference between “low” and “empty” is far bigger than the difference between “fine” and “low”.

Needs can’t be the only thing that matters. There’s a ceiling on how much unmet needs alone can drag morale down, so health, loyalty and leadership still count for something even in a struggling colony.

Some things that look like needs aren’t. Pain and defiled gear are tracked separately and reported on their own terms.

Playing with it

  • Open the character panel and read the Buffs & Debuffs section. It lists every active condition with its actual cost — “−15 Mood”, “−8 Morale”, “−15% move speed”, “Cannot work”. If someone is unhappy, the reason is on that list.
  • Need bars are colour-banded, so you can triage at a glance: red is urgent, orange is slipping, green is fine. The number matches the bar’s colour.
  • Fix the deepest bar first. Because the cost curve accelerates, dragging one near-empty need back up buys more than topping up three comfortable ones.
  • Don’t neglect the soft needs. Food & Eating and Sleep & Rest get fixed automatically by colonists; social, hygiene, comfort and recreation don’t. Those are the ones that quietly rot a colony that looks well-supplied.

Good to know

  • A satisfied need doesn’t get its own row. Only problems are listed — a wall of “+10 Mood” rows would bury the things you actually need to act on.
  • Conditions have no timer, because they don’t expire on their own. They last until the colony does something about them, so the panel shows the source rather than a countdown.
  • The panel shows the penalty actually being applied, so what you read is what the simulation is charging — you can check its arithmetic against the bars.
  • Buffs and debuffs share one list. From a colonist’s point of view there’s no difference between a curse costing 15 mood and being filthy costing 15 mood.