Community Morale

Base Morale is the mechanic that comes with maintaining your community of survivors outlook on how you run your base and what actions you undertake or decisions you make. Checking on the community’s morale can be done by navigating to the Base tab. On the left-hand side are a few boxes containing the Morale meter ranging from -100 to +100, select it to see a complete breakdown of every survivor’s morale in the community and all other influences.

In the breakdown you can see every positive and negative impact certain actions, each characters personal morale or base accommodations have. There are two types of morale contributions, be it positive or negative, which is a continuous addition or a momentary addition. Continuous additions are effects that will remain indefinite until you change something, for example a -7 morale penalty for not having a watchtower will remain until you build a watchtower in your base. Momentary additions have a set real life countdown timer (20 minutes for example) that will have to run down at which it will disappear, for example a fight broke out between 2 community members and so now you have both a -7 morale penalty from the instigator as well as -7 morale for the victim and both will take 35 minutes to run down.

Maintaining a positive or at least neutral morale is very important for a successful playthrough, as negative morale has a tendency to spiral out of control real quick, as community members will start fighting or leaving and sometimes stealing resources in the process, all of which will impose further negative morale penalties on top of all the others that are already present. A positive morale not only ward off these examples of problems but give boons on their own, for example in bonuses to reduce construction time, resources used on daily basis or fatigue as a few examples.

The more negative morale a survivor has, the more likelier they would pick a fight with your other community members and become frustrated. When a survivor becomes frustrated, they will ask you to do a task for them or they threaten to leave the community for good. Improving their morale or improving base morale will help get them out of the frustrated mood. (Note: A Frustrated survivor will gain the frustrated trait, decreasing her personal morale by 25.)

A few examples to improve morale:

* Clear infestations
* Build new morale-boosting facilities
* Gather resources for any supplies running low
* Claim a morale-boosting outpost
* Add community members with positive traits (Caring, Cheerful, Encouraging for examples)

A few examples that will decrease morale:

* Not having certain facilities build that community members want to have
* Running low or out of any resource supplies
* Not treating community members with the Blood Plague
* Running afoul with other communities
* Having community members with bad traits (Bleak Outlook, Angsty for example)

So remember it’s important not to ignore the early warning signs and get to improving the community morale as soon as possible.

**Morale Buffs/De-buffs from Difficulty settings**

Depending on your difficulty setting for your Community slider, there can be a morale buff/de-buff for your community morale when starting the community on that difficulty. Here are the detailed breakdown.

Green Zone: +15 Morale to Everyone (Hopeful Survivors)

Standard Zone: No effect

Dread Zone: -10 Morale to Everyone (Jaded Survivors)

Nightmare Zone: -15 Morale to Everyone (Traumatized Survivors)

Lethal Zone: -30 Morale to Everyone (Desperate Survivors)

**Morale Tiers**

There are 7 tiers of morale for base and survivors, ranging from the worst to best are:

Hopeless > Miserable > Depressed > Stable > Cheerful > Empowered > Enthusiastic.

Negative morale: Hopeless (-100 to -60 morale), Miserable (-59 to -40 morale), and Depressed (-39 to -20 morale)

Neutral morale: Stable (-19 to 20 morale)

Positive morale: Cheerful (21 to 40 morale), Empowered (41 to 60 morale), and Enthusiastic (61 to 100 morale)

**Morale Level Effects**

While negative morale does not provide base-wide effects, attaining positive morale does provide base-wide effects.

Cheerful: +50% Facility Action and Build Action Speed, +33% Experience Rate

Empowered: +100% Facility Action and Build Action Speed, +50% Experience Rate

Enthusiastic: +200% Facility Action and Build Action Speed, +100% Experience Rate