Game Mechanics Nearby NPC impact on Happiness should be revamped

[DotJson]

First, disclaimer, I'm talking about specific NPC "relations", not the overcrowding thing, the latter is fine with me.

The problem with the former is the simple fact that by having a 2 or 3-room house in each biome, you can easily cheat the system and with no effort achieve maximum happiness for any given NPC on demand. All you need is to set the NPC's housing in their preferred biome and surround them with NPCs liked/loved by them. Then — magic! — as soon as the chosen NPC moves into the room, even if their new neighbors aren't present, the housing assignment itself counts as an NPC being "nearby", so the chosen NPC has the maximum currently achieveable Happiness.

The problem is not that this "trick" is easy to perform, IMO the problem is that it's worth performing at all. By that I mean that NPC preferences (as you can judge from the updated Wiki page) are constructed in such a way that there is no "stable state", by which I mean that you can't have maximum Happiness for all NPCs at once.

Take, for example, the Goblin Tinkerer and the Mechanic (the former's Happiness affects the cost of Reforging, btw). They love each other, but the Goblin Tinkerer's preferred biome is the Underground, and the Mechanic's is the Snow. So you clearly cannot satisfy both biome conditions if you plan for them to live together, but you can switch them both together back and forth between Snow and Underground when you need a discount from one or another.

And yes, I understand that maybe that was actually the point: that you need to choose what NPCs to "prefer" over the other, but currently the concept doesn't work, as you can see. My only idea of how to make it work is to simply take a "fee" for each housing re-assignment so players would not abuse it.

My other proposed solution is to simply define an "ideal" housing plan where everyone has maximum happiness. To achieve this NPC preferences need to be adjusted so that "likes" and "dislikes" are mutual and NPCs who "like" each other prefer the same biome.

What do you think of all this? I honestly just want a system where there are no ugly workarounds that just beg to be used.

 

[mcpjb]

Yeah, they definitely wanted you to find "your" optimal arrangement where you treat the npc's you like the most the best. That's pretty clear since for some NPC's they really went out of their way to make them hate/love something so that you just can't make everyone perfectly happy.

Except for the fact that some like/disliked things seem really far fetched (or even blatantly wrong) I don't really have a problem with this.
But to discourage minmaxing it would probably be best if instead of each factor contributing with a 10% discount/fine there was some kind of happiness rank. You wouldn't need the theoretically best layout possible to reach the max happiness, you would only need one that's good enough.

I'll work out an example here of how it could work:

Spoiler

Let's say that the min happiness is -2 and the max is +2 and work this out for the mechanic in the example you gave:

-1 Because she hates the underground
+1 Because there are almost no other NPC's around
+2 Because She lives next to a loved NPC

So that would total a +2 score which would be the maximum, even though not all her conditions are fulfilled.

btw, in the current version, you can actually make them both happy by putting them in the underground snow biome. They will both be fine with the biome from what I heard.

This above approach together with maybe some more tinkering to the NPC preferences should allow for more creativity and discourage extreme min maxing.
There's still a little bit of puzzling, but with plenty of optimal approaches and with a bit of wiggle room.

 

[Yvori]

Yeah, they definitely wanted you to find "your" optimal arrangement where you treat the npc's you like the most the best. That's pretty clear since for some NPC's they really went out of their way to make them hate/love something so that you just can't make everyone perfectly happy.

Except for the fact that some like/disliked things seem really far fetched (or even blatantly wrong) I don't really have a problem with this.
But to discourage minmaxing it would probably be best if instead of each factor contributing with a 10% discount/fine there was some kind of happiness rank. You wouldn't need the theoretically best layout possible to reach the max happiness, you would only need one that's good enough.

I'll work out an example here of how it could work:

Spoiler

Let's say that the min happiness is -2 and the max is +2 and work this out for the mechanic in the example you gave:

-1 Because she hates the underground
+1 Because there are almost no other NPC's around
+2 Because She lives next to a loved NPC

So that would total a +2 score which would be the maximum, even though not all her conditions are fulfilled.

btw, in the current version, you can actually make them both happy by putting them in the underground snow biome. They will both be fine with the biome from what I heard.

This above approach together with maybe some more tinkering to the NPC preferences should allow for more creativity and discourage extreme min maxing.
There's still a little bit of puzzling, but with plenty of optimal approaches and with a bit of wiggle room.

I prefer this idea a lot. Having a maximum be achievable without needing perfect conditions would make switching things around playthrough-to-playthrough with which NPCs go where and with whom be so much easier without needing to go through a spreadsheet to try and maintain as optimal results as possible given the system. This way, even if not everything was perfect, both the minmaxers and the builders who like changing things up each time they play would be satisfied.

Also! On a related note, it would be neat if assigning a pet to the same house as an NPC would give them a happiness boost regardless of conditions, so if you have an odd NPC out that you just can't figure out good conditions for, you could still make them at least a bit happier.