Could you hover over the happiness bar? It will tell you the current value for happiness.
My guess is that it’s going down because he had a greater happiness value prior to this.
The indicator below moves toward the current target happiness (which in your picture must be 55 or so) at the speed/pressure indicated by the arrows on the side of the happiness bar (slowly/normal/faster over time, it’s not instant). So perhaps he had a little more than 55 happiness, his thoughts changed, the new target was lower, so the indicator is decreasing until it reaches 55.
If you have a savefile paused right when that issue is happening, we can inspect the target and current happiness (or you can also do it if you had debugtools enabled).
The base happiness/morale is 50 (the middle of the bar). Add/substract the values of the currently displayed thoughts and you’ll find the current target happiness. The indicator will move towards that value. And if it reaches a threshold, the mood of the hearthling will change:
Most of the thoughts are temporary, so when they expire, the target happiness changes. The remaining duration of the thoughts can be seen on their left.
I find this a fairly interesting way for the morale to “adjust”. It doesn’t really seem logical. Lets take a look at the following images (which were taken in series just minutes from each other).
In this second image more positives have been added to the morale and the bar continues to climb. This is also expected based on what appears on the morale tab.
This third image is where things get confusing. There are no negatives to morale, only positives, however the mood of the Hearthling is going down. It really doesn’t make sense from a “logical” standpoint. If there’s nothing bothering the Hearthling you would expect the mood of the Hearthling to improve, however this isn’t the case.
I understand, now, how morale is setup but when you’re looking at the actual morale tab it’s fairly confusing. Unfortunately I have no suggestions how it could be better displayed, given how morale works in a “tier” method, with each level balanced on a central point. Perhaps the slider itself is the cause of the visual confusion. Again, I don’t know how you could better display this “balanced tier” style of leveling without having the same confusion.
Here’s how we intended the morale screen to be interpreted:
In the final screenshot, Raj Kenaii has 3 modifiers (4 + 2 + 2) that adjust his target morale by +8. If his base morale is 50, we expect that over time, his happiness will converge to 50 + 8 = 58. Since his morale is currently 60, his morale is decreasing slowly towards 58.
With that said, I’m sure there is a better way to present morale so that it is clearer. I also just made some changes to make morale more responsive to the hearthlings current environment.
We originally had the target morale clearly displayed, but ended up moving away from that approach due to visual clutter. It may be worth putting it back.
