Overview

With True Happiness enabled in Meaningful Stories for The Sims 4, your sims will experience happiness differently.  Happiness for your sims will be something fleeting, meaningful, and personal. It's something you will find difficult to seek out, but be able to appreciate when it happens.

Your sim might be having a day that's merely OK, until something special happens, like a new friend, a promotion, or a first kiss, and they feel truly happy for once. You'll be happy for them, too, because that good mood might be the push they need to make today's painting a masterpiece, or to improve their grade at school.

Happiness will no longer be your sims' default state. They will feel truly happy only when something worthy of it happens to them, and it should feel like their life is improved for experiencing it.

True Happiness in detail

The roles of the 'happy' and 'fine' moods have changed.

'Fine' is now the boosting mood for positive emotions, taking the role previously filled by the 'happy' mood. Other positive moods will be boosted by the score of the 'fine' mood.

'Happy' is now a full positive mood. It does not boost other moods, and can be boosted by the score of the 'fine' mood.

Most 'happy' moodlets are now, behind the scenes, really 'fine' moodlets. Their tooltip will still display 'Happy+1', but when these moodlets are the only type of positive moodlet present, they will display as 'boosting: fine', and your sim will feel fine.

Some moodlets have been selected to be true happy moodlets. These can put your sim into the 'happy' mood, and be boosted by the 'fine' moodlets. True happy moodlets can be rare, hard to gain, hard to predict, or come from doing something that your sim's personality particularly enjoys.

As the colour of moodlets that are boosting other moods is hardcoded to be green, and this cannot be changed by mods, the associated colour of the 'happy' and 'fine' moods have been swapped. The 'fine' mood and its changeable moodlets display as green, and the 'happy' mood displays as white.  This should keep the colours in the UI consistent, and moodlets easy to read at a glance. It also kinda reminds me of the white maxed out mood bar in The Sims 2 when a sim completed their aspiration.

The 'happy' mood now has a number of additional benefits that should make being truly happy something you will be pleased for your sims to experience.

• Sims that are truly happy gain satisfaction points over time.
• Sims that are truly happy get a bonus to their career performance equivalent to the bonus from being in a career's associated mood.
• Sims that are truly happy get a bonus to all of their skills equivalent to the bonus from other positive moods to their associated skills.
• When your sim gains a true happy moodlet, they will also gain a +1 'fine' moodlet for 'A Happy Moment', that lasts half as long as the true happy moodlet. So even if your sim does not start feeling truly happy, their mood can still be briefly boosted.