Morale

Morale means how many conflicts and sacrifices a character can endure. High morale makes it possible to recover action points lost in the morning by negative statuses.

The morale of any given survivor can also be clearly seen on their character sheet.

Passing Morale tests is a key part of Victory in Help Will Come Tommorow. At the start of every day, your character always be afflicted with hunger, and without careful management, more statuses on top of that. As a result it is highly likely that during the course of the game, your characters will be subjected to morale skill checks. Harder difficulties will force you to pass morale skill checks on a far more frequent basis.

You do not want to fail morale checks. Failing a morale check means you lose an action point. Having a healthy supply of action points lets you do more stuff. And you obviously want to be able to do more stuff, it lets you gather more, build more, keep your survivors sheltered and fed, and yes, makes it easy to continue to manage your morale so you can do even more stuff the following day. Failing a lot of morale check early in the game will often snowball into defeat, and probably hampers a lot of new players who don't understand the game's mechanics. There is a very wide variety of things that affect morale over the course of the game. Events and character traits play a role.

The key to keeping morale high is relationships, food, and clearing bad statuses.

Characters in bad relationships hurt each other's morale when working together. You could try to have characters work alone, but there are 36 construction projects over the course of the game, and having to spend extra actions points is inefficent. A better plan is to work on character relationships, and instead turn the combined building action into morale generation instead. Building a campfire and using fraternize as some of your first actions will help with this a great deal. I tend to pick a pair of characters from the same faction, as they often can get into a positive relationship more quickly. This pair of builders will often stick together the doing projects the whole game, with my other characters focusing on expeditions and other tasks (until i'm in a better situation to work on their relationships as well). Be sure to factor in character traits when picking your builder pair.

The care option in the quarantine point will also be extremely good for building relationships, and adds in many other bonuses for keeping your characters healthy as well. You first care action on a character increases the friendship meter of the cared character by 30 the first time, with 10 friendship points being added every time after that. Once your characters are in good relationships, keeping their morale high by continuing to put them in actions together should be a breeze.

In addition to directly acting towards relationship building, also be sure to pick good options during campfire discussions. As a genral rule of thumb, choose options that seems like characters are agreeable, and shy away from dialogue options that look like insults or antagonism. Keep in mind some conversations will always go badly, assume most of the imporant work on relationship will be done directly with character actions. (as a random note, relationships are also an important in uncovering stories and getting positive endings for characters, as well as several trophies)

Food is another factor in morale. Checking which raw food items carry indigestion and other statuses is another morale management strategy, You don't want your characters to get too hungry, but try to avoid bad statuses early on. Cooking not only removes these status risks from most raw foods, but also boosts morale as well.

Lastly is general status management. There are many statuses that affect morale. Big ones to watch out for are the tired status, which makes survivors lose morale every day, and the shocked status, making a survivor lose a whopping 10 morale per action. One of my quickest defeats on the harder difficulties was from leaving shock untreated (i had cigarettes, i didn't think to use them). I lost a lot of morale on my first day, failed a lot of skill checks, and snowballed into defeat.

Once you have an understanding of morale down and you've properly secured your actions points, the rest of the game simpy becomes about strategies to use actions points efficiently to preserve your character's health bar, until you eventually reach the endgame scenario.