FO4 Workshops: Happiness calculation and the trouble with sheltered beds

[Sclerocephalus]

The happiness of settlers contributes up to 80% to the happiness value of a settlement. Consequently, happiness calculations start with the calculation of individual happiness values of each settler. This is dome by distributing the available resources among the actors and adding resource-specific happiness boni to all actors that benefit from the respective resources. The following is a list of the resources that are considered in the calculations and of the happiness boni they contribute:

 

Safety:    + 20 happiness        (if safety per NPC exceeds a value of 1, this bonus applies to all actors, otherwise to none)

Food:     + 20 happiness

Water:    +20 happiness

Bed:       +10 happiness

Shelter:  +10 happiness         (this applies if the bed is sheltered, more on this below)

 

Thus, if an actor benefits from all of the aforementioned resources, he gets 80 happiness. If one of the resources is missing, specific happiness caps may apply. That is, if one of the following conditions applies, the happiness will not be higher than the indicated maximum, even if the sum of the individual boni (as listed above) is higher (it can be smaller though):

 

No food and/or no water:      happiness capped at 30

No shelter:                            happiness capped at 60

 

The shelter cap is an interesting one: imagine that an actor has safety, food and water, so his happiness will be 60. Now build him a bed. If that bed is not sheltered, it won't make a difference whether he has one or not.

 

Subsequently, the actor happiness values are averaged (i.e. the sum is divided by the number of actors) to give the population's base happiness. Needless to say that this has to be 80 if you ever want to achieve the goal of 100 happiness at this settlement. Finally, boni for shops and all of those happiness-raising objects you have built will be added.

 

 

Now to the beds and what makes them sheltered:

 

The engine (and the scripts) discern sheltered and non-sheltered beds, but the game nowhere indicates their counts for  individual settlements. The evaluation is done by the engine which stores the counts as actor values on the workbench, and the scripts just call GetValue with the respective actor value passed in to obtain the values.  When I run the workshop scripts in debug mode, the individual values for each settlement are displayed on the log for every daily update, but after weeks of monitoring, I still have no clucking fue as to the criterions that make some beds sheltered and others not. Well, if I place a bed in the corn field at Finch Farm, it is not sheltered (as expected). Though when I place beds inside shacks, I would expect them sheltered but they aren't: Sometimes, at least. On other occasions, they are, but I can't see what makes the difference. Maybe the headboards must be pointing to the Institute ? Oh wait, we still don't know whether they fixed the Skyrim 90° bug in the meantime ...

 

If you see happiness values steadily decreasing with increasing population although you have enough food, water, beds and safety, this is almost certainly because some of the beds you have built are not considered to be sheltered for whatever reason. You can safely assume that all pre-placed beds, except for those at Somerville Place, The Castle, The Slog and Warwick Homestead are NOT sheltered. Unfortunately though, most of these cannot even be scrapped and you have to build extra beds to compensate for those if you go for high happiness.

 

Sub-optimal game design, to say the least.

[kawaksallas]

what about graygarden? robots don't need water or beds (and no food), in fact the bed icon is green at the counter 0

yet, that settlement happiness never raised higher than 60 (yes, I have turrets for defense)

[Sclerocephalus]

Robot happiness is always 50. That's handled separately.

 

If robots count for population (at Greygarden, they do), the product of robot population and robot happiness is added to the total for human settlers BEFORE the average is calculated. That is, if you have robots that count for population, they will bring your happiness down.

[kawaksallas]

interesting stuff

 

empty settlements (meaning no settlers and no resources) happiness are capped to 50 based on my observations

 

any explanation of why the starlight drive-in on my game have 9 points of hapiness? never had any settler there, I just cleared the mole rats, activated the workshop, but I did used scrapall command

 

[Arthmoor]

I would say don't use console commands first of all. They don't always do things properly. Scrap manually so it gets processed through all of the proper channels.

[Perraine]

I think the "sheltered" tag for beds, depends on the condition of the "roof". I run the 'Settlement Management Software' mod, and can tell you how many beds you have and more importantly how many are "sheltered"

 

In Sanctuary for instance, I have 60 beds, but only 18 with the "sheltered" tag.. From what I can gather, this relates to whether you have either a) Repaired or replaced the roofs of the damaged pre-existing buildings, or b) Built entirely new structures, and placed beds in them.

 

I haven't done exhaustive testing on the pre-existing buildings because repairing the roofs is downright aneurysm educing, but most other settlements I usually scrap the entire "house' they are using, (yes I use a scrap everything mod) and build a new one, as such most of those get classed as "sheltered". The only exceptions seem to come from what type of roof you use, as some of the "shack" roofs have a lot of holes in them, which the game may interpret as "un-sheltered".

 

Settlers also seem to be very picky about personal space with beds. If a mattress or bed is even 1 inch to close to another, the settlers will not share the floor space next to the bed,  so if the AI assigns them a bed next to someone else, they will either walk off (complaining about the bed situation" or stand out in the street all night ( whilst complaining about the bed situation) Although In reality I think this has to do with whether their is enough space to play the "gettin' inta bed" animation or not.

 

However this doesn't seem to apply to sleeping bags, as you can place those mere inches apart all round, and settlers don't seem to care (oh as long as they are sheltered of course)

 

The other thing I've noticed is the "auto-Navmesh" feature on constructed buildings can sometimes be quirky. I think sometimes their are "hidden" navmeshes for NPC's under the ground or something, and they will get confused if you build on top of, or near pre-exisitng navmeshes.or sometimes you have to zone out and zone back in to get things like stairs or ramps to work. so if your beds are on the second floor,, make sure that the settlers can actually get up the stairs to reach them. (hint - take a follower with you, if they can follow you "upstairs" then you are good to go, if they get stuck in a walking loop, or just stand their looking dumb ( I know, hard to tell with some followers) the the problem could be related to the navmeshes.

 

Finally, in some of the larger settlements, the game will actually "unload" half of the settlement if you go from one end to the other. This is very noticeable on Spectacle Island, if you put resources (power water etc) or beds to far away from each other, the game will not recognize that they are there..

[MageKing17]

I think the "sheltered" tag for beds, depends on the condition of the "roof". I run the 'Settlement Management Software' mod, and can tell you how many beds you have and more importantly how many are "sheltered"

 

In Sanctuary for instance, I have 60 beds, but only 18 with the "sheltered" tag.. From what I can gather, this relates to whether you have either a) Repaired or replaced the roofs of the damaged pre-existing buildings, or b) Built entirely new structures, and placed beds in them.

I put all of my beds in Sanctuary in the ruined houses and never had to repair the roofs for the beds to count as sheltered.

 

However, it does appear that a bed won't count as "sheltered" if no NPC is assigned to it; whenever I check my count of sheltered beds, it never exceeds the total number of settlers.

[Perraine]

I put all of my beds in Sanctuary in the ruined houses and never had to repair the roofs for the beds to count as sheltered.

 

However, it does appear that a bed won't count as "sheltered" if no NPC is assigned to it; whenever I check my count of sheltered beds, it never exceeds the total number of settlers.

Hmmm ok, well admittedly the "roof" situation came from a youtuber, who "supposedly" did lot's of research on settler happiness, and that was one of his claims. I might do some testing ...

 

It could just be simply if it's a "new" bed, built since you took over the settlement or not? Not sure how else to tell without the settlement management software. You certainly can't use visual cues, as even Warwick Homestead, a solid concrete and steel "bunker" has rain and puddles INSIDE the gorram "house". And The Slog ... Even after repairing the roof (I built an entire floor above it) rain STILL comes through the original "skylight" section.

[Mussieman74]

I have noticed in sanctuary at the start when you are building beds for sturges the state of the roofs of the houses do not matter as all the beds you build inside are sheltered as per his request ( I may be wrong in the fact he asked for sheltered bedding ) nope I was correct as I just checked. I hope this helps a little, also I never assigned any one to the beds so this is not considered it seem but don't take my word for it as I'm none the wiser as I'm not all that tech savvy lol

[MageKing17]

also I never assigned any one to the beds so this is not considered it seem but don't take my word for it as I'm none the wiser as I'm not all that tech savvy lol

Settlers auto-assign themselves to beds.

[Perraine]

I also don't think happiness is as cut and dried as the OP would suggest, I have NFI how it's calculated, but in my current playthrough Oberland Station for instance has just the original 2 settlers. There is one extra bed, though I haven't assigned anyone to it, they have a little extra water, a few extra crops (above the necessary 12 that they could normally harvest) ~ 20 power, and ~ 100 defense (I built lots of turrets) and their happiness is sitting at 100 and never moves.

[drmaxman]

Another issue I have with Settlement Management Software (SMS) is that it doesn't always give consistent data. It does seem to identify synths correctly, thankfully.

 

I have also struggled with what does "sheltered" mean. Again, the data is not always consistent when I use SMS one session to another or even the same session. I have gotten to the point that I just go ahead and build a floor roof on top of a shack just to be sure. I struggled with it at Abernathy Farm in particular. "Sheltered" does seem to be limited to the number of total settlers and not to the total number of beds.