Newby Question: place in wiki to look for what to do about beauty?

[mzonk]

OK, I'll bite.

I've been looking for a couple of hours off and on now, and I can't find a place in the wiki (or these forums) that has anything on what a player can do to affect the beauty of his colony.

Specifically, when I play the game, I keep getting debuffs that say "awful barrack," "ugly environment" and the like.  Mind you, if I didn't have a sense of humor, it would seem an awful lot to me like somebody wrote the game to pile the same things on the colonists over and over again, but I digress.

I couldn't find anyplace where it said what makes an environment ugly or not.  There were vague references in the forum to golden grand statues, but nothing really helpful.

So...where do I look?  And forgive me if I'm a little too green, but, because I think the concept of a wiki is that users like me can edit it, and I used to do stupid things like edit novels for publishing houses, I just might be stupid enough to try and expand the wiki--if nothing else, adding a few hyperlinks--before I'm done.

So...where to find the info?

[Slimy_Slider]

Beauty is affected by cleanliness and the quality of the room. To get an overview of a rooms beauty, click the little button that looks like a head in the bottom right of the game screen.

Cleanliness can be lowered by dirt, blood, vomit and more. Pawns moving through an area or performing certain jobs can leave stains in the room. Make sure that the room is included in the home area and someone is assigned to cleaning to avoid this.

The beauty of a room is also affected by the quality of it's surroundings. Different walls give different levels of beauty (e.g. stone brick walls are better than rough stone) and laying down flooring also helps. It should tell you roughly how beautiful each type of floor is in the tooltip for it.
Furnishing also helps, high quality furniture and sculptures can provide huge boosts to beauty.

Also, be aware that leaving items and chunks on the floor provides a decrease to the beauty of a room.

[sick puppy]

wait i thought walls werent beautiful or ugly, only floors, because walls cant be assigned beauty points. it's just that their wealth is also calculated into the wealth of a room.
and brick walls are better than rough mountain sides because...well...it's just a pile of boulders, aint it

[mzonk]

Thank you, but this is only half the answer.

What specific items affect the beauty of a room, environment, etc?

What specific things can be done to increase/decrease a room's beauty?  An environment's?  Specifically, how much does adding or changing an item affect said beauty?

Is this in the wiki somewhere?

If not, can I contact the game developer, sign a Non-Disclosure agreement, look at the source code (I have a bachelor's degree in computer science am mentally gifted and can easily read source code even in computer languages I'm not familiar with (before getting struck with Crohn's disease, I was a C/C++ hacker), and PUT IT INTO the wiki?

[jamaicancastle]

Virtually all items affect beauty (or can; some items are beauty-neutral). This includes everything from floors and furniture, to dirt, to raw materials left lying around.

A tile's beauty is the beauty of its terrain plus any items placed on top of it. A room's beauty is the average beauty of all of its tiles, but what pawns primarily care about is the beauty they can perceive at any given moment, which is the average of the tiles in a small radius around them. (This is what's shown by the environment overlay.) Perceivable beauty obeys line of sight, so ugly things don't count if they're on the other side of a wall.

The beauty need is a tracker, so a pawn won't jump immediately to having bad thoughts on entering an ugly area (or good thoughts on entering a beautiful one); instead, their beauty need gradually empties while in ugly areas and fills in beautiful ones until it reaches level with their surroundings. The upshot is that places where pawns spend a lot of time should be made beautiful (and pawns should be encouraged to spend their time in beautiful areas), whereas places they visit only for short periods don't matter.

To improve beauty in an area, you can:
- put down flooring; basic flooring (except for concrete) gives you neutral beauty, which is at least better than dirt, and expensive flooring adds beauty.
- keep it clean; dirt and other filth reduces beauty a lot, and miscellaneous items left lying around like resources or apparel reduce beauty a fair amount. Separate your stockpiles from other rooms so the stuff lying there doesn't hurt beauty for your colonists. (The blip when they enter the stockpile is negligible.)
- install sculptures or other art objects (such as high-quality furniture). Quality makes a big difference here, with higher-quality objects offering a ton of beauty and low-quality ones little or none.

Note that effects like "awful bedroom" are tied to the room's general quality, of which beauty is only a part; it also takes into account its size, the market value of the room's walls, floor, and anything inside it, and its cleanliness. The same general tips apply, though: have floors, good-quality ones if possible, use the best-quality furniture you have available, and keep them clean*. That should be enough to keep you out of penalty range; to get bonuses, you need to provide either bigger rooms or more art in them.

* Cleanliness tip: bedrooms are normally pretty small, which makes them susceptible to small amounts of dirt. (Cleanliness is calculated as an average: one tile of dirt in a big room has a smaller impact on its overall quality than one tile of dirt in a small room.) Instead of having them open directly to the outdoors, have them open into a common room, such as a dining room. Pawns normally track dirt primarily in the first few tiles when they come indoors, so the dirt will collect in the dining room where people won't really care, rather than their bedrooms where it will make a big impact.

Incidentally, per the RW EULA, you're allowed to decompile the game code for certain purposes. (You can see more on this in the modding subforum.) You cannot post the decompiled code publicly, but you can use that to investigate how the beauty system works, and then put your conclusions on the wiki.

[sick puppy]

Thank you, but this is only half the answer.

What specific items affect the beauty of a room, environment, etc?

What specific things can be done to increase/decrease a room's beauty?  An environment's?  Specifically, how much does adding or changing an item affect said beauty?

Is this in the wiki somewhere?

If not, can I contact the game developer, sign a Non-Disclosure agreement, look at the source code (I have a bachelor's degree in computer science am mentally gifted and can easily read source code even in computer languages I'm not familiar with (before getting struck with Crohn's disease, I was a C/C++ hacker), and PUT IT INTO the wiki?

every piece of furniture with a quality associated with it (usually all the packable things, so no walls, workbenches and graves), be it awful, shoddy, poor, normal, good, superior, excellent, masterworkor legendary has beauty. often, wooden objects have a pretty high beauty already, if you wanna do better go for marble (out of all the rock types it is usually the most beautiful), or if you can afford it silver, jade and gold of course.
by the way, sculptures increase beauty by a very high amount, usually around 100-1000, but even grand sculptures only apply that beauty bonus on one tile. and yes, you can build better beds and not only will your pawns sleep better, it will also make your room look more beautiful. be careful about marble beds though. pawns dont like to sleep on rock that much, it is too cold and hard.

but generally speaking, just look up every piece of furniture's description.
if i remember correctly, gold floor is by far the most beautiful, then comes silver and shortly after carpet with beauty 2. then stuff like rock and so on at 1 and then pretty much everything else at 0, except concrete i think, which is at -1. IF I REMEMBER CORRECTLY. anyway, long story short, go for carpet flooring everywhere if you are for cheap beauty, go for rock flooring if you want to be firerpoof and everything else is quite useless. if you are too poor for carpet it isnt really worth makig wooden floors either because you either lack the wood or need more beauty or cant keep it clean. btw, keeping the floor clean is way more important than its beauty anyway. the slightest bit of dirt can ruin the whole carpet's beauty in your room. better invest into a janitor.

it's best if you look up every piece of furniture on its own though. any type of machine or workbench doesnt have a quality and therefore doesnt have beauty, even if it's built from a different kind of material, even barrels. horseshoe pins have no beauty either, chess tables do, though, just like billard tables. it's kinda random.

i'd totally appreciate it if you made a list though and i am sure others would aswell.

[mzonk]

I'll look into making a list.

[XeoNovaDan]

Most things in the game affect beauty, but some here's some brief listings for things that have the most significant effect:

Positive
* Sculptures
  * Small sculptures have 50 base beauty while needing 70 resources and a 1x1 area to occupy.
  * Large sculptures have 100 base beauty while needing 135 resources and a 1x1 area to occupy.
  * Grand sculptures have 240 base beauty while needing 260 resources and a 2x2 area to occupy. Do note that 4 large sculptures will actually out-beautify a single grand sculpture due to how tile beauty works.
* Plants (particularly daylilies and roses)
* Floors

Negative
* Defensive structures (e.g. mortars, turrets, sandbags)
* Debris (stone chunks and steel slag chunks)
* Human/mechanoid corpses and animal carcasses
* Filth (e.g. blood, dirt, vomit) - also affects cleanliness
* Meat and leather

Here's a list of materials that sculptures can be made from, ordered from best to worst in terms of beauty (items in bold need 10x more resources to make a sculpture):
* Gold (+12 and 6x)
* Jade (+6 and 2.5x)
* Silver  (+4 and 2x)
* Marble (1.35x)
* Sandstone (1.1x)
* Slate (1.1x)
* Granite (1x)
* Limestone (1x)
* Plasteel (1x)
* Steel (1x)
* Wood (1x)
* Uranium (0.5x)

Plasteel sculptures are good not just because they offer baseline beauty, but because plasteel sculptures have a high market value (only being beaten by uranium and golden sculptures here), which means that they contribute a lot to room wealth, which is a factor for room impressiveness. Plasteel also becomes more common as raiders show up with plasteel equipment and mechanoid disassembly yields some plasteel. Do consider that wealth is also a major factor that determines the size of raids though.

[Dashthechinchilla]

The wiki's list of beauty items are on the pages for those items. For example the floor page has a beauty table for each floor. You can also find the beauty value for each item by clicking the i. It is effected by material and quality.

[Damien Hart]

On the front page of the wiki, there's a link to the environment page, and that links to the beauty page

[cultist]

You can examine any item in detail (even blueprints before you build them) to see its stats, including beauty value. Also, use the environment tool (lower right menu) to check beauty of a specific area.