Stranded Alien Dawn: Survivor Happiness Guide

To absolutely no one’s surprise, meltdowns are bad. Just like in real life, a psychological meltdown can cause your survivors to turn completely on each other, engaging in fights, weakening each other, and perhaps worse! It’s like they forget that there are aliens knocking on the door ready to eat them alive. Thankfully, there is a way to avoid meltdowns, which is to perpetually keep your survivors at over 20%. What follows is a brief guide to the best actions you can take to keep your survivors happiness high and avoid game ending meltdowns.

Happiness Guide for Stranded Alien Dawn Survivors

The survivors happiness is a fickle thing, but the one time it absolutely won’t waiver is when their asleep. This can work for or against you completely depending on when you time your bonuses. That’s right, just like in real life, the memory of things that make us happy fade while we sleep.

That means it can actually be best to let your survivor go to bed rather cranky so you can prepare things for when they wake up in the morning with the tired status erased to begin boosting their mood as soon as they awaken.

That also means that if you give a mood boosting effect to your survivor that they will instead have their mood locked at the level they fell asleep while the timer on the mood boosting effect will still run out. Monitoring sleep is important for avoiding meltdowns. Anybody else feel a little called out?

What’s The Recommended Schedule Doc?

One of the best ways to try and get the survivors AI to behave is to try and have them stick to a specific schedule. Experimentation by players has shown that they tend to respect the order to sleep more than relax. Because of this, it’s suggested that you put sleep directly after work, and relax in the hours after sleep.

Interestingly, one of the best ways to keep buffs is to be well rested, but that also means you need to stay well fed, or the survivors will choose to eat instead of sleep. By breaking up the day into two equal 12 hour shifts, you can meet your survivors needs without taking to many penalties. Thankfully, our survivors don’t become cranky for you interrupting their sleep.

Bedtime Over, How Does The Patient Feel

Thankfully, unlike in real life we don’t have to rely on someone’s ability to tell us how they feel. We have a handy dandy happiness meter tells us everything we need to know to know how to make sure that our survivors are happy and ready to fight. We have one meter for the total happiness, one meter for fullness, one meter for rest, and one for relaxation.

You’ll also see a tiny arrow below the happiness meter. This arrow points to where their mood is trending, and let’s you know if their mood is improving or steadily getting worse.

So, What exactly do we need to do to get this tiny arrow as high as possible and keep our survivors mood positive and less inclined to murder?

Letting Them Live Like Kings

Give your survivors happy lives sounds like sound advice but is a little more difficult in practice to implement on an alien planet with very angry critters. Your survivors are acutely aware of the situation and your Survivor starts at a base line of 0%.

Now it’s just a matter of stacking up as many happy and beautiful things for our poor survivors and avoid as many troubles as possible. Thankfully, we can see under the happiness tab exactly what is affecting someone’s mood at the current moment and how much.

Every little creature comfort can be important, from something as simple as eating on a table to something as deep as being in love with another survivor, can impact a survivors mood. In addition to how powerful this effect is, we are also able to see how much time is left on our timer, which will help us apply our slept schedule correctly.

Though remember, these bonuses (and troubles!) will drop over time as you become distant from an event. This means it’s often a good idea to send someone straight to bed if something catastrophic happens. Survivors particularly enjoy doing well in games and practicing their instruments.