Even though the Happiness report shows zeros in the top portion, your happiness is exactly where it should be given all your other numbers.
First. If you have one food, one water, one defense, and one sheltered bed for each settler your happiness score will/should be 80. You have all of these covered. (Thus, it is true that the happiness report should show full scores in all categories. This may very well be bug in the presentation of the report, but not one in fact.)
Second. You have two advanced Industrials that right now give -20 Happiness divided by 5 settlers = -4 Happiness total. The report correctly reflects this: 80 (full needs met) - 4 (bonus/penaties) = 76 predicted happiness.
Until you or the City Plan adds a Rec Plot/other bonus happiness objects, this is exactly where your total settlement happiness will stay. If more settlers show up, your happiness will also increase somewhat because then Advanced Industrials' penalty will be spread across more settlers: 20/6.
(A couple of junkyard dogs right now would put you at 80. Where's Gene when you need him?)
Third: the weight bench. It adds 2 points/population. Right now with 5 settlers it is only providing a fraction of happiness. What I'd expect to happen in this case is that your total happiness will appear somewhat unstable. Sometimes you'll see 76 happiness arrow going up, sometimes you'll see 76 happiness arrow going down. Fractions of happiness often cause this sort of oscillation in the workshop numbers and in the pipboy.
(Best thing would be to add a weight bench/pommel horse for each settler: this would send your total settlement happiness to 78 and remove the fraction wobble.)
The bottom half of happiness report is the most helpful and shows stuff you might not be keeping a running tally of (because you aren't a nerd like me). The top half is just a fancified way of seeing if you have one food, one water, one defense, and one sheltered bed for each settler.
But as you said above:
its helpful to have some confirmation because a lot is really just speculation (for example, speculating on whether a bed has been counted as being in the rain because of the tin shack roof having a small hole
The real use for this portion is seeing if your beds are counting as sheltered as you really have no other way of knowing this. Since your total happiness isn't tanking, this also I think points to the fact that the report
just isn't showing the numbers, but that all is fine behind the scene.
(In the WSFW settings you can turn off the sheltered bed mechanic. It's a PITA, why fight it? Somewhere Kinggath recommends this.)
The file named 'message' is the notification that pops up after I populate and then close the happiness report.
I haven't encounter this new bit. I wonder if it's because I'm on a poor old Xbox. This play through, updated to the most recent version of everything, I haven't bothered to build a CP desk and have only run the report on the pipboy. I can't imagine that desk versus pipboy would matter. But maybe just for Science! see if running the report on your pipboy shows different???
or whether or not I have a synth
You'll have to forgive me, but this is a pet peeve of mine
: Synth settlers do not affect settlement happiness. Although they may be plotting to kill you, they are just as happy to farm in the dirt as any other dirt farmer.
I'm using Sim Settlements 3-in-1 v 4.2.5 and HUDFramework v 1.0f
