Dev diary: moving in

One home for your whole account

Every account gets one home, shared by all of its characters. Your home is the house and everything in it: the furniture, the storage, the size of the rooms and the wallpaper. Buy a plot somewhere else and the whole home moves there as you left it.

Plots have a property tax. If it runs out, the house stays up for a week of grace before the plot goes back on sale. You keep your home either way. Buy any plot later and it comes back as it was.

Finding a plot

Public Housing is open to everyone. Ring the bell on the western rise in Primrose and a list of streets opens, each with ten plots, showing which ones are taken and where your friends and guildmates live. Pick a free plot or press Find me a plot. A new street opens whenever the others start to fill up.

The Public Housing panel open at the bell in Primrose, listing three streets and the plots on Mill Lane

The bell on the western rise opens the street list. Each street shows how many plots are free, and picking one lists who lives where.

A guild estate belongs to a guild. The guild leader buys one, and every member can buy a plot around its courtyard. The picture at the top of this post is one of them.

Primrose itself has two plots for sale on the rise beside the bell, the only ones in the village.

Your first plot is on the mayor. At level 7, Mayor Pemberton’s quest A Roof of Your Own gives you a Plot Deed, good for one plot on a Public Housing street, and walks you through moving in and buying your first piece of furniture.

Bigger on the inside

Walk up to the front door and you’re inside, with no loading screen. The room is bigger than the house looks from the street, and it can grow: every house comes in three sizes, Snug, Roomy and Grand.

Furniture

There are 84 pieces so far: beds, wardrobes and bookshelves, kitchen counters and a cooking stove, an alchemy table, a grandfather clock and an orrery. 27 of them are the same pieces that furnish the houses and shops of Primrose. Nell sells them at the General Store and delivers them to your home’s storage. A new home comes with a starter set of a bed, a nightstand, a table with chairs and stools, a rug, a lamp, a plant and a vase of flowers.

A cottage room with a stone hearth, a grandfather clock, a bed, a wardrobe, a dining table, a settee and rugs

A Thatched Cottage at the Roomy size. About half of these pieces come from the Primrose village, including the bed, the hearth, the tall bookcase and the carved wardrobe.

Inside your own home, press B for build mode. Your skill bar turns into a build bar. Pick a piece from storage and it follows your cursor, tinted green when the spot is free. You can turn it, move it later or put it back in storage, and hang wallpaper the same way. You can sit in the chairs and sleep in the beds. Visitors see the room exactly the way you left it.

Build mode: the build bar along the bottom and a green ghost of an orrery on the floor beside the hero

Build mode, placing an orrery. The ghost shows where the piece will stand before you click.

Building inside

Beyond furniture, you can build. Put up walls to split the room, with doorways and windows, then add pillars, railings and wooden stairs up to a loft. A Roomy house has space for one loft, and a Grand house for a second one above it. The building pieces are free. Try a layout, tear it down and try another.

A loft with a canopy bed, a bookcase and an armchair, reached by wooden stairs, above a room with a stone hearth

A loft built from plank floors, railings and a staircase, with a bedroom up top.

A mailbox by the door

Every house has a mailbox outside its front door. Other players can send you letters with gold and items, and they wait there until you open it.

What’s next

I’d like you to be able to put a lamp on a table, hang pieces on the wall, dye furniture and sell pieces back. There will be more houses to choose from, more estate maps for guilds and a sign with each street’s name at its entrance.