I am occasionally experiencing a rare issue where rooms would get low environment score that is impossible to raise above 0. This occurs because some wall sections apparently eat environment. If those walls are located and rebuilt, the score returns to normal. There is nothing clearly unusual above those walls. They're normal rectangular. I first noticed this issue in FreeTime, and it may be its bug. But I hadn't paid close attention while playing earlier versions.

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Has anybody else experienced this problem?

I only recall the environmentally-friendly, environment-crashing bamboo flooring.

That's really odd. I don't know if I've had this problem or not. I may have and just not noticed. I usually just build how I like and only look at the environment motive if it suddenly tanks, indicating a mess somewhere. Now you've got me wondering...

I recall reading about this before. I couldn't find the post I had read previously , but found this http://www.modthesims.info/t/showthread.php?t=416551 . The gist of the thread I couldn't find was that walls can become corrupt/problematic in relation to environment scores. Perhaps Mootilda or another sage simmer can give more info. I have no idea how rare it is , I make my sims live in squalor and pretty much ignore the environment bar.

Corrupt Walls? News to me, but that makes sense. I've had this phenomenon before.

It's new to me as well, and I don't pay too much attention to the Environment motive. I have all EPs and SPs, and you have FreeTime as the last EP. I wonder if AL or M&G fixed it already.

I found that just replacing 1 wall section will normally do the trick.

Thank you for your responses. I was inaccurately conviced that a specific wall must always be found. It is indeed enough to merge a room with one or another nearby, and the environment is fixed.

It's also to do with the size of the room, as well. Pixels, like the rest of us, do not like to be boxed into tiny rooms. The larger, and brighter rooms will always raise an environment score. Lots of windows and attractive wallpaper will often do the trick. I have a few combinations of walls and floors which will always keep that score high.

I've also found that anything other than straight angles will drive it down.

It's tricky, though to find the right ones for the houses, and to keep them from becoming cookie-cutter boring.

I'd argue that environment score may have more to do with how the game calculates light and decoration per tile, rather than the actual size of the room itself.

For example, I've found that sims have very high environment scores in tiny 2x3, 2x4 or 3x3 bathrooms that have a toilet, showertub, and sink, plus 1 window, 1 light, 1 mirror, and maybe 1 or 2 additional decorative items like a curtain or bathmat. That's about 8 objects that can boost environment score within a 6- to 9-tile space, then factor in decent walls and floors, and they're in environment nirvana.

In rooms larger than say, 5x5, I often have to keep spamming the room with decor to get the environment score up, and maybe it's my imagination, but I seem to get diminishing returns. The larger the room, the more I have to do to get a good environment score. Room divider fences sometimes help if the room lends itself to being split into smaller sections.

I should mention that I don't like to over-decorate sim homes, but maybe it's not an issue for clutter fiends.

I too seem to recall that diagonal walls didn't work well. But people have no problems being in small rooms, as Rousseau explained. If more realistic options aren't available, inviting a Headmaster into virtually any bathroom will give a good score.

I think that light, object niceness, and wallpaper & floor value are scored separately, weighed, and all have to be at maximum to have environment of 100. There seems to be a score of the room, and also proximity score to nice objects. A room with everything expensive but no light, can reach about 75 or so in the range of [-100,100], i.e. the contribution of light is at most 20-30 points. It can clearly be observed switching lights on and off. Same happens with wallpaper. I try to use wallpaper that looks good, aiming at decent, but not maximum score.

It is quite difficult to get large outdoor spaces scored high, while using fences, and without spamming the area with objects that visually don't belong there.

The issue described in this thread is abnormally low scores, as if the room included off-screen, invisible tiles with no light and no flooring.