Happiness and Town Quality

Happiness (the smiley face) is how content the townsfolk are. Its only use is in sermons: the number of parishioners who attend is the lower of your happiness and your church quality, and starting a sermon takes one happiness per parishioner. You earn it from Town Gratitude, from selling certain goods to town traders, and later in the game from town orders.

Happiness can never go above town quality. Town quality starts at 0 and goes up to 10 when you finish Certificate, Please. In the demo nothing else raises it, so in the demo you can never hold more than 10 happiness, and no sermon can have more than 10 parishioners.

The cap

• If your happiness is already at town quality, anything more you get is lost completely.
• If you are below it, you get as much as fits, and the rest is lost.
• Happiness arrives as small smiley points that fly to you, like tech points. If you hear the failure sound when they reach you, they went over the cap.
• Happiness does not decay. The only thing that takes it away is starting a sermon.
• A new game starts you with 9 happiness, so it is nearly full once town quality reaches 10.

Example: town quality is 10 and you have 8 happiness. Using a Town Gratitude (+5) takes you to 10, and the other 3 are lost. Used right after a sermon that spent all 8, the same Town Gratitude would give the full 5.

Where it comes from

Town Gratitude

Town Gratitude gives 5 happiness when you use it. It keeps in your inventory until you use it, so you can save it for when your happiness is low. Quests such as Planted and Delivered, Two Peas in a Pod, Jack in a Boat and Fighting Spirit Required reward it. In the demo, quests hand out 13 of them in total, worth 65 happiness. Januarius also sells one at a time.

Selling to town traders

Some traders count as town traders. They give happiness for particular goods, marked with a smiley in the trade window. Each of those goods has a weekly limit, and each trader has a weekly happiness cap. Both reset on Pride day (see Time and the Week). Past the limit you still get paid, but no more happiness.

In the demo there are two:

Trader	Buys for happiness	Per item	Per week	Weekly cap
Januarius	Burial Certificate I, II and III	1	5 of each	10
Herm, first tier	River fish fillet	0.4	5	2
Herm, after Planted and Delivered	Vegetables, wheat and river fish fillets	1/15 to 0.4	5 to 30	15

In the demo every corpse comes with a Burial Certificate I, so Januarius gives at most 5 happiness a week, not 10.

Happiness from sales is counted in fractions. You only receive a point when a trader’s running total for the week passes a whole number. Anything left over when the week resets is lost.

Orders

Later in the game, completed town orders also pay happiness. Orders are not available in the demo.