Hey there!

Wow. This build has been super intense for me to put out. Lots and lots of tiny design details behind this one. There are also a few things that I'm not even done and that's why this build is going to beta rather than production. HUGE disclaimer: this build might be buggy or questionable. There's just so many changes and additions that I didn't have time to triple check every detail. Apologies in advance if I break your game. : /

Mainly, this build is all about overhauling UI for rooms and various info displays. But it also changes up how Happiness works. Before, happiness was this very obscure stat that had a bunch of hidden values working in the background. Now, Happiness is a modifier on a brand new attribute called Will. Much like Hunger and Thirst, Will is a stat that starts at 1000. Happiness affects this stat over time, just like Metabolism affects Hunger. As the game progresses, Settlers will start to collect behaviors which affect their Happiness. For example, wanting their own Bedroom. This will give the settler a negative buff on their Happiness. Happiness starts at 5. As long as it's positive, a Settler's Will improves. Gain enough negative mods from things like wanting a Bedroom, wanting a Bed, wanting a Roof and Happiness will dip below 0 and the Settler's Will starts to decline. If a Settler's Will drops to 0, they will do something like leave the Settlement or go mad.

Ok, so, why make this change to Happiness? I'm trying to move the game towards my vision of it having more and more depth. I want Happiness to be something which isn't terribly important early on but will later introduce fun challenges. I'm going to add different ways for Settlers to lose and gain Happiness which will hopefully give them more personality, rather than just being drones. All that being said, I don't want it to get to the point where you're constantly worried about happiness. It will just be a long term thing to work on.

I've also changed up the 'Relaxing' state for Settlers. Settlers will try to relax every few days for an hour or two. The frequency of going to relax is affected by how unhappy they are. When a settler relaxes, they get a temporary bonus to happiness. If they relax at a Tavern, that bonus lasts for a longer amount of time. This is really going to be cool when I start introducing arenas and permance-based rooms.

Now to the part that's taken the most amount of my time the last few weeks, the changes to rooms. Essentially, I've re-worked the room placement panel. This panel should provide a much easier way of navigating the various rooms but also provide way more information and control for setting up a room. There are a lot of designs still in flux for it and that's really what eats up my time, trying different solutions for gray problems. Again, why I'm putting this in Beta.

As well, I've added the Shepherd profession. This profession will mainly be used for taming animals and taking care of them at Animal Pens. Animals will no longer just eat whatever when they are tamed. They will ONLY eat what is in their pen. I will automate this soon, but you need to manually designate items for Shepherds to bring to their pen OR manually place food zones in there. Otherwise, they will starve or die of dehydration. Currently, the room will autofill with some custom zones that have your designated items. This is sort of clunky and I'm going to be focusing on this for the next build to improve upon it.

Rather than write several more paragraphs, I'll list out the patch notes to give you a good sense of what's new/changed:
-Added more info to settlers overview screen. Shows level, age, happiness, and other important attributes.
-Added Will attribute and changed Happiness to a hourly increase/decrease of Will.
-Changed how settlers treat happiness. Settlers will now leave/go insane if their Will reaches 0. Happiness affects Will and can be + or - depending on how well the settler is living. i.e., has their own room, roof, furniture, etc.
-Re-made the Room placement overlay to be clearer and have way more info on room requirements.
-Can now limit room owners by race.
-Rooms (some of them) can have two owners. i.e., Animal Pen having a Shepherd and Animals.
-Re-worked the relax state to affect happiness and get bonuses from the Tavern.
-Animals will now only eat the food and drink water that's in their enclosure.
-Added two new containers: the food trough and water trough.
-Changed the barrel container to hold liquids and beverages.
-Added info to show room skill requirements.
-Added info to show room permitted races.
-Added Well House room. This room auto collects water from the ground and requires the survival skill.
-Added missing notifications for deaths by thirst and old age.
-Added new shepherd profession. 
-Animal Enclosure will auto add custom item zones for food/water designated to be in enclosure.
-Added buff detail to entity state items.
-Settlers will now try to relax when they are very unhappy and every few days. Relaxing boosts happiness for a period of time. Some rooms, such as the tavern provide bonuses to relaxing.
-Re-made some of the settler state indicators to be clearer. i.e., being unhappy and gaining energy from sleep.
-Added positive/negative buff info to settler state list if state item has buffs.
-Added thirsty state icon.
-Added thirsty notification.
-Added unhappy notification.

I think there's a lot missing from these notes as I didn't track things so will this time around.

What's next? Well, I still have a lot of art to add to the rooms. You'll notice that some of the big icons that represent a room are small or not represented properly. I will be adding the new ones. As well, I'm going to tutorialize this new UI. Additionally, I'll be tuning/tweeking the behaviors for how settlers join rooms and how they do their room based tasks. i.e., How shepherds properly stock Animal Pens.

Phew. Ok. Still a ton left to do, but am hoping to get this hot new goodness to the production branch ASAP.

Thanks all for the support and feedback!

Waylon