It's possible that some parts of this review should be labeled [BUG] - It's hard to tell when we don't know much of anything about how housing badges are supposed to work.
TOURING BADGES I've discovered three badges so far.
Castle Tourist - Rate 10 castles
Castle Auditor - Rate 100 castles (Required to buy any of Angelica Windspar's recipes.)
My personal opinion is that Tourist is fine, Auditor is a challenge and probably won't be pursued except by "gotta catch 'em all" badge collectors and serious decorators who want the invisible blocks. It took me about a week of dedicated rating to achieve Castle Auditor, but on live there would be more castles to rate and it should take only a couple of days for a dedicated badge chaser, I'd think. Castle Assessor is out of reach of anyone who is less than obsessive about castle tours.
CASTLE TOURS APARTMENT Between the blueprint requirement of 64 blueprints and the badge requirement of 1000(!) rated castles, it's going to be months, or years, before anybody ever actually succeeds at crafting a Castle Tours apartment. Meanwhile, the preview of the recipe is actually a preview of the Olde Town apartment. I don't know if this is a bug or if it's intended. All I can say is that given the requirements, this apartment OUGHT to be super fantastic and/or super interesting. That is, if it's a "dorm" or if it's an apartment plus courtyard, then it ought to have some special characteristic, maybe some special castle magic effects unique to that lot. It sure as heck better not be a duplicate of an existing apartment.
DECORATOR BADGES After I crafted one of each of the invisible blocks, and was experimenting with placing them on my Red Barn lot, I suddenly got a "badge earned" notice for something called "Dorm Decorator". I looked in my badges and found the following new badges that I had somehow earned:
Master Decorator
Crazy Decorator
Dorm Decorator
There were NOT any "open" decorator badges, meaning there were no "X/100" type of placeholders showing a badge in process of being earned. I can't tell what I did to earn any of these decorator badges, or how the game deduced that I was doing "crazy" decorating versus "dorm" decorating. All of my "decorating" since being on test server was either on my Red Barn lot or my Myth House lot, so while I suppose I can understand the game concluding my work was "crazy" by whatever criteria it defines that; I don't have a clue how it decided I'd been doing "dorm" decorating.
In short - one or more of these badges could be awarded incorrectly, or they could all be awarded "correctly". I can't tell. I can only report that I "earned" them and I assume from their existence that there are similar "hidden" badges for each of the other categories of Castle Tours castles. Likewise, if there's some generic badge beyond Master Decorator (like Grandmaster Decorator), there is currently no "in progress" placeholder showing it and I have no idea how that badge is being tracked or, indeed, if it even exists.
As an addendum - I just now "earned" a Magical Decorator badge. I was visiting a house via castle tours for the Spiral Scene event. There was a lot of castle magic in the house, so it was probably categorized as a "magical" house but, again, I have no idea why I received the badge, so no way to know if I received it "correctly" or "incorrectly".
Since I was touring someone else's house, I definitely was not doing any "decorating" myself at the time. Maybe there are multiple criteria for these badges?
After discussing about this with a friend, I realized that I had forgotten about listing all of my properties, even the warehouse/non-decorated properties in an attempt to help address the small number of "new" properties available for people to rate as part of Spiral Scene participation.
The "decorator" badges must be a result of a certain number of people visiting and/or rating my properties via castle tours. (Though, again, there's nothing anywhere I've seen that actually explains this.)
