Just to circle back, your comments caused us to have a few discussions about purely decorative items & the discussions have reminded me it’s problematic for a couple of reasons:
- We really want stuff that exists in the game to work in game. So like, bookshelves should allow you to take books off and learn from them. Gameplay design is currently bottlenecked so we don’t have a lot of latitude to do much more gameplay at this time. If you make assets in advance of gameplay, there’s a chance you may have to go back and fix them up later. Better to use the time on stuff that you know will not have to be revisited, like animations for a current feature.
- But what about items that don’t seem to imply function, like more fountains? Well, we want to do an update art pass on all the items in the game. This is blocked behind some of the aspirational tasks we’re working on, because the aspirational tasks influence the look of the game as a whole. Anything we add now will as above, have to be touched up again later.
Therefore to optimize our art efforts and reduce rework, we’re going to focus on only adding assets that don’t have to be touched up (animations are a good example) or on assets that offer gameplay function, like the new icons Allie just did for a handful conversation topics. Another example will be new workshop upgrades when we start revising the economy. These assets will still have to be touched up, but we’ll eat that future cost in exchange for gameplay feedback now. This will be true till we finish some more of our aspirational experimental work, which won’t be for a while; it’s not even really yet in a state to talk about. 
I’m sorry this is the outcome–we find this very frustrating–it’s so tempting to just jam in some lovely things because you want them!–but we agreed together that SH is a game that will benefit, long term from having a ton of art. The right thing to do for the game is to work as optimally as possible on this art, which means working on animations now and objects later. When I can talk more about the aspirational stuff, which unlocks all these other things, you’ll be the first to know.