At the current state of books, I’ve found book reading for morale pointless due to their very low duration (1 hour only, starts decaying at 30 minutes). They stack up to 3 times, and the highest you can feasibly get is 75 from the Big Book of Stories (reading it 3 times). 75 is the same bonus you can get from drinking 1 swig of cold alcohol with gourmand, and eating 1 toast-em.
Is there anyone who reads books for morale? If so, why? If you don’t, what change do you think would make it worthwhile?
The morale fades too fast, but the main problem is that food offers way, way, way too much morale right now. I’d say between two to five times what it should.
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I agree with Erk here, morale tends to be a ‘all or nothing’ resource in CDDA. You’re either swimming in it due to food, or are completely depressed due to choppin’ up someone’s not-zombified corpse. There’s not really any need for the books due to that you just eat a couple things and bam, you’re all the way to one extreme.
I use it occasionally to pass time out of a moodswing or get the quick bump to elated before doing complicated things I don’t want to fail at. I do it all the time if I’m spiritual and have three different religious texts lying around though.
Books are not good to be fair, there’s drugs, food, electronics that can give you some good modifiers. There’s also some stuff that can give you the Good feeling modifier that gives you +100 mood as far as I know
Im on Day 7 right now, and using it to help with passing the time/ increasing mood from ‘guilty from killing,’ ‘Anguished from memories of butchering Human corpse’ (won’t be doing that again anytime soon…how new is that?) & ‘wet’ penatlies to get moral high enough to butcher string into thread so I can craft a towel.
What seems odd to me is that my tailoring-1 guy is getting more enjoyment (+2) from reading a sew awesome book that the adjacent Playboy mag goes disturbingly untouched for someone looking to…feel better about the world, so they can be in spirits to survive.
Did playboy get nerfed too? Or have I just never had a character this low in moral to notice something like this? Something else?
When I run over some dude that robbed my vehicle cache. I tend to have to put on some mozart to perk myself back up in order to complete tasks before I had a morale debuff. Which I find helps shake away the cobwebs of concern when I need to make some death mobile parts after running fools over lol
I’m more for immediate gratification. I usually have a beer or use my mp3 player for morale over time.
“Slow reader” + “hates books” are basically free trait points. Well, together with, like, half the other “negative” traits, but at least these traits actually WORK and the effect is not simply negated by a starting item, it’s just that the effect is very… unsubstantial.
I never touch the morale only books. They all get left where I find them. Electronic items like mp3 players, etc, I just take the batteries and either leave them or disassemble them for parts.
The morale bonuses just from keeping your character nourished and hydrated are so OP that you don’t need anything else. Not only do you get large bonuses from food and drink items, the effects last for way too long. Every time I look at the morale screen I see that I still have bonuses in effect from stuff I ate the day before.
I will sometimes use a towel to remove the debuff from being wet, but other than that I never worry about morale. Normal eating and drinking takes care of everything.
I like my character to be euphoric. Kinda offsets all those times I made her eat those mutated fetuses.
I have found one situation where they’re useful: when playing inna woods, at the start, there aren’t many sources of morale early on. No electronics, no fancy foods or junk food. I start with low or no cooking skill, so can’t even make good foods. On one run I didn’t manage to make a fire the first day due to poor time management, went to bed cold and hungry and thirsty and wet. Next morning, morale was too low to cut down a tree for wood, and I wasn’t having any luck finding wood on the ground. But there was a book in the shack, so I read for a while until I was finally able to get a fire, some clean water, and some food.
I do agree with others, though, that food morale is really too high and too long-lasting. Sure, eating good food gives you a boost, but if I ate a really nice plate of scrambled eggs and then had to fight for my life while soaking wet and covered in blood, I feel like the scrambled eggs would kind of take a backseat. 
On the other hand, I don’t really want to complain, because the food boosts make the game a lot easier to play. Without them it might be a struggle just to carry out basic tasks. I suppose the whole system could use some tweaking and balancing, but I’m not volunteering for the job, that will be a lot of work!