Npc happiness

[Nicol Bolas]

Ehh, I don't really understand much of the criticism with it. You can still create big cities, you'll just need to space things out more with "filler" buildings without npc in them just for visual purposes; just terraforming and decorating the natural scenario. Things like playgrounds, parks (as in, tree farms and stuff. The new tree types are pretty cool.), waterfalls among many other things.

Let's look at the numbers. In order to space them out enough that unhappiness doesn't build up, you can only have 4 NPCs every 120 squares in any direction. 120 squares is pretty big; it's well over a screen-width at 1080p in normal scaling.

So if you have 16 NPCs, that requires an area approximately 500 squares wide. That's over 10 percent of the entire land area of a small world. How would you qualify that as a "city"? That's a lightly-populated rural area at best.

Oh, and there are more than twice that many NPCs in the game. So you'll need more than 20% of the land area devoted solely to your "city".

You seem to have made this suggestion off the cuff, without thinking too hard about how the numbers work out. Once you do that, it seems apparent that what you want is nothing at all smiliar to current building placement. Not to mention the time it would take to build all of that. You're talking about hours of time investment.

And there's the thing: if you want to spend hours manicuring 20% of your world's terrain, more power to you. That's wonderful, and you have my full support. But, Pylons aside, you could have been doing that in Terraria 1.0; the happiness mechanic isn't what allows you to do any of that.

Furthermore, it is unreasonable to expect everyone to want to do that, all the time, just to play the game normally.

Having a few houses for 2~3 npcs in each biome with pylons is not only a faster way to move around the world, but also faster to access a specific npc in general.

Well, it certainly has not been my experience that it's faster. Even if I know exactly where a particular NPC is, if that NPC's Pylon is not immediately visible on the teleportation map screen, you have to scroll around to get to it. It's so much faster to just navigate your character over to them.

But here's the thing: if you personally find it faster to Pylon-teleport yourself to an NPC, OK fine. But why should I be punished if I don't find it faster?

Also, the argument isn't that Pylons are bad; the argument is that happiness is bad. Don't link the two mechanics; there was no reason we couldn't have Pylons without happiness. Or even have happiness, but without the penalty.

 

[Heroman3003]

Honestly, penalty is minimal, and even less now that they are fixing happiness immedeately becoming minimal for one disliked thing. Now it will be hard to cause maximum unhappiness, and only thing that can at this point is probably combination of disliked biome, disliked NPCs AND overcrowding, which can only be achieved for only specific NPCs even with housing block setup. And liked biome/NPCs will in turn counteract that partially as well.

 

[brbonfire]

Just popping in here to give my 2 cents.

This... honestly isn't great. While having towns all over the place to avoid price penalties isn't that bad in theory and the penalties can just be powered through, the psychology of the system is all wrong. By that, I mean how the player is meant to react to the fact that even if the penalties are manageable, every time they click the big obvious happiness button they get told they're designing their bases wrong and that in essence, the game considers their builds bad. The psychological effect of "being punished" exists regardless of the size of the punishment. Now, once the bug with disliking and hating is fixed you won't have ridiculous price hikes any more, but the Happiness tab will always be there to remind you that you're playing this sandbox game wrong.

Secondly, I've found precious little on how fulfilling the needs of this happiness system interacts with events like invasions, the Eclipse, and of course, the onset of Hardmode and the release of the V. Meteorites do not hit NPCS, thankfully, but it's not out of the question that defending your NPCs becomes more or less a chore as the game progresses, and while I suppose you could just buy a stack of purification powder and spend your time managing the spread of the corruption and taking down any biome interference caused by it so that your towns remain inhabitable, that sounds... Well, it's basically just busywork that you'd really rather not be doing, right? And if I have to slog across to the world to find these right biomes and place these small villages that are kind of on their own when stuff goes down, well, it starts to get pretty tempting to just slap down a quick wooden apartment, you know?

 

[Coricus]

Just popping in here to give my 2 cents.

This... honestly isn't great. While having towns all over the place to avoid price penalties isn't that bad in theory and the penalties can just be powered through, the psychology of the system is all wrong. By that, I mean how the player is meant to react to the fact that even if the penalties are manageable, every time they click the big obvious happiness button they get told they're designing their bases wrong and that in essence, the game considers their builds bad. The psychological effect of "being punished" exists regardless of the size of the punishment. Now, once the bug with disliking and hating is fixed you won't have ridiculous price hikes any more, but the Happiness tab will always be there to remind you that you're playing this sandbox game wrong.

Secondly, I've found precious little on how fulfilling the needs of this happiness system interacts with events like invasions, the Eclipse, and of course, the onset of Hardmode and the release of the V. Meteorites do not hit NPCS, thankfully, but it's not out of the question that defending your NPCs becomes more or less a chore as the game progresses, and while I suppose you could just buy a stack of purification powder and spend your time managing the spread of the corruption and taking down any biome interference caused by it so that your towns remain inhabitable, that sounds... Well, it's basically just busywork that you'd really rather not be doing, right? And if I have to slog across to the world to find these right biomes and place these small villages that are kind of on their own when stuff goes down, well, it starts to get pretty tempting to just slap down a quick wooden apartment, you know?

Honestly. . .while I'm a bit more forgiving of the mechanical changes than most, I have to agree. Between the way the town mechanic is currently set up and the new luck mechanic that I honestly didn't even see covered at any point that according to a Discord screenshot on the wiki was apparently designed by Redigit explicitly to "punish players for using the wrong torches" and only had the negative effects for said torch placement removed when the fandom understandably blew their top when they found out, a lot of the new mechanics in this update leave the impression that the dev team woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and decided they were angry that players were playing the game "wrong" and that deliberately punishing the playerbase was the ideal way to fix that.

I don't think the town system or luck are bad as concepts in and of themselves, but the reasons they seem to have been added put a downright nasty taste in my mouth. Thankfully the negative torch luck was removed after backlash built up (as much as it really shouldn't have come to that for the sake of any party involved), but penalties to item pricing should absolutely be removed as well and I hope the devs still read the forums often enough to hear that stated. And for that matter, the amount of space you can put between NPCs before it becomes considered crowding should be vastly lowered as well. It doesn't take much spacing in the slightest to curb the creation of the old NPC prisons and the Pylons incentivize spreading out to additional biomes enough as it is, the way it's set up now just prevents players from having more than a couple of NPCs at a time interact at all.

Essentially, don't punish players for playing "wrong," reward them for going the extra mile. There's no point in making a game where the game itself goes out of it's way to make you feel bad for doing something completely harmless. And definitely don't be proud of taking out your frustrations on the players themselves, that's downright tacky at absolute best. The only person who's allowed to take out his frustrations on his own fandom is Kamiya, everyone else just looks bad for it.

 

[YourLocalTerrarian]

Honestly, penalty is minimal, and even less now that they are fixing happiness immedeately becoming minimal for one disliked thing. Now it will be hard to cause maximum unhappiness, and only thing that can at this point is probably combination of disliked biome, disliked NPCs AND overcrowding, which can only be achieved for only specific NPCs even with housing block setup. And liked biome/NPCs will in turn counteract that partially as well.

the penalty can go all the way up to 50% increased prices, plus like others said the idea of the game telling the players that they built wrong is terrible.

Just popping in here to give my 2 cents.

This... honestly isn't great. While having towns all over the place to avoid price penalties isn't that bad in theory and the penalties can just be powered through, the psychology of the system is all wrong. By that, I mean how the player is meant to react to the fact that even if the penalties are manageable, every time they click the big obvious happiness button they get told they're designing their bases wrong and that in essence, the game considers their builds bad. The psychological effect of "being punished" exists regardless of the size of the punishment. Now, once the bug with disliking and hating is fixed you won't have ridiculous price hikes any more, but the Happiness tab will always be there to remind you that you're playing this sandbox game wrong.

Secondly, I've found precious little on how fulfilling the needs of this happiness system interacts with events like invasions, the Eclipse, and of course, the onset of Hardmode and the release of the V. Meteorites do not hit NPCS, thankfully, but it's not out of the question that defending your NPCs becomes more or less a chore as the game progresses, and while I suppose you could just buy a stack of purification powder and spend your time managing the spread of the corruption and taking down any biome interference caused by it so that your towns remain inhabitable, that sounds... Well, it's basically just busywork that you'd really rather not be doing, right? And if I have to slog across to the world to find these right biomes and place these small villages that are kind of on their own when stuff goes down, well, it starts to get pretty tempting to just slap down a quick wooden apartment, you know?

completely agreed. no player should have to feel punished like that. Especially new players, how are they to understand that the npcs have specific needs?

 

[brbonfire]

completely agreed. no player should have to feel punished like that. Especially new players, how are they to understand that the npcs have specific needs?

Good Moon Lord I hadn't even thought about that! All these completely unexplained features are basically going to slow down the game and irritate a new player. Now, happiness isn't so bad because there's a button there and you can infer pretty quickly what it means, but actually using the damn thing? Nope. Nada. Nil. Zilch. The Dye Trader says the forest is too drab and boring and don't inspire him - well the colourful jungle surely does the trick right? Nope, it's the even duller desert! The whole thing is arcane and for a newbie would take a lot of trial and error, and if biome unhappiness is bad then you don't get a pylon so you will need to assign NPCS to houses ON FOOT.

One of the selling points of terraria was that you never truly needed a tutorial or a big stonking HOW TO PLAY section. But that relies on good tooltips and making information known to the player to work.

 

[Heroman3003]

Actually, to find out favorite biome you simply check the NPC's bestiary entry. And simply putting NPC in favorite biome is enough to compensate. Everything else they say is obvious in those regards, they will say if they like an NPC thats around or dislike it and they will say if they are enjoying solitude or too crowded. That is all intricacies of mechanic explained in-game. And of course, you are not punished for 'building wrong'. Putting all NPCs in one spot has nothing to do with 'building wrong', its just that convinience of having all NPCs in same area now has a certain cost. And even then the 50% increase is hard to achieve without just ignoring mechanic entirely.

 

[Yestoday]

Furthermore, it is unreasonable to expect everyone to want to do that, all the time, just to play the game normally.



Well, it certainly has not been my experience that it's faster. Even if I know exactly where a particular NPC is, if that NPC's Pylon is not immediately visible on the teleportation map screen, you have to scroll around to get to it. It's so much faster to just navigate your character over to them.

But here's the thing: if you personally find it faster to Pylon-teleport yourself to an NPC, OK fine. But why should I be punished if I don't find it faster?

Also, the argument isn't that Pylons are bad; the argument is that happiness is bad. Don't link the two mechanics; there was no reason we couldn't have Pylons without happiness. Or even have happiness, but without the penalty.

While I definitely think you are over exaggerating the "cost" of the happiness mechanic, you do have a point and a different playstyle than me, which I respect. I wouldn't be surprised if they remove or drastically lower the penalty in a upcoming patch, like the luck mechanic.

Regardless, as soon as the Tloader for 1.4 drops, we are bound to see some really cool mods to change up those mechanics in the very first week of release, probably.
I'm expecting things like removing happiness altogether and letting us buy multiple pylons and place them without having npcs near them to a completely opposite system that will develop the happiness system further, with new items to buy and mini events.

 

[brbonfire]

Actually, to find out favorite biome you simply check the NPC's bestiary entry. And simply putting NPC in favorite biome is enough to compensate. Everything else they say is obvious in those regards, they will say if they like an NPC thats around or dislike it and they will say if they are enjoying solitude or too crowded. That is all intricacies of mechanic explained in-game. And of course, you are not punished for 'building wrong'. Putting all NPCs in one spot has nothing to do with 'building wrong', its just that convinience of having all NPCs in same area now has a certain cost. And even then the 50% increase is hard to achieve without just ignoring mechanic entirely.

Well, yes, I do know that. But the favourite biomes stuff is only a part of the puzzle and are you ever actually told where this information is in game? And yes, the NPCs will tell you who they like and dislike, but only when they're already near them and you'll have to shuffle NPCS around to fix it. Things like overcrowding distance and how many NPCs are allowed in an area before penalties kick in, all of that isn't shown to the average new player. I foresee much frustration with trying to figure out where NPCS need to be, pulling down various structures and rebuilding them around and encouraging the use of temporary housing. The whole thing feels bolted on and clumsy, tbh. Surely there was a better way to do this?

And the size of the penalty you have is in no way relevant to the discussion. A penalty is a penalty is a penalty, and player psychology will reflect that. You can ignore the penalties and they don't bother you? Good for you, but not everyone is like that. A whole lot of people now enjoy the game less, I'd wager.

 

[Nimblentfox]

A bad taste in my mouth for the first time I own Terraria in many years. I like how the game can be play at will, without any punishment. But this? While the penalty is small and can be ignore, its still something that very out of place.

 

[YourLocalTerrarian]

A bad taste in my mouth for the first time I own Terraria in many years. I like how the game can be play at will, without any punishment. But this? While the penalty is small and can be ignore, its still something that very out of place.

same here, the luck system and this have been the only things I have ever opposed before. And apparently people are fighting back on the luck issue and were able to get some changes, I’ll have to check our Reddit to see if anytime is protesting the happiness penalty.

 

[11clock]

I like the NPC happiness mainly because of the pylons. Terraria has needed a fast traveling system for a long time so that medium and large worlds are more playable.

My main problem with NPC happiness is that it's overly convoluted. They should've just stopped at biome preferences and spacing. How other NPCs affect happiness means you basically need a giant graph to get optimal town setups and prices. They didn't need to make this system so needlessly complicated.

 

[IronTsunami]

There's a lot to be said about systems in games that reward players and systems that punish players. Both of these systems have been used in many games. But where one system does/doesn't fit in is based on the style of the game itself. For example; a game like Dark Souls can be very punishing to players, and can be hard to progress forward sometimes. But that's the way that game was designed. Terraria isn't that.

The concept of forward progression in Terraria is about doing things like exploring, fishing, defeating bosses, gaining new NPCs, etc. It's always been a system about rewarding people for moving forward. How players choose to move forward is up to them, but the game has never been punishing to the players for "misplaying" the game. But these new features in 1.4 don't really follow this trend; the Terraria trend of reward. While Terraria does allow people to choose to impose limitations on themselves, they don't have to. They do this by playing Mediumcore and Hardcore characters, or playing in Expert or Master worlds. But when they do that, they go into it knowing that they have purposefully imposed those punishments on themselves. But Softcore (classic) players on normal worlds aren't looking for that experience, and that's not what those modes are for anyway.

I liken negative happiness to that of the negative torches in the new Luck system, which actively punished players for not using the desired torch for each biome. Not only did that implementation force players to play in a specific way, it also severely punished anyone who has worlds from before all the new torches were available. These people would already have normal torches everywhere, meaning their entire world was one giant negative luck zone. Thankfully enough people were unhappy with that, so the negative luck was removed. This new happiness system feels like the same issue to me. It's not just about rewarding players for doing certain things, it's about actively punishing players who don't do it that way. It also punishes older worlds, even if they have expansive cities instead of 6x8 blocks of "houses" everywhere. If you don't achieve happiness, then the NPCs take it out on you. It's as if the rewards for achieving happiness are less about feeling rewarded and more about sugarcoating the negatives of the system. This just feels wrong for Terraria.

The way the luck system is now is more along the lines of what it should have been when it was introduced. People get rewarded for using the right torches, but there's no severe backlash just because you as a player prefer orange light instead of blue light. And I think that NPC happiness should be the same. If you appease the NPCs and make their desired towns, you get rewarded for your efforts with reduced prices and Pylons. But if you instead want to crowd everyone together, then it should just be the same as it was before. You can reward players for doing things without punishing them just because they choose not to. In fact, that's exactly what the system was before. You could place certain NPCs in specific biomes to gain access to items that they wouldn't otherwise sell. But did the game punish you by charging you more for all their other items when they weren't in that particular biome? No, it didn't.

TDLR: Terraria is a game based around rewarding players instead of punishing them. New mechanics that actively reward players is great, but those that actively punish players are not. That's just not "Terraria" IMO.

EDIT PS: What boggles my mind is why there's been a desire to punish players for using a different torch or crowding NPCs when HOIKing is still in this game. That's a busted mechanic that causes tons of glitches and other things players shouldn't be able to do, and the devs just said "We'll call that a 'feature' instead." I'll never understand that one.

 

[Coricus]

I like the NPC happiness mainly because of the pylons. Terraria has needed a fast traveling system for a long time so that medium and large worlds are more playable.

My main problem with NPC happiness is that it's overly convoluted. They should've just stopped at biome preferences and spacing. How other NPCs affect happiness means you basically need a giant graph to get optimal town setups and prices. They didn't need to make this system so needlessly complicated.

I dunno, I actually don't mind that aspect. I mean, if I were the Truffle I'd be pretty freaking unhappy if I were forced to bunk with the Clothier and the Witch Doctor, and if I were the Mechanic then living with the Goblin Tinkerer would certainly make me a lot happier. It's a mechanic based around the happiness of NPCs, and what's going to influence someone's mood more than who they share a house with? Granted, I wouldn't say it's flawless, but the problem here is that there's not enough NPC dialog outside of the Happiness tab to infer most of the relationships off of casual conversation. Frankly I think the NPCs should have a ton more dialog in general, but it's probably too late for that now, at least for this game. Although if the dev team wanted to prove me wrong on that, I'd be absolutely giddy to say the least.

But then, I've never been one for optimization. My beef is with the fact that the game deliberately punishes players for NOT participating in the system. Incentivizing actually roleplaying to a degree while building towns, on the other hand, is actually a really cute idea. It's just, again, that doing so really needs the NPCs to have more life to them outside of the Happiness tab.

It can't be THAT hard to add more dialog to the NPC dialog trees, can it? Ironically all the big new features in this final update finally giving the world a little more life is what makes me regret that it's the final update. Just a few more casual lines from each character relating their day-to-day dynamics with other NPCs or character personality traits that inform those dynamics so that the characters come to life more and it's easier to mentally keep tabs on who likes and hates who. Personally I find character dynamics really fun to watch unfold, I just think that both to make the mechanic more intuitive and just for it's own sake that they should make them blossom a bit more outside of the tab.

I mean, 1.4 added a pair of siblings as NPCs and they barely even acknowledge each other. . .If you heard it from the Golfer, you wouldn't even realize that the Zoologist was his little sister. If I had a sister who turned into a werefox on the night of a full moon, I'd have a WHOLE lot to say about that.

 

[Marney]

It's both too complicated and nowhere near complicated enough. Why isn't anything a factor except for biomes and neighbors? Why does every NPC have the same crowding preferences, which are clearly inappropriate for at least the Merchant and the Stylist and the Party Girl?

"Hey, you know there are like 20 other people around, do you want to invite them over?"
"No, I think I'll just throw yet another 'party' with the Stylist and the Wizard as my only guests! Whee!"

Say what?

Furniture should have an effect. The surrounding blocks should have an effect. Walls should have an effect. Lighting should have an effect. Weather should have an effect - the Zoologist even talks about how she likes Windy Days. Green spaces should have an effect, and a major effect for the Dryad - who could also be affected by the world's corruption status.

Business should have an effect - buy or sell a certain amount of goods, going up as you defeat more bosses, or complete a certain amount of quests, within say the last 10 days, and happiness should increase.

You could play rock paper scissors with the new emotes to give them a tiny boost occasionally. A party should give a temporary boost, a larger one if you drop some cash into the Party Center, even more if the Tavernkeep or the Merchant is nearby, more still if both are. Having the new pets roaming around should increase everyone's happiness.

Could we play games with Water Guns and/or Slime Guns? Offer your spare to an NPC to start the countdown to a quick duel, or hand out more for a battle royale. Different NPCs could have different levels of aiming and dodging skills, increasing as bosses fall.

How about favorite foods? We have dozens of new food & drink consumables and they all give one of the same three buffs. Why can't I offer the Nurse a Tropical Smoothie occasionally?

What about other gifts? I've been living with the Dryad since well before 1.0.6; can I offer her a Diamond Ring yet? You can see she's getting impatient:

How about something incredibly basic, like current health or recent events? It's reasonable to think people would be stressed out, temporarily, the morning after a Blood Moon. No, as long as they have their one little friend and they're in the one place they like, they're the epitome of cheer even during a Solar Eclipse.

"Hey, Mothron's coming through the wall again, duck! Now what were you saying?"
"Dude, you're at like 4/250, do you want a healing potion or something -"
"No, no, it's fine, I like the beach."

Huh?

The current system just feels like a lazy, brutish, tacked-on attempt to clumsily dictate to players how they should play the game. There is no elegance to it. It is not intuitive. It is not practical. And it fails even at its stated goal, discouraging NPC boxes, because all it actually accomplishes is forcing spread out boxes.

They could've done so much with a happiness mechanic. Instead we get this.



PS. In fact I'd argue that neighbor preferences are the one thing that should not be a factor, or at least not a negative factor.

(Well, okay, except for the Tax Collector. It's fine for everyone to hate him.)

Kids play this game, don't they? You really want to teach them that some people will never get along no matter what?

Where's the "side by side with a friend" feeling? Aren't we all in this together, one "scrawny kid" and a ragtag bunch of merchants and outcasts against an infinite horde of zombies, demons, and eldritch abominations? Are you seriously gonna whine to me about your bunkmate while the Martians are invading?

 

[brbonfire]

Long post, but now that I think on it I completely agree with it. Couldn’t there have been a better way of implementing it?

And on an aesthetic note, I liked to build single large towns and took pains to make sure the NPCs could navigate them. Because I really liked just watching the NPCs interact with each other, chat with each other, play rock paper scissors in the middle of a blood moon... it gave life to the place, something that was sorely missing in something like Minecraft. And, well...now I’m looking at these isolated huts of npcs just wandering around and sitting in their chairs occasionally and it honestly makes them feel even more like walking shops and services and little more.

 

[Fortis]

It's both too complicated and nowhere near complicated enough. Why isn't anything a factor except for biomes and neighbors? Why does every NPC have the same crowding preferences, which are clearly inappropriate for at least the Merchant and the Stylist and the Party Girl?

"Hey, you know there are like 20 other people around, do you want to invite them over?"
"No, I think I'll just throw yet another 'party' with the Stylist and the Wizard as my only guests! Whee!"

Say what?

Furniture should have an effect. The surrounding blocks should have an effect. Walls should have an effect. Lighting should have an effect. Weather should have an effect - the Zoologist even talks about how she likes Windy Days. Green spaces should have an effect, and a major effect for the Dryad - who could also be affected by the world's corruption status.

Business should have an effect - buy or sell a certain amount of goods, going up as you defeat more bosses, or complete a certain amount of quests, within say the last 10 days, and happiness should increase.

You could play rock paper scissors with the new emotes to give them a tiny boost occasionally. A party should give a temporary boost, a larger one if you drop some cash into the Party Center, even more if the Tavernkeep or the Merchant is nearby, more still if both are. Having the new pets roaming around should increase everyone's happiness.

Could we play games with Water Guns and/or Slime Guns? Offer your spare to an NPC to start the countdown to a quick duel, or hand out more for a battle royale. Different NPCs could have different levels of aiming and dodging skills, increasing as bosses fall.

How about favorite foods? We have dozens of new food & drink consumables and they all give one of the same three buffs. Why can't I offer the Nurse a Tropical Smoothie occasionally?

What about other gifts? I've been living with the Dryad since well before 1.0.6; can I offer her a Diamond Ring yet? You can see she's getting impatient:

View attachment 272932

How about something incredibly basic, like current health or recent events? It's reasonable to think people would be stressed out, temporarily, the morning after a Blood Moon. No, as long as they have their one little friend and they're in the one place they like, they're the epitome of cheer even during a Solar Eclipse.

"Hey, Mothron's coming through the wall again, duck! Now what were you saying?"
"Dude, you're at like 4/250, do you want a healing potion or something -"
"No, no, it's fine, I like the beach."

Huh?

The current system just feels like a lazy, brutish, tacked-on attempt to clumsily dictate to players how they should play the game. There is no elegance to it. It is not intuitive. It is not practical. And it fails even at its stated goal, discouraging NPC boxes, because all it actually accomplishes is forcing spread out boxes.

They could've done so much with a happiness mechanic. Instead we get this.



PS. In fact I'd argue that neighbor preferences are the one thing that should not be a factor, or at least not a negative factor.

(Well, okay, except for the Tax Collector. It's fine for everyone to hate him.)

Kids play this game, don't they? You really want to teach them that some people will never get along no matter what?

Where's the "side by side with a friend" feeling? Aren't we all in this together, one "scrawny kid" and a ragtag bunch of merchants and outcasts against an infinite horde of zombies, demons, and eldritch abominations? Are you seriously gonna whine to me about your bunkmate while the Martians are invading?

Thank you for summing up my exact feelings on this whole happiness system. It feels like it made all of the NPCs into antisocial jerks. After you build them a home, and possibly save them from being eaten by spiders / left to rot in the underground / being turned into undead in the dungeon, they seem incredibly ungrateful when they overcharge you just because there's a few extra NPCs nearby. It doesn't matter if you build them a room out of solid gold with all the furnishings they would conceivably need (not just the basic wood table and chair), or make them something perfectly suited to their style. None of that affects their happiness. Only biome, being alone, and possibly the presence or absence of another NPC or two.

I personally enjoy building cities, with rooms for each of the NPCs styled to their liking. A living tree room for the dryad, an arcane tower for the wizard, a rustic tavern for the barkeep, a shop for the merchant, and the like. I'd love to see those efforts rewarded. Instead, the current happiness system feels like a bare bones ham-fisted attempt to make the players build their cities in a certain way, because of a pet peeve on the part of the developer. Why the hell should he be concerned about how people build their towns on servers or single player games he will never see in his lifetime? Some people don't even like the building aspect, and just want to focus on exploration or combat or fighting bosses. They shouldn't be punished for enjoying the game their way.

Also, to those saying the punishment is insignificant, I disagree. Paying 150% of the base price for goods is not insignificant. For me, it always felt like money was short even before that. And if you feel it's insignificant, then why the resistance to removing it altogether if it doesn't matter that much?

 

[Flubman]

It's not a huge deal, but I would like to see happiness not negatively affect prices, at least not to the extent that they do now. Punishing players for building the way they want in a sandbox game with fleshed out building mechanics seems kinda silly to me and goes against a lot of the game's appeal.

Edit: fixed an error

 

[Nimblentfox]

The way they write this system is seem to just piss player off a bit for prison them together. I think main feature is Pylons on the theme of lively world. So they add this penalty for a little more push. As each npc just hate to live with 4+ people..... I mean, seriously? Party girl can throw her party all her want in isolate building ..... good lord...

They didn't have any different, that why it feel empty, force and still add nothing except for Pylons. It's a neat idea on paper, but need a lot of work to make it lively as Dev need to be.

I feel like they didn't try to add too much in this happiness system. Because they still want to make us feel not too force for very specific setup. Just pair this this and this while avoid hate and you good to go. But the penalty itself is backfire more than they think.

 

[Flubman]

I made a thread about NPC happiness in Suggestions: The Problem With NPC Happiness