Colonists that hold a grudge
Mood now has memory. A colonist who watched a friend die near the east wall will avoid it for days. Tiny system, huge difference in how a colony feels alive.
Mood was a number. It went up when good things happened and down when bad things happened, and that was the whole model. It worked, but it made colonists feel like gauges rather than people — nothing that happened to them left a mark.
Now mood has memory. Significant events get recorded against the location they happened in, and colonists carry a decaying association with that place.
What it looks like in play
A raider kills someone near the east wall. For the next several in-game days, the colonists who witnessed it will path around that area when they have a choice. They’ll still work there if you order them to — this isn’t a hard block — but left to their own priorities, they avoid it.
The memory decays. After about a week it’s gone, unless something else happens there to refresh it.
Why it matters more than it should
This is maybe forty lines of code sitting on top of the existing mood system, and it changed the feel of a colony more than any feature I’ve added in months. Players notice it before they can name it: the colony has opinions about its own geography now.
That’s the bet the whole game makes — that ten systems talking to each other beat a hundred that don’t.