A mental health system for gameplay and a deterrent to griefing reasons.
I was thinking something like at 0 mental health there would be no benefits but also no detriments to normal gameplay. At certain points of mental health you get bonuses like natural insulation higher baby chances etc. But also if it goes negative you get negatives such as higher hunger rate. If it goes to far negative your character gets depression unable to feed themselves and have to rely on other players to keep them alive untill their mental health returns to normal. And if it goes even further negative (you crazed bear releasing baby murdering lunatic you >.>) you could simply stop moving as your hunger rapidly decreases.
Also if your mental thresholds reach certain points either positive or negative the lowest tier actions positive or negative don’t effect your mental health untill it drops back below the threshold. (what i mean is lets say the threshold is -50 and +50 you have +51 mental health so all low negative mental health actions wont bring your mental health back towards zero until it drops below +50 again and the opposite is true for -50 mental health ) this would make it harder for actual griefers to easily continue griefing without repairing some of the damage they have done while innocent players that simply didn’t know better can learn from their mistakes.
As a further deterrent for griefing when a player breaks the negative threshold and gets depression instead of their mental health slowly returning to their natural mental health it would instead set their natural mental health to the near fatal limit and to get rid of their depression they would have to do high and mid tier positive mental health actions (like clothing babies) until they breach the negative threshold and their natural mental health threshold returns to normal. (This would be extremely hard to do since the player could not even feed themselves and would have to rely on other players while attempting to right their mental health.)
Maybe it could also factor into food chains. The idea is limit the max food chain to something like five but the higher your mental health the higher your max food chain could go. And at maximum mental health we could eat the same foods twice or something without breaking the food chain.
Clothing would be a key factor for mental health to. For example the reed skirt would only give a very small amount of mental health but wool pants would give much more while blue or red ones would give even higher mental health. I was thinking it would be better if clothes gave a flat increase to mental health instead of slowly increasing over time since players could just give babys single pairs of shoes and all players would have max mental health by the time they were old. (By flat increase i meant that mental health will always flow towards zero when there are no mental health aspects effecting the player for example mental health +20 or -20 would decrease to zero over time but clothing would change the natural mental health point like fully clothed in rabbit fur could make +20 the natural mental health for the character)
Furniture and other such things could have a increase over time or even a radius effect for example standing on a brick floor would slowly increase mental health while something like a rose bush or a peace lilly would increase mental health just by being near enough to it.
Somethings could have negative mental health consequences to. Like getting bitten by a animal would give a predetermined decrease to mental health
This is a list of negative and positive actions i thought might affect mental health in major medium and low ways.
High mental health negatives - Murder, Releasing bears, getting bitten by animals or bugs.
Medium mental health negatives - pet starvation (not death of old age), your babies death before three. Chopping tree with birds.
Low mental health negatives - slaughtering domestic animals, chopping trees.
High mental health positives - healing wounded players, killing bears, building peace Lilly cistern, burning the candles on tree ,building bell towers,
Medium mental health positives - pet dying of old age, baby surviving to age three, cooking cakes, three sister stews, clothing baby (once per child), hand feeding baby with less then 3 food tics left, planting rose bushes.
Low mental health positives - all cooking, planting (trees included), feeding baby animals, incubating eggs, making tool heads, getting fed by other players, feeding babys and pets etc.
Radius mental positives - fires, Tree with birds, rose bushes, wild peace lilly (small rate) peace lilly cistern (slightly higher rate), active home marker, bell towers.
I tried to balance the list so that its not detrimental to normal gameplay but also deter griefing for example lets say you want to be a bear hunter by the time your old enough to shoot a bow you should have high enough mental health to release a bear without getting depression from guilt, kill the bear and its completely removes the mental health decrease by the equal (or slightly higher) mental health gain of killing a bear.
As for the radius mental health increasing objects those are things of beauty and comfort that make the players feel like they are part of a beautiful town or safe, so of course players should be rewarded for such making such objects. Imagine a town square filled with baby players and their mothers surrounded by beautiful rose bushes with a central hearth fire, talking and joking with each other while birds sing in the back ground. Being able to send your children of knowing they have good mental health and are prepared to face the harsh world.
Of course players shouldn’t be effected by multiples of the same radius objects (like surrounding yourself with fires you crazed pyromaniacs >.>) for balancing reasons.