Housing 101

Wildstar Housing is among the best out there for MMOs that gives players a great amount of tools to customize their plots and create spectacular homes. This guide goes over the basics about Housing and details not mentioned in the tutorial.

Intro

Getting a plot is easy in Wildstar and relatively cheap. There’s two ways to initially get a plot; to level your character to 14 and head to your Capital City where you’ll do a quest to visit the Protostar Showcase and receive a Housing décor pack as well as the teleport-to-plot ability or to purchase the Jump Start Pack from the In-Game Store for 720 Protobucks (under $10 USD) which gives you the ability to access your plot at level 3 (just have to be out of the tutorial), a large Housing décor package, Shard Spire Caynon FABKit, Flask of Advancement (3-hours), 16-slot bag, 5 gold and a hoverboard. It is a good value as you get a lot of bang for your buck if you love the idea of Housing and like having a boost in general.

Housing Plots are large! There’s a lot of room to use and able to customize with. All plots have 6 FABkit plugs (4 regular and 2 large) and House plug in the center of the plot. You also have the ability to change the sky, ground, and music as the tutorial talked about. Lot of these customizations are purchased via gold and renown though some are also available from the In-Game Store, Arcterra Reputation, Cosmic Rewards Points and Events. Many of the Event ones can be traded or sold.

To use these for customization you need to use your Housing Bar. You can change it's position on your screen as well, the default position however is right above your action bar. These are what the buttons do:

Landscape - This for the House and FABkit plugs and use when placing them down, repairing if needed, upgrading or replacing.

Remodel - Changes the Ground, Music, Sky, Lighting, etc depending if you're working on the Exterior or Interior of your plot.

Crate - Your Plot's Inventory.

Vendor - Housing Vendor for decor items, sold by gold and renown.

Placed Decor List - Lists all the decor items you placed down in alphabetical order. Handy for locating items.

Toggle Edit Mode - Allows you to edit your plot or not.

Return to Teleporter - Use when you accidentally get stuck on a plot. It does happen.

Houses

Houses range in size and shape. The cheapest and usually the starter house are the Cozy. There’s Cassian, Exile, Granok, Aurin, Draken, and Chua for the price of 1 copper. A cozy may not seem like much but you can do a lot with them and personally I’ve stuffed three floors comfortably in a Cozy Cassian. The Spacious Houses and Bunker are at 3 plat which usually means won’t be accessible until level cap or close to it. Once you are a level cap earning plat becomes easy. There’s also Houses on the In-Game Store which only cost a 1 gold to place down once purchased. And at the end of the Cosmic Rewards Tier 6 is the Osun house which is Account-wide.

One thing to note about the Houses currently available with the In-Game Store is that the Bird House is only redeemable on one character while the Black-Hole from the Champion’s 90 Day Signature Pack is Account-wide. If you find yourself loving the game, the Champion’s Pack is a great value even at $55 USD and recommend if you do to purchase Protobucks to buy it, this pack has a lot of perks with everything in it would equal to over $160 USD.

FABkits

FABkits can add interesting things to your plot as some are useful for Tradeskills such as Harvesting FABKits though you can only have 1 on a plot (Gardening FABkit does not count against this), Banking, Personal Customization, Challenges, Housing Expeditions, Buffs, and aesthetics. They can be made my Architects, drop in Open-World or in Instances, Elder Gems, purchased through Reputation vendors, and some purchased from the In-Game Store. If you find you’re not a fan of Housing then it would be good to at least take advantage of placing down Tradeskill, Bank, Biome Zones, Personal Customization FABkit as those you will get use out of.

When it comes to Challenge FABkits the thing to keep in mind is that you cannot place décor within their area. This is to prevent cheating in the challenge. But others, including Biomes, you can. With a lot of FABkits you do have to keep your level in mind as they are attached to your character’s level.

Though FABkits are purely optional, it’s really up to what you plan.

Decor

Decor is what makes the Housing feature shine in Wildstar. There's lots of it and can be made by Architects and purchased from the Housing vendor, Renown vendor (at your teleport pad), Reputation vendors, open-world, instances (both PVE & PVP), and the In-Game Store. Some decor are a little bit harder to come by as few are restricted by Faction.

All decor that you redeem by right-clicking the item goes into your Crate and becomes Soulbound to it. Initially you start with a 1000 (2000 for Signature) items that can be placed down on the outside and inside your house with 40 light, 50 special, and 5 mannequins counting towards that number. You can purchase Decor Limit (+500) from the In-Game Store or 230 Protobucks or 115 OmniBits multiple times to reach a maximum of 5000 (2500 inside and 2500 outside). You will see the limits listed on your Crate as "Decor Owned: #/#", Exterior/Interior Limits; Decor Placed: #/#"



Lights, Special and Mannequins are unique decor types. Lights are straight forward as these decor items give out a light effect and are limited to 40 outside and inside as they are part of the Exterior/Interior Limits. Special and Mannequins have Global Limits meaning you can only have that max of them at any time regardless of Exterior or Interior. Specials are NPC decor such as the Ekos Guest and Space Cadet Aurin, particle effects like the Burning Track. Mannequins are as their name suggests; a decor item you can put Costumes on (from your Holo-Wardrobe) and pose.



Any decor you place down you can move around and change it's size. There's three buttons and a sliding bar as shown below:

Left button: Toggle Advance Options." Middle button: Linking items, "Right-click on decor items to link them." and Right button: "Send to Crate." The slider bar changes the size from 0.20 to 8 scale.

Advance Options

Advance Options is something highly used for Housing as this gives you the axis to manipulate the decor with Object and World. To access Advance Options, click that Right button and brings up the window. Make sure to check the "Advance Mode" at the top of it, this gives you radius bars and arrow directional on the decor item itself. In the Advance Options Window you have lots of options and the ability to use basic geometry to place the item as you want.

The first thing to note are the check-boxes of Object and World. This effects the axis of the decor you are manipulating. Object's axis is to the item itself and World is a fixed one.

Example:

So many ways!

Under it is the Move section and has arrow positioning along with numerical; X (North and South), Y (Up and Down), Z (East and West). All it effects is where the item is on your plot.

Next is Rotate section and also has arrow positioning with numerical; Yaw (Right-side and Left-side), Pitch (Upside and Downside), and Roll (Spin). These effect of the item is positioned itself. Its handy to know radial degrees and to know you also deal with positive and negative numbers.

A quick cheat if you're not good at numbers is to think of them like the hour position on a clock;
0 = 12:00, 45 = 1:30, 90 = 3:00, 135 = 4:30, 180 = 6:00, -135 = 7:30, -90 = 9:00, -45 = 10:30.

The Scale defaults at the lowest setting at 0.20 and the highest 8.00 but these are not hard-set. In the field next to it you can enter in a different number. Decimal point effects the size in smaller intervals and you can only do as much the in-bounds of the plot can allow for.

As for the T, R, S those are to save information and best to keep them locked as they are.

Last there are five buttons at the of Advance Options window. The first two are "Copy Transform" and "Paste Transform" and very useful when you have multiple items you want to stack right next to each other, like walls. Click Copy on the item when its in the position you want and then click the item, follow with clicking Paste. This will put that second item in the exact spot and size as the one you copied. With the arrows you can move it around that spot. The next three are simple; Send to Crate which is exactly what it does. Place, is to place the item as you want it but you can also do this by simply doing a Left click away from the window. And finally, Cancel, it returns the item back to it's original position before you moved it around.

Addon

I would be a poor Housing Enthusiast if I did not mention Addons.

There are some for Housing and the one I use is Katia Builder Toolkit (KBT). You can get from Curse and it is a life-safer when it comes to building. Makes projects easier to do and able to save them. Katia does have videos on how to use the Addon and I will admit it when seeing the Addon for the first time it looks confusing. But there are a lot of players out there will to help teach the ropes. If you really want get into Housing this is a must have.

Notes

That's it for this guide! Will adjust and update along the way. You can always check the blog at roguegarr.wordpress.com for the same guides and updates. Please rate this guide if you find it useful! You'll make the quest garr happy.

[iddysus]

RIP

[Chogborts]

How do I plant things in my garden?

[jay_rab]

As a side note thanks for bringing these guides to steam, I have read through most of the ones you made and they have been really informative.

[WOOD]

I found a reddit post with the details on cheap/easy way to gain max rested xp/min through decor in case this info is helpful to your guide. These look to be the same as the old guide I use to use. Some names have changed however like the chua bookcase is now "Tall Bookcase (Chua)" but you can still find them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WildStar/comments/27p76n/maximizing_your_housing_buff/

[Rogue]

A good point! Will work to add that in!

[jay_rab]

As a new player to the game, it would be nice if you had a section explaining the decor buffs.

[Rogue]

That site I'm not aware of though a lot of the early sites made for Wildstar no longer update. :(

[WOOD]

In the past, I used a guide that showed the easiest/cheapest way to get large decor buffs for each type to maximize your rested XP. That site is dead now but any chance you or anyone has that info?

[てんか]

Good