All ways to maximize happiness in Elder Scrolls Castles: Banishing, marrying, rulings, and more

Whether you’re a cruel ruler or a benevolent one, keeping your underlings in line in Elder Scrolls Castles is always easier when they’re happy. There are many things you can do to raise the average happiness and maintain it, so remember all of these tips for when your subjects become irritated.

How exactly does happiness work in Elder Scrolls Castles?

Elder Scrolls Castles’ cousin, Fallout Shelter, didn’t have many negative effects from an unhappy population apart from depriving you of the bonuses gained from them being happy. This is not the case in Elder Scrolls Castles.

Each individual subject has their own happiness for you to worry about that is influenced by many different factors. On top of this is also the average happiness of the racial groups and class groups of the castle and finally the full average happiness of the castle.

For the most part, your rulings will please or upset one of these groups of your castle, so you should know which groups are the largest. If caught in a tricky choice, upsetting your minority demographics will preserve the average happiness and avoid negative effects due to unhappiness.

Keeping your subjects happy is very important in Elder Scrolls Castles, and there are many tips and tricks to disguise your corruption and keep everyone happy. How Orwellian.

Unhappy subjects can cost you in Elder Scrolls Castles

If the average happiness plummets in Elder Scrolls Castles, your subjects will become rather angry. Many things can happen as a result of this, most of which will cost you.

Firstly, angry subjects will work less efficiently, meaning your production times will increase. This can spell disastrous if your food and oil productions can’t meet the demand anymore, plunging your castle into starvation and darkness.

You’ll be forced to spend Speed Elixirs to get food and oil promptly, which itself is a very valuable resource.

If your subjects have had enough of being upset, they’ll (rather audaciously) march up to your ruler and demand things improve. This will cost your resources to amend the happiness of the populace.

As you can see, unless you spend resources or other valuables, unhappiness can quickly plunge into a downward spiral that leads to a more dramatic consequence. Assassination.

Rather unhappy subjects (or subjects made unhappy by) may attempt to assassinate your ruler after a negative ruling, which they’ll likely succeed with. Unless you’re not fond of your current ruler, this is an awful consequence that must be avoided.

If you want to avoid assassination and losing resources, you should follow these tips to keep the average happiness up.

Best ways to raise happiness in Elder Scrolls Castles

There are many things I’ve learned about Elder Scrolls Castles that are surprising remedies for unhappy subjects. To keep the peace, make sure to employ these practices to make selfish rulings in peace.

Positive rulings are worth the expense… or you can simply not rule at all

Due to the damning consequences of negative rulings, it’s always a good idea to pick the costly but positive answers. The short term loss of resources is better than an overall productivity loss. Also, no matter the current happiness of subjects or groups, negative rulings can spark assassination to your ruler or another valuable subject.

However, interestingly, you can avoid the drama surrounding rulings all together by simply not engaging with them. There is no current consequence for avoiding the rulings in Elder Scrolls Castles. Considering most rulings put you in a tricky position, you can avoid negative happiness effects by ignoring your people.

Just remember that some rulings are pretty rewarding, so I won’t personally be avoiding the rulings any time soon.

Keep families and friends together

Something I was delighted to notice was how happy it makes your subjects when they get to work together with those they care about. Couples will hug occasionally and friends are happy to be in each others’ presence. Sometimes, your subjects will ask to thank you for assigning them with their friends and family.

This spike in happiness and potential rewards (and the adorable sights) always make pairing these groups together worth it. Oh, and as a quick side note, make sure that lovers and couples are paired up in the bedroom to avoid heartbreak and scandal.

In the same vein, make sure to keep any enemies apart. Enemies working together will slow production and their happiness will drop, making them bitter over time. Nothing like an awful coworker to make you resent your working life.

If both of your strongest Kitchen workers, for example, are enemies, however, then you can curb all hostilities and make everyone happy with our next legally questionable life hack.

Turn enemies to lovers through marriage

If enemies are providing a problem in your castle, then why not fix everyone’s problem by handing out jewelry? In this case, it’s wedding bands but hey, it works.

Marrying two enemies works wonders for not only ceasing the hostilities of your subjects, but increasing the overall happiness as they work together.

This isn’t always viable, however, as some enemies may already have lovers and spouses. In this case, you can resort to a more permanent and damning solution.

Banish any unhappy subjects

if some subjects are unhappy and refuse to be a good sport, you can banish them by dragging them out of the castle to the left.

Naturally, the banished will hate that but they no longer contribute to the castle’s happiness so no one will really care. If the target subject was unliked, you may find that others in the castle become happier for it.

You can go on a bit of a blitz banishing your less useful and upset subjects with no consequences.

However, after doing this some players report that their average happiness actually went down. This is all thanks to the babies.

Babies bring down average happiness

Less of a happiness strat and more of a note to keep in mind: babies can’t ever be happy. They will remain neutral until an adult, which can screw with the average happiness stats. If you have loads of babies in the castle, then you may find your average happiness to reflect a poorer score than you actually have.

Don’t worry, however, as your subject happiness isn’t tied to the average happiness, so they’ll remain productive and happy.

Keeping track of all of these happiness groups can be exhausting, however. But what if you could get rid of one of them?

Make everyone noble

Hilariously, you can completely remove a demographic of your castle by making everyone noble. Through marriages and banishment, you can whittle your commoners down to zero.

Any rulings that would have otherwise upset the commoners and disrupted castle life will now have no effect, meaning some rulings are rewarding and consequence-free.

This does mean that any rulings that would upset your nobility will upset everyone, but it should be easy to make one demographic happy rather than balancing both of them.

In a similar chain of thought, you can make your subjects all belong to one race, meaning any rulings that would upset different races become consequence-free. This would be much trickier, but can be totally be pulled off over some many generations.

Now that you know everything to do with happiness in Elder Scrolls Castles, your subjects will never be mad at you again. When getting more people make sure to maintain these strategies to not tank your hard-earned happiness average!