Sympathy

“	Do you have to do that? Where's your conscience!	”
–Bernard - the old man at Quiet House

Overview

The sympathy mechanic forms the basis of characters' personalities and their reactions to moral and interpersonal behaviours such as committing crimes, aiding people, or consoling others. The system displays no visible measures or stats, however, it may be inferred indirectly from a character's comments in the Bio window, from dialogue when cheering up depressed people, and other clues. Two stats comprise this mechanic: archetypes and modifiers.

All the playable characters are divided into 4 different personality archetypes, which will have a variety of effects on their reactions to morale events, as well as their behaviors. Each of them also has a "modifier", an extreme negative state of mind that they will shift to upon experiencing enough negative events. Their exact effects will be discussed later in this article. This table lists each survivor's archetype and modifier, according to how they are named in the game files, roughly ordered from least to most empathetic.

Archetypes	Modifiers	Survivors
Egoist	Aggressive	Roman
	Insensitive	Bruno, Emilia
Survivalist		Anton, Arica, Irina, Marin
Homie		Katia, Pavle
	Apathic	Christo, Henrik, Marko
Altruistic		Boris, Cveta, Livia, Zlata

Children have their own archetypes, simply named "Kid". While the game files contain diary notes for two modifiers, Aggressive and Apathic, in practice children don't seem to be able to shift into these modifiers.

Archetypes

Survivors of different archetypes will have different diary notes in reaction to an event. A survivor's archetype determines how affected they are by morale events (that is, how many points they get from an event). Generally, more empathetic survivors will be more concerned by others' suffering and less by their own, and vice versa.

For example, after killing multiple civilians in a night, Boris (an altruist) will receive 44 points - guaranteed to drop from normal to depressed. Whereas Roman (an egoist) will receive just 22 points, only dropping from normal to sad. Inversely, being terminally ill adds 18 points for Roman, almost assuredly enough to drop to sad, and 7 points for Boris, likely not making a visible influence.

However, this rule isn't absolute. This table provides a rough outline of how events affect each archetype's morale.

Events	Egoist	Survivalist	Homie	Altruistic
Moral choices (both good and bad)	less	average	more	most
Witnessing a survivor's death	less	average	most	more
Witnessing a survivor being hungry, sick or wounded	less	most	more	more
Being hungry, sick or wounded themselves	most	more	average	less

In the case of children, they are greatly affected by events that they can witness (like a survivor's death or a neighbor's request), on par with a homie or an altruist. On the other hand, events that they can't witness (such as any deeds done by a scavenger) affect them about as much as an egoist.

Archetypes also influence the probability of triggering certain traumatic responses. Egoists are most likely to cause a fight or argument, survivalists are most likely to rob the shelter upon leaving, altruists are most likely to commit suicide, etc. For example, starting at 50 points or above, Roman has a 4% chance to fight another survivor, whereas this chance for Boris is a solid 0%. Children have their own set of traumatic responses.

In addition, archetypes determine how good a survivor is at consoling. The archetypes, ordered from most to least proficient at consoling, are: homie > altruistic > survivalist > egoist.

Modifiers

If a survivor experiences enough negative events, their mind will permanently shift to a more traumatized state, and from then on their archetype will have a modifier attached (ie insensitive survivalist). This change is signaled by more pessimistic diary notes, as well as more negative variants of "My Story" segments. Once a survivor reaches this point, they are no longer eligible for a good ending. The modifiers, roughly ordered from most to least severe, are: aggressive > insensitive > apathic (sic).

A traumatized survivor is desensitized; they are less affected by all events across the board. Continuing from an above example, normally Roman gets 22 points for mass murdering civilians, but a traumatized Roman (as an aggressive egoist) gets only 6 points; he's barely affected at all.

Additionally, unique to the aggressive modifier (and therefore to Roman), likelihood of traumatic responses is also modified. For instance, in this state, Roman's chance of fighting another survivor rises sharply to 8-12%, starting from just 35 points or above; in other words, he can pick a fight even if his mood level is displayed as normal.

Crimes

Character	Consequence of direct theft	If another character committed theft
Anton	Sad	Less Sad
Arica	Sad	No concern
Boris	More Sad	Sad
Bruno	Less Sad	No concern
Cveta	More Sad	Sad
Emilia	No concern	No concern
Katia	Sad	Sad
Marin	Sad	Sad
Marko	Sad	Sad
Pavle	Sad	Sad
Roman	No concern	No concern
Zlata	Sad	Sad
Computer Specialist	No concern	No concern
Insurance Agent	No concern	No concern

Murder

Characters	Direct murder	Learn other did it	Note
Anton	Sad	No concern
Arica	Sad	No concern
Boris	Sad to Broken	Sad
Bruno	Sad	No concern
Cveta	Sad to Depression	Sad
Emilia	Sad	No concern
Katia	Sad	Sad
Marin	Sad	Sad
Marko	Sad	Sad
Pavle	Sad	Sad
Roman	Sad	No concern
Zlata	Sad	Sad
Computer Specialist	Sad	No concern
Insurance Agent	Sad	No concern

Brief table

Locations	Theft affect character	Murder affect character	Notes
Brothel	None	Almost never	Other characters receive a morale boost if you rescue prisoners.
City Hospital	Usually sad	Often depression
Construction Site: Snipers scenario	None	None to positive
Construction Site: Bad soldiers scenario	None	Almost never	If you let Boris go scavenge on this scenario he always gets sad, no matter if you kill the soldiers or not.
Central Square	Usually sad	Often depression
Garage	Usually sad	Often depression	Cveta did the heist, Cveta and Anton have concern in their thought but none of them was sad. Bruno is apathetic
Hotel: Trader survivors	Usually sad	Often depression
Hotel: Kidnappers	None	None to positive	Rescuing the hostage makes characters content
Hotel: Lunatic	Usually sad	Usually sad
Military Outpost	Almost never	Slight
Quiet House	Usually sad	Often depression
Ruined Villa: Couple	Usually sad	Often depression
Ruined Villa: Deserter soldiers	None	Almost never
Semi-Detached House: Unfriendly women	Usually sad	Often depression
Semi-Detached House: Trader survivors	Usually sad	Often depression
Shelled School: Homeless people	Usually sad	Often depression
Shelled School: Rebel soldiers	None	Usually sad
Small Apartment Building: An elderly couple and their son	Usually sad	Often depression
Small Apartment Building: Well armed thugs	None	Almost never
Sniper Junction	Not available		Saving the man makes characters content.
St. Mary's Church: Priest Olek	Usually sad	Often depression
St. Mary's Church: Bandits	None	None
Supermarket: Girl in peril	None	None	Saving the girl is actually the factor making characters content, killing the soldier is unnecessary.
Supermarket: Armed looters	None	Often depression
Warehouse: Armed thugs	Positive	Positive

Specifics about Theft

NONE of the following actions are considered to be Theft and therefore do NOT carry the respective moral penalty with them:

• Looking into a "private property" stash without actually taking any loot from it at all (to be reconfirmed, as a player saw their character's mood changes from Content immediately to Normal even when just clicking at the stash while the character hasn't even reached the stash)
• (accidentally) taking loot from a "private property" stash and immediately putting it back while still in the "stash screen"

• Taking loot from a "private property" stash and moving it to another stash without actually taking it from the location to the shelter

This means that you can have an emotionally less stable character (such as Cveta) move around the location and put everything into one stash for higher comfort and quicker nights later on while leaving with just non-private property without receiving penalty. The following nights you can have an emotionally colder character (f.e. Emilia) come and steal without having to arrange everything.

Console proficiency

See Mood

Bug

There was a bug in version 1.3, that made survivors sad even if they steal from the Hotel (kidnappers scenario), Ruined Villa (deserters scenario), St. Mary's Church (bandits scenario), and Small Apartment Building (thugs scenario). This bug was fixed in veresion 2.0.3.