Needs
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Colonists, and all human characters, have basic needs that, if not met or if met beyond expectations, will trigger thoughts which in turn will influence the pawn's mood.
The basic needs of human pawns
- Food: how well fed the person or creature currently is. An empty food bar indicates starvation, leading to malnutrition in various stages, and eventually death. Hunger lowers the mood of the person.
- Rest: how rested the person or creature still is. An empty rest bar leads to exhaustion, which usually means that the pawn will uncontrollably fall asleep on the spot. Being tired also puts the person in a bad mood.
- Recreation: the need for enjoyable activities; can be met in many ways. Unsatisfied recreation will trigger increasingly, eventually severe mood penalties.
- Beauty: the desire to exist in a visually pleasing environment. May trigger a mild mood penalty when unsatisfied, and a substantial mood bonus when satisfied.
- Comfort: people want to sit in comfortable chairs and sleep in cozy beds. Otherwise they get mildly irritated, but when satisfied it makes them quite happy.
- Outdoors: the need to be outside, ie. not under a roof or mountain top. Pawns that are indoors for too long grow increasingly unhappy.
Drug addictions
Any drug addictions a pawn has developed become needs for that pawn, and need to be satisfied like the need for food and rest. Failure to do so puts the pawn into withdrawal, which can be an extremely disrupting or even fatal situation.
After a person has successfully withdrawn from the drug, the need will disappear entirely.
The Needs window of a pawn
This window is shown if you select a colonist's needs tab. It can also be displayed for prisoners, guests and tame animals, but will display fewer statistics in some of these cases (eg. animals do not have beauty and comfort needs, and no thoughts at all).
The colonist in the displayed example has no positive or negative mood thoughts yet, besides a default thought reflecting his current expectations: in this case, particularly low expectations trigger a very positive mood thought for +30 mood.
Showing more information
You can mouse over the various meters to have the game give you more information in a tooltip. In the example, the beauty meter is currently selected, and the tooltip displays its current level ("49%") with some text detailing the meaning. Some of the meters display very detailed explanations when selected.
How to read the levels
The red and green triangles show the current tendencies of the meters: in this example, the mood level is growing, the outdoors level is not changing, and all the other levels are shrinking.
The white triangles show where the mood, beauty and comfort levels will settle if the current situation of the pawn does not change: the pawn from the example will have a little higher overall mood, somewhat lower beauty level, and zero comfort.
If a meter has white triangles, the tendency of the meter will be falling if the white marker is inside the bar, and rising if the marker is outside the bar. That is because the white marker shows the eventual end point for the level.
Since the white markers represent the current, immediate situation, their positions will change often, and not necessarily have a substantial impact on the need level.
The black hatch marks on the level meters represent the threshold points where the mood of the colonist will change because of a thought that would occur at that point. In the example, the beauty level is at 49%, right in the middle, but the white marker indicates that it will fall to somewhat below 35%, the position of the second hatch mark. This will then incur the thought "Unsightly environment" and a -5 mood penalty.
The hatch marks on the mood gauge show the thresholds for minor, major and extreme mental breaks. Mental breaks are not good...
This is confusing, I still don't understand...
The main aspect to focus on when looking at the needs window is the position of the white mood marker in relation to the current level of the mood bar. The mood bar will always try to catch up with the marker, and various thoughts will appear or disappear in the process, changing the mood of the colonist.
Do not get confused by the white marker seemingly always being in the "wrong position" – this is not true, because it actually does reflect the current situation of the colonist, while the meter level grows and shrinks more slowly.
The meter levels display the long term situation of the pawn, while the markers show you the immediate circumstances. Short-term events do not instantly lead to a mental breakdown or euphoric mood, but eventually they will. This is how you would expect the character to react psychologically if it was a real person.
The markers on the comfort and beauty bar are much less important, you will usually only look at them if you want to precisely examine how the current environment of the pawn impacts these needs. The food, rest and recreation bar do not even have markers: they are naturally falling towards zero, unless the pawn is eating, sleeping or relaxing – like fuel meters.