Welcome (home) to Alpha!
We’re incredibly excited for you to get your hands on Housing and wanted to put together a quick post to discuss what to expect in the coming days and weeks as well as list out the known issues. Please send in your feedback and file those bug reports since they’re critical for us to make this feature the best it can be.
Buying Your First House
When you login, you’ll be given a quest “A House for You” which will lead you to your faction’s Neighborhood, introduce the Steward, and take you on a tour of the Neighborhood, and ultimately direct you to buy your house.
Please note, the house cost is not final and assuming you used a template character, you’ll have plenty of gold to afford it.
Once you have a house, start building! You’ll be able to find a variety of decorations on vendors, professions, and throughout the world and use them to make your house a home. Lay out your rooms and expand into a spooky basement or lofty attic. Explore the Neighborhood and see what’s hidden around the corner or say hi to your neighbors.
What’s New in Alpha Week 2
- Outside decoration should now be enabled, allowing you to decorate the outside of your house. Build the flamingo lagoon of your dreams! This also means you can move and rotate your house around your plot as well.
- Similarly, you should also be able to customize the exterior of your house with various chimneys, roof options, dormers, and other architectural delights.
- A variety of decor is now available at the Neighborhood vendors. Shop away!
What to Expect Going Forward
During Alpha and Beta, we’ll be adding a ton more content and functionality to Housing, including:
- Moving your house will become possible. Please be especially careful of your choice since it is not possible to change right now.
- Exterior decoration (being able to place decor outside) AND exterior customization (being able to change the outside appearance of your house) will both be enabled.
- House exteriors will also be able to upgrade their visual size
- Charter Neighborhoods will be enabled allowing arbitrary groups of players to have a private neighborhood. In the meantime, Guilds can create their own neighborhoods to test.
- Endeavors will be turned on, allowing your Neighborhood to work together to achieve rewards and welcome new NPCs to town.
- Social visiting will be enabled, allowing friends, neighbors, party members, and guild mates to easily visit each other.
- Lumber is very much a work in progress and will be getting a lot of updates, polish, and balancing.
- We’ll be adding tons of new decorations, profession recipes, neighborhood activities, and more content.
Fixed Issues
- The UI to select the destination house when visiting is no longer slow to load.
- A whole lot of other less visible fixes have been made!
Known Issues
There are a number of things we know about already and are actively working on and want you to be aware of ahead of time.
- Walking towards another player’s doorstep can sometimes cause a crash. Focus on decorating your own home for now.
- If you’re customizing your exterior and then you swap to any of the decor editing modes (Basic, Advanced, Customize, or Cleanup) the decor editing in that mode might not work.
- Workarounds:
- Avoid swapping straight between exterior customization to any of the other modes by exiting the House Editor completely.
- If you do end up in this stuck state in a Decor mode, exit the House Editor completely, and re-enter it.
- Workarounds:
- While editing the decor outside, if you try to move decor too far outside the plot boundaries, player movement might stop working or your client might crash.
- Workarounds:
- Don’t move stuff outside the edges of your plot.
- If your movement gets stuck, log out and back in.
- Workarounds:
- The red outline and gridlines that signify an “Invalid location” sometimes won’t show when moving decor or the House Exterior to an invalid location.
- The House Exterior may float off the ground slightly while dragging it. This is purely visual.
- Entering other players’ houses will sometimes take a VERY long time.
- For Alpha, all room placement costs are intentionally set low to enable better testing. Costs will increase to their intended amount during beta and release.
- Private Neighborhoods with names longer than 50+ characters will cause disconnects and crashes. Be brief!
- If you drag decor across room boundaries, a crash can sometimes occur. Put the decor away in your chest and take it out in the target room to avoid this.
- If you have a LOT of decor in a single room and add more, a crash may take place.
- Customizing rooms will always have the “Vaulted” ceiling type option available, though it only works on some room types.
- Houses that are owned by other players will occasionally display the For Sale sign asset even though they’re not for sale.
- Exterior doors are sometimes hard to click.
- Moving your house will reset your exterior fixtures so those will have to be set again if you move.
- You’ll likely encounter a variety of LUA errors. It’s fine to ignore these, but occasionally you may have to relog or reload your UI.
- There are some visual issues with various pieces of decor, rooms, and customizations.
Please leave your Housing feedback and issues you encounter in this thread and any suggestions and ideas you may have in a separate forum post. Thank you and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on Housing!