Morale

Morale is how well you are feeling, and is the best way to generate experience. Your current mood is displayed as an emoticon in the lower part of the game screen. To view current morale modifiers press v.

It is important to keep your morale up as it affects how well you learn from actions, as high morale will increase your focus, which boosts experience gain. Increasing your skills increases your survivability, and there are several ways to do so.

Having a heavily negative morale gauge could be detrimental. At -50 it would be impossible to craft, to tinker with your vehicle, or to butcher animals or zombies. So you can become so depressed you can't cook food, or boil water. But you can always read.

How morale affect you

Every minute, your focus is updated. Whether it increases or decreases depends mainly on your morale (pain is the second factor), and you can view the focus trend in the morale modifier menu using v. In some cases, the sidebar will also show an indicator for this trend next to [focus] value.

Go out and spend that focus by using your skills!

In addition, if your morale is positive points you gain "happy/joyful/elated" status with bonuses to speed and stats per each 10 points of positive morale:

• .084 intelligence;
• .01 perception;
• .06 strength;
• .05 dexterity;
• 0.42 speed

The same is happens when you are in a bad mood too, but instead bonuses you will gain penalties and "unhappy/sad/depressed" state! Those penalties are mirrored negative versions of those stated above.

Positive morale effects

The Optimist trait helps keep your attitude naturally high, and Masochist balances pain effects by giving some morale bonuses- carefully managed, the latter can keep a demented :D going in all but the most dire situations.

Drinks, foods and drugs all have an "Enjoyability" rating. These tend to be short-lived, however, and foods are very minor, but variety is the key. Each individual food bonus only applies once, regardless of how much is eaten. You can eat individual flavors and get separate bonuses, such as flavors of potato chip or toastem.

Some books have a fun rating, providing a boost to morale when read. This appears on Just for Fun books and some low skill level books. A bit counter-intuitive as a source of morale as reading drains focus, but it's a bonus if you're reading the book anyway. Some books are sad or boring to read, and they can decrease your morale.

But the best way to gain morale is to listen to an MP3 player. The amount gained slowly increases to a maximum of +50. Be sure to keep a supply of batteries around so you can reload as needed (it consumes one battery per 1.5 hours).

Negative morale effects

Some foods and complicated/disgusting books have negative "Enjoyability", and thus hurt your morale. It is worth noting that reading books does spend focus, so reading To Serve Man as a non-cannibal, for example, might put your morale negative and reduce your focus in addition to the focus cost if you have no other modifiers.

Many negative traits like Hoarder and Mood Swings can seriously harm your mood if not properly managed. Prozac is a popular thing even before the apocalypse, and especially after the apocalypse.

Rain is extremely damaging to your morale. As you are out in the rain, it will slowly increase the penalty to a maximum of -60 unless you are wearing a rain coat or another cloth piece that provides at least 35 warmth, or have the Feathers mutation. You can use a towel to dry yourself off to immediately remove the morale debuff.