Decoration and beauty

Each decorative object, floor, or surface has a beauty value, and dirt, corpses, and filth are negative. The game aggregates values over a radius or a room and samples the result for agents or attractions. In RimWorld a room's beauty is total beauty divided by a weighted size (the size if above 40 tiles, otherwise 20 plus half the size), graded from hideous (below -3.5) to unbelievably beautiful (100 or more), and combined with wealth, space, and cleanliness into impressiveness that sets mood thoughts; colonists also get mood from the beauty around them. In RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, as documented by OpenRCT2, scenery within 5 tiles of a ride's station adds 0.05 excitement per item up to 47 items. The Sims 4 rates rooms by an environment score from decor. Inputs are placed objects; outputs are mood, ratings, or prices.

Cosmetic choices get a mechanical payoff, so players dress up rooms and paths and watch moods or ride ratings rise. The tension is between beautiful and efficient: every statue costs resources and floor space that production could use.

• beauty value and cost of each object, and negative values for filth and industry
• aggregation rule: per tile, per radius, per room, with or without size normalization
• caps or diminishing returns on how much decoration counts
• which systems consume beauty: mood, ratings, prices, or visitor choice
• per-agent taste variation by trait or culture

• One object with the best beauty per cost dominates, so players spam it regardless of how the space looks.
• Proximity rules that count only a hot spot, such as scenery near a ride station in RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, reward decorating one spot and ignoring the rest of the ride.
• Beauty values that disagree with the art (an ugly-looking object rated beautiful) break trust in the system.
• If the score is hidden, decoration reads as optional and the mechanic goes unused.

• Traffic creates filth that lowers beauty, which creates cleaning jobs that compete for labor.
• In RimWorld, decoration raises colony wealth, and wealth raises raid points, so beauty carries a security cost.
• Prosperity funds decoration, and decoration raises mood or ratings and so prosperity, a slow upgrade treadmill.

• Can a vision model score the composition of a space instead of summing per-object beauty values, and would players accept its judgment?
• Does generated decor reduce the asset cost enough to make beauty a deep system rather than a spam target?