Dragon Happiness is a vital mechanism that comes with your Dragon, each Dragon has a smiley face (Dragon Happiness) underneath the Energy Bar that symbolizes the happiness "meter". Over time, the happiness will decrease as you play, shoot or walk around with your dragon and the smiley face will change accordingly, with the lowest it can get being a sad red face (Dragon Saddness).
Before December 15th, 2020, v3.13.0 - A Messy Snoggletog Update, players could play fetch, use a light contraption, and pet a dragon to increase their happiness, but it was replaced with Eel Hunting. The community expressed discontent[1][2] with this change due to the play menu serving an easier, convenient way to increase the happiness as well as players felt they were bonding with the dragon.
Happiness Stages
There are a total of three stages: Very Happy/Fired Up, Happy and Sad/Angry.
| Stage
|
Icon
|
Duration
|
Effects
|
Visual Demostration
|
| Very Happy/Fired Up Stage
|
Dragon Happiness
|
100% to 80%
|
- Speed of the flight and locomotion will be boosted by 1.2%;
- Animation will display the Dragon in a happier, eager mood;
- They will help the player collect items;
- Between 100% to 90%, the Dragon will display Happiness Particles*.
|
|
| Happy Stage
|
Happiness 50%
|
79% to 20%
|
- Speed has been noticeably modified due to the boost being reduced to 1%, the Dragon will walk/swim/fly a bit slower than usual, if not, the same speed as the Avatar;
- Animation will display the old Standing animation;
- They will still help the player collect items;
|
|
| Sad/Angry Stage
|
Dragon Saddness
|
19% to 0%
|
- Speed has been greatly modified in spite of having the same boost as Happy, the Dragon will walk/swim/fly much slower, more so than the Avatar;
- Animation will display the Dragon in a sad, grumpy, and worn down mood;
- They will refuse to help and instead sit in front of the item.
|
|
:* Happiness Particles are small effects that only appear in Adult Stage and Titan Stage, and every dragon except Monstrous Nightmare, Gronckle, Deadly Nadder, Hideous Zippleback, Whispering Death and Thunderdrum have them. They range from smoke/breath coming out of the mouth or nostrils to bodily effects such as mist and electric coats.
Draghappy particle effect.png
Shockjaw's Bioluminiscent Electric Antennas
Draghappy particle smoke.png
Draghappy particle breath.png
Draghappy particle coat.png
Titan Skrill's Electric Coat
Play Options
There are a total of 2 ways to increase a Dragon's Happiness: Eel Hunting and feeding specific food. For more information on Eel Hunting, check its respective page.
| Pros:
|
Cons:
|
- Increases Happiness and Energy, ranging between 1 to 40;
- Wastes no Energy.
|
- If the Energy's full, you can't feed the dragon;
- Non-Starter option, requires to be harvested at The Farm, obtained by Fishing, or purchased from the Store.
|
Feeding can give the Dragon Happiness and Energy points at once, however the Dragon needs to not be full in order to eat anything. Some foods require to be obtained by Fishing, harvested from The Farm, or purchased from the Store. V3.13.0 changed most of the food Happiness and Energy Points after a quick patch to fix a "no energy from food" bug. Now, most give Happiness Points, more so than pre-patch. The only food that doesn't give Happiness is Ostrich Eggs.
Down below is a list of all the foods that give Happiness.
- *- Because Death Songs, Slithersongs, and Typhoomerangs naturally eat eels, they will receive the positive effects. Any other dragon will receive the negative effects.
Dragon Nip is the equivalent to Cat Nip. It's used to calm down a Dragon and alter their behavior. The only way to get Dragon Nip is by harvesting from the Farm or buy it directly from the Store. Previously, players had to head to the Play menu, select Dragon Nip, click and hold it to hand it over to the dragon, as long as the Dragon Nip was over the petting spot, it would count as giving Nip to the Dragon and increase happiness.
Now, players can give Dragon Nip at anytime by accessing the Feeding menu as long as the Dragon isn't full, it restores 40 Dragon Happiness and no Energy.
| Pros:
|
Cons:
|
- Greatly increases Happiness from 20, 40, to 100 Happiness;
- Respawns 5 in 5 minutes once it's fired at;
- Baby, Teens, and Non-Flying Dragons can also hunt them by clicking on the Fire button when nearby one.
|
|
Eel Hunting is a minigame introduced in v3.13.0, December 15th, 2020, around six locations, there's 10 Hunting Zones where Eels have a chance at spawning and jumping out of the water. When the player fires them, it rewards with Happiness depending on the Eels, then after 5 minutes, it will respawn on the same location. For more information, head to Eel Hunting.
History
Dragon Happiness is one of the oldest mechanism pre-existing in the game, it went through nearly seven years of UI changes, mechanical modifications and upgrades, though never fully updated. During its early age, Happiness was very needy and restrictive, players had to take a constant eye on it due to rapidly decreasing, to compensate for the rapid decrease, players could access a Play Menu with 3 options - play Fetch, Light Contraption, and petting - to increase the Happiness. The 4th option, Dragon Nip, was added in v2.0, August 8th, 2013. During this time, players could also see how much Happiness did the Dragon had.
For every major update where the UIs and HUDs were updated, the Happiness bar would also go through said updates. In v2.2.0, the Happiness now hides the percentage bar and only the smiley faces (Dragon Happiness, Happiness 50%, Dragon Saddness) indicate which stage of Happiness the Dragon is at, and the newcomer Happiness Particles indicates if the Dragon's Happiness is above 90%. V3.0.0, February 21st, 2019, another major updated modified the UI, but the Play Menu still remained the same, if not, barely any modification was done to it.
In v3.12.0, October 13th, 2020, Dragons now play an animation according to their mood, this means a Very Happy Dragon will play a more eager, cheerful, excited animation, and a Sad Dragon will play a grumpier, grouchier, downer animation. The Happy Stage uses the old default Standing animation. The Happiness' Speed Modifiers were also changed, Sad Dragons would only have 0.8% of the Happiness Boost, nowadays, it's the same as a Happy Dragon (1%). The Play Menu still doesn't have any modifications.
In v3.13.0, December 15th, 2020, players were met with a surprise, what was thought to be a bug, it was a real change made in the game - both Play Menu and Eel Roast were removed and replaced with Eel Hunting, a new minigame that increases Happiness. Players were frustrated and disappointed due to both methods being greatly used to increase the Dragon Bonding levels[3] as well as a form of demonstrating "bonding"[4], some even suspected they removed it just to make leveling harder than it already is[5][6]. This was debunked by Malkath, and Brynjolf to an extent. The suggestion of keeping both to increase the variety was widely suggested.[7][8]
Malkath explains how at the time, Players could only own one so the restrictive, needy Happiness was easy to handle, but once the ability to train multiple Dragons rolled over, the system adapted to make it less restrictive and needy (such as speed reduction), granting higher rewards for keeping a Dragon happy, and eventually had to be removed due to being very old systems from an early stage of the game. He further explains they can't be kept due to both game size for mobile port, and to allow the team to focus on what really is important.[9]
Brynjolf seconds the previous statements, stating Eel Roast and Play Menu were over seven years old, riddled with bugs, bloating the game with slower game loads and more bugs. And due to only 3% of the players using the minigames, the final decision was to remove them rather than update something only a fraction of the userbase use. He ends with an assurance that while it feels like the developers are not listening and making Updates for seemingly no reason, they just haven't done a good job at providing proper communication in the past, which is what they're trying to improve from now on.[10]
Reference
