Your RimWorld beauty level is a major mood builder that affects the mental state of your Pawns (the official name for your colonists). Low-level moods can bring about major downsides, while high-level moods can cause Pawns to grow inspired — allowing them to perform much better at certain tasks for special period of time. As such, it’s good to raise your mood however and whenever you can. Beauty lets you do so passively and without the need for resource upkeep, making it one of the best ways to balance your psychological books. So let’s take a look at how to improve RimWorld beauty and keep those colonists as happy as possible!
How to Increase RimWorld Beauty Levels
Beauty is something of a complicated topic in RimWorld, so let’s take it step-by-step. Starting with the biggest factor: Sculptures and Plant Pots.
Sculptures are your pound-for-pound best option when it comes to building beauty quickly. Even a simple wooden sculpture can vastly improve the beauty and impressiveness of a room! Assuming you know where to put it (or them). All you need to start is with is an Art Bench and an Artistic colonist to work it.
To properly position Sculptures, you then need to understand how they work within the logic of RimWorld. Sculptures — as well as plant pots with flowers and other attractive objects — effectively radiate beauty around themselves. Think of them like space heaters that generates good vibes rather than warmth. Thus the most efficient spot to place Sculptures is often in the center of a room; not near walls as one might default to in real life. If you place a Sculpture next to a wall (or, even worse, in a corner) fewer tiles will be affected by the radiating beauty zone.
Higher quality statues made from rarer materials and/or in larger sizes also increase beauty even more. In other words, a “good” quality statue will provide more beauty than an “awful” quality one. Meanwhile, a marble statue will produce more beauty than a wooden one, and so on. Though there’s always a tradeoff or two. Bigger and better statues take longer to build (oftentimes much longer) and require more materials. Materials that are often extra valuable.
Large Sculptures are typically the sweet spot in terms of size, too. This is because four Large Sculptures provide roughly the same amount of total beauty as a matching Grand Sculpture. Four Large Sculptures also take up the same amount of total space (one tile each for a total of four tiles, which is the same as a single Grand Sculpture). Yet splitting the space up into four, separate tiles allows for more customization than just one thick, central point.
Sculptures have another major benefit, as well: Psyfocus. Any colonist with the “Artistic” focus can meditate by a statue to regain Psyfocus. If you own the Royalty DLC and if that particular Pawn has a Psylink, of course. Artistic is the default focus for characters without a “tribal” background, as well, which makes it quite common.
Plant Pots are a potentially useful alternative to Sculptures, as well. They’re just not as effective. Nor are they very efficient! You need to fill pots with roses or daylilies to produce beauty. This, in turn, requires Pawns to repeatedly tend to the flower inside — wasting time they could spend on more productive tasks. The upside is that Plant Pots don’t require the Artistic skill to create. So you can use them early on if your colonists are lacking in that area.
Other Beauty Level Factors in RimWorld
Other factors have a less central impact on beauty. Yet they can still add up. Furniture materials are one example. A Thrumboskin Armchair provides more than three times the beauty level of a Sheep Wool Armchair. Walls and floors made from smooth stone also have higher beauty than ones made from cut stone. At the same time, having floors of any kind (rather than simple dirt) will also increase beauty. Even a carpet will help.
Similarly, higher quality furniture will provide more beauty than lower quality stuff. Though not every object provides beauty in the first place! Sometimes without much rhyme or reason. A 1×2 Wooden Table has no beauty, for instance, but a 2×2 Wooden Table does. If you’re ever uncertain, just select the item and click the “i” symbol above its description to pull up an info tab. This will list the beauty level — including the base beauty level of objects that aren’t yet constructed.
It’s a common tactic for players to have their Pawns deconstruct items that aren’t “normal” quality or higher for this same reason. Then they simply tell them to start the project over again. This serves dual purposes: it further raises the character’s Construction skill and increases the passive beauty of a room. In the case of beds and chairs, it also raises the comfort level of that future, allowing colonists to rest and regain comfort more quickly. High quality beds are especially important for this reason. The better they are, the less time a Pawn needs to waste sleeping in one.
Don’t forget about blood, either. Not to mention bile from corpses and animal carcasses, vomit, hair, and more. “Filth” is more-or-less the inverse of beauty in RimWorld. It basically includes anything that dirties up your home area. On the bright side, it’s easy enough to get rid of if you have a colonist willing to clean. Just let them do the work — manually prioritizing the Cleaning skill- in the Work Menu if you need.
Filth will also disappear on its own. Eventually. The problem is that most types of filth take a very, very long time to despawn naturally. Some types will thankfully wash away naturally in the rain, if the filth is on an outdoor tile, but it’s often still best to get rid of it yourself.
Final RimWorld Beauty Tips
To close things out, here are just a few miscellaneous tips when it comes to RimWorld beauty.
For instance, don’t worry too much about beauty in bedrooms. The “impressive” statistic is more valuable here. As is the comfort level of any bed your Pawns may use. Impressiveness keeps characters happy while comfort helps them sleep better (meaning they sleep less per day). Comfort can also affect a Pawn even while they sleep; beauty cannot. Unconscious people can’t see beauty in their physical surroundings (just like in real life, technically).
Instead focus your beauty efforts on areas where Pawns spend a lot of time working: kitchens, research areas, workshops, etc. This allows their beauty gauge to fill up passively while they complete other tasks. In the process, their mood will improve.
You can also build shelves to boost your numbers. This type of furniture has its own beauty, yes, but it also helps remove a passive beauty debuff that comes from storing items on the floor. Shelves can hold a certain number of basic items, just like stockpiles. Whereas these items typically receive negative beauty when placed on the ground without any aesthetic purpose.
Lastly, you can see the overall beauty level of any tile in RimWorld with the click of a button. Just look at the bottom-right of your screen. Among the many gray icons shown there is a simple image of a human face (as shown in the screenshot above). This is the beauty toggle. Click it from a red X to a green checkmark. When you do, any area you hover over with your cursor will show the total beauty level of every tile around it. Not to mention you can see a more specific beauty level number on whichever specific tile you select.
And those are the basics of beauty in RimWorld! At the very least, this should help you raise the aesthetic level of your colony quickly and efficiently. Best of luck keeping those Pawns happy among the wonders and terrors of your chosen world.
