I have no idea why it is happening. Some children lose their happiness seemingly for no reason. No-one is dying (and if they do there's a cemetery with plenty of space), starving, freezing or anything, yet they lose happiness, and it only happens for children, adults are fine. They eventually regain their happiness, but I have no idea why they lose it in the first place.
My weirdest example is a child from a save I haven't played very long. I started with Adam & Eve and had one family, and their third child lost almost all happiness.
(https://i.imgur.com/c0zUYt6.png)
She regained it later, and it started happening when I got some clothes, however it might be a coincidence as I read that clothes don't affect happiness.
(https://i.imgur.com/DG3onAM.png)
Another example is this one in my current save, 2.5 stars while nothing wrong is happening, and the rest of the family is fully happy.
(https://i.imgur.com/x3KRmzj.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/vG7TwQV.png)
Can someone explain it? I'm going to build a sacred stone (some kind of chapel) and see if it does anything.
The child has no clothes; "ragged clothes" means no coat. A person, who never had a coat, gets unhappy. Give him one and he slowly gets happy again. If I remember right he regains ½ star each month, the same speed as they are lost, I think. The weirdest thing is, that if he once had a coat. (adult people mostly did) they aren't this sensitive. There are a few other things, that have a similar effect. You can see at the beginning of a game, if you start without any houses, that homeless people get unhappy after some time. But if they once lived in a house, they can stay homeless "for ever" without losing happiness.
I think that Luke who made Banished planned a more advanced happiness system, but somehow discovered, that it didn´t work and took it away. Some small traces are left, like this never have a coat or never have a house.
Where can I find more information on this forum?
Do you mean about, how happiness work?
I think we all want to know more about it. It has been discussed here on WOB on many threads, not easy to find some information.
But there is one important thing to know about happiness; if you don't use "Northman" or "Ironman" from
@Tom Sawyer. The only thing, that really have an impact on the happiness is a graveyard. With one of these mods, it gets much more complicated. I don't think anyone really understand exactly how it works. I'm about to find out some things about it but I don't (yet?) understand everything.
Here's one thread about happiness: http://worldofbanished.com/index.php?topic=2183.0
If you're interested in how it works with one of these additional mods, I write about my findings in my blog, (sorry it's long): http://worldofbanished.com/index.php?topic=2380.0