Für die Early-Access-Version von Stonehearth ist das Alpha-20-Update (ca. 310 MB) veröffentlicht worden. Mit dem Update wird das Moralsystem entfernt und durch das neue Zufriedenheitssystem ersetzt. Die Bewohner der Siedlung können fortan verzweifelt, bedrückt, zufrieden, fröhlich oder überglücklich sein - je nach "ihrer" jeweiligen Situation. Je nach Zufriedenheit arbeiten die "Hearthling" schneller oder langsamer. Darüber hinaus wurden die Animationen verbessert, die Performance optimiert und einige Bugs bei der Dachkonstruktion aus der Welt geschafft.

With this Alpha we are laying the groundwork for a replacement to the Morale system. Morale for a while has been a fairly simple system whose responsibility was to track three different things for the “morale” section of the daily update - hearthlings’ feelings about the food they’ve eaten, about their safety, and about their sense of shelter.

While serviceable, we wanted to start building a richer system for tracking hearthling happiness, one that more concretely reflects hearthlings’ feelings about the details of the world around them. The goal is to provide a framework for greater interdependence of all the varied systems in Stonehearth, so that players can have many more pathways of optimizing their town.

Some features you’ll find in this initial release:

• Hearthlings can now experience five different moods - Forlorn, Glum, Content, Merry, and Jubilant. The mood of a hearthling will affect his or her ability to work in small ways, with sadder hearthlings being slower to complete tasks and happier hearthlings being faster and more focused. A hearthling’s mood is visible both from her animations, the unit frame, their character sheet, and the town citizen pane. The town’s aggregate happiness can be found in the town overview and in the daily update.
• The mood of a hearthling is a product of his “thoughts.” Thoughts are a new gameplay system, visible on the character inspection window, that allows hearthlings to have and hold opinions of the world around them and what is going on with the town. Thoughts will come and go as the game progresses, with some thoughts being fleeting while others are more long lasting. A hearthling’s current happiness reflects the positive and negative thoughts at the moment, so check the character sheet regularly for suggestions as to how to improve the functioning of your village. Right now we’ve implemented a limited number of thoughts concerning things like settling, tiers, food, safety, beds, and spaciousness. We plan to add many more thoughts in the alphas to come as we tie each system into happiness, so expect the impact of this system to grow with time.
• Awareness of narrow spaces! Hearthlings now maintain a constant awareness of the space around them. Being in cramped spaces for long periods of time will make them unhappy; spacious interiors make them happy, and everyone enjoys having a window beside their bed.
• More meals! Hearthlings will now eat twice a day instead of only once. As we said, this is only the very first step in a long path towards a more harmonious interaction of hearthlings and their world; stay tuned for updates to this feature as we revisit the other systems in the game.