Is there a tutorial for dummies (like me) that teaches how to simply change the environmental rating? I'm not very tech savvy and I find too many objects both oc and cc that have lower scores than I'd like.

The actual environmental scores are in the OBJD, what it says in the tooltip (the object description that pops up in the catalogue) is in the COBJ. The OBJD one is I think a radius of some sort, the stuff in the COBJ is literally what it will say in the tooltip.

To change that in an existing object you can just open it in s4pe and change those values -- open package, select the resource in the list, and hit "Grid". Hit "Commit" after you made your changes, repeat for the rest of the OBJD/COBJs (there is one of each per colour variant) and save the package when you're done.

This has nothing to do with tuning though, so I've split it off into a separate thread.

Ok, I found the where the changes are made, but I don't understand the values. Looking in the OBJD of a painting that comes with confidence score 8
It says EnvironmentScoreEmotion Tags (Array: 0x1) / 9.228251E-41 and EnvironmentScores (Array: 0x1) / 204
This makes no sense to me. Is there a place that explains what these mean and how to change it?

What did you mean now -- I was assuming by "the environmental rating" you mean the decorativeness? Emotion Tags are something different, that's what activates the moodlets. Is that what you were asking about?

Sorry, I do want to understand both, but for simplicity sake and the fact I am slow at this sort of thing... I am looking for environment ratings and how to adjust them.

Open the package you want to change in s4pe, sort the left-hand list by instance (by clicking on the word "Instance" at the top) and scroll to a COBJ and OBJD. Select one and click the "Grid" button. There you can edit the data.

In the OBJD in the "PositiveEnvironmentScore" field is the actual decorativeness (like I said, I believe it's a radius but I dunno in what units -- look at some Maxis objects for comparison). The COBJ has the catalogue tooltip (the value is hexadecimal, so when you want it to say 10 in game, type "A"). Again compare with existing objects to see what kind of radius roughly corresponds to how many "points" in the tooltip (these points are basically just cosmetic, they're not an accurate way to measure anything but they shouldn't say 10 when the object actually has next to no deco score).

The object in my screenshot happens to have an PositiveEnvironmentScore of 1 which is very very small .. most cheap-ish deco objects have 10-20 in that field (I made that smaller on purpose since the object is physically quite small, so it's likely to be used more than once .. I didn't want everything to be drowned in decorativeness due to that).

Also, the value you cited for the tag (9.228251E-41) indeed makes no sense, not just to you =) -- I poked at that for a bit and what it actually should say there is 319 (0x013F), not 9.228251E-41 (0x0001013F).

I'm attaching a s4pi.CatalogResource.dll -- I now reposted that here -- that you can use if you want (put it in your s4pe folder, replacing the existing one). It's not particularly great yet (displays that value as hex in the Preview and decimal in the grid, and does not have one of those fancy dropdowns either) but gets the job done I suppose. The values for the various moods are:

317 -- Mood_Angry
318 -- Mood_Bored
319 -- Mood_Confident
320 -- Mood_Cranky
321 -- Mood_Depressed
322 -- Mood_Drunk
323 -- Mood_Embarrassed
324 -- Mood_Energized
325 -- Mood_Flirty
326 -- Mood_Focused
327 -- Mood_Tense
328 -- Mood_Happy
329 -- Mood_Imaginative
330 -- Mood_Uncomfortable
331 -- Mood_Fine
332 -- Mood_Playful
333 -- Mood_Sad
334 -- Mood_Sloshed

I just tested this by turning a Confident painting into an Embarrassing one , see screenhot. (Changed 319 to 323 in Grid, I mean)

(There is also 64 -- Mood_Optimism in that list but I don't think that is actually in use. This is from S4_03B33DDF_00000000_D89CB9186B79ACB7.xml, TagCategory.)

Thanks for that last post - the idea inspired me to make a complete set of embarrassing paintings with which I replaced all the paintings in the local Museum. The Museum of Futures Past or whatever it's called, is now The Art Gallery of Shame, full of very embarrassed customers - quite funny!

OP, please note that if you download the wrapper plasticbox posted, you must specifically unzip it with 7zip and not the unzip feature that comes with Windows or any other unarchiver. Otherwise the OBJD resource will be unusable - it will have no preview and its Grid will be greyed out.

Thank you so much! I will work with this and see what I come up with over the weekend.