Housing Dye System Revamp in Patch 12.1 – Color Families, Less Clutter

This is the story of how we got to the Dye Update in Curse of Ula’tek, streamlining dye crafting, reducing bag space requirements, fixing unintended color changes, and adding a bunch of new colors to use with all dyeable decor.

“These colors don’t match,” many players said after 12.0.5’s release. “This Obsidium Black isn’t as black. This Mesquite Brown isn’t as brown.”

We agreed, so we got to work.

Here’s how we got from those comments to the Dye Update that’s coming in Curse of Ula’tek.

HOW IT BEGAN

When we were first building Housing, we knew we wanted crafting to be a significant part of decor collection. Crafting is a part of WoW and has been since the very beginning, and one of the core philosophies in Housing’s rewards design was “as if it had always been there”, which is how we got to putting all those retroactive rewards on old quests and achievements and added decor rewards to all those old gameplay bits. Dyes seemed a natural fit here as well, so all 62 colors became recipes that both alchemists and scribes could make.

There were complications with the sheer number of items involved, though. One of those was that we couldn’t directly have people crafting that many inputs into that many outputs. So as a compromise, we created the dye crafting system that’s been in the game since 11.2.7: players can use Classic Inscription or Classic Alchemy to make dye pigments, the neighborhood dye stations let players turn them into the specific colors you want to use. This was good enough to ship, but we kept an eye out for ways to streamline it.

Meanwhile, and far less clear to anyone at the time, we also shipped a bug that affected dyes, some more than others, that caused the darker colors to be much more dark. Most notably, Obsidium Black went from being pretty black to almost as black as Sylvanas Windrunner’s coffee order when Housing went live.

The reason for this is technical, but essentially the way it worked is that the bug caused any light that hit an object with a dye on it to be rendered as though the light itself were the color of the dye. This significantly intensified the color, and that’s what shipped to players when we launched housing. So that’s what everyone got used to and made some truly epic creations with.

So when we fixed the bug in 12.0.5, the unintended consequence was that lots of those dyed objects looked… different. Not how players built or wanted them. As a result, we got the feedback I mentioned above: these colors don’t match.

[Thanks to our forum participants for sharing this image that demonstrates what this bug fix did to the appearance of the dye!]

Once we tracked the issue down to being inexorably tied to that bug fix, we had several tough choices. For performance reasons and the long-term health of Housing, we couldn’t revert the fix. But we needed to address the issue.

WHAT WE DID

As soon as we ruled out reverting the fix, we knew we couldn’t simply redefine the colors on people again; it was bad enough when it was unintentional. Repeating it, especially intentionally, would be too much disruption to people’s creativity. No matter how well-intended the change and how requested it was, people had been building since 12.0.5 with colors looking how they do now.

So we decided to make some new colors.

Say hello to Dark Obsidium, Dark Mahogany, and Dark Mesquite. These look a whole lot like the way Obsidium Black, Mahogany, and Mesquite Brown used to, before that 12.0.5 bug fix.

[L: Circular Elven Table with Dark Obsidium in dye slot 2; R: Circular Elven Table with Obsidium Black in dye slot 2]

[L: Circular Elven Table with Dark Mahogany in dye slot 2; R: Circular Elven Table with Mahogany in dye slot 2]

[L: Circular Elven Table with Dark Mesquite in dye slot 2; R: Circular Elven Table with Mesquite Brown in dye slot 2]

But we didn’t stop there. While we were at it, we made quite a few other new colors to play with. These are:

Amani Green

Klaxxi Amber

Aethril Pink

Foxflower Orange

Faded Mana

Stonetalon Brick

Verdant Green

Tirisfal Green

Dusty Red

Tranquility Blue

Pearl White

Petal Pink

Fifteen new colors is a lot of new items for your bags, though. And when you go to import a Blueprint that includes dyed items, that would be just enough of a new problem. Nobody wants to see a Blueprint import leave colors out because you had Midnight Blue Dye in your bags instead of Alliance Blue Dye.

But what if it didn’t matter which blue dye you needed? They all take the same resources to make anyway. It took some additional engineering work to unravel one of the assumptions made at the start—that each dye item is associated with only one dye color—but we took this opportunity to consolidate all the various dye items down to only a few.

We had 62 colors before, plus ten pigments. With 15 additional colors, that would have meant players stockpiling a full collection of dyes to maximize their flexibility in the creative moment would need to dedicate eighty-seven inventory slots just for that one purpose. With this dye consolidation, we’re down to nine, which is much more reasonable on bag space. And they still stack very high.

WHAT YOU’LL SEE

When you log into Curse of Ula’tek (including the PTR), you’ll see that you have mail. Possibly a lot of mail. For every dye pigment or housing dye item you had a stack of, you’ll get an in-game mail from Hestia Forlath, the apprentice painter in Silvermoon City. (You may remember her as a vendor associated with the Artisan Aid endeavor.) She explains what’s going on in a letter bundled with the new item that can be used in place of the old item.

For example, if you had five Alliance Blue dyes, six Horde Red dyes, and two White Dye Pigments in your inventory or bank, you’ll get three mails from Hestia. One will have five of the new Blue Housing Dyes, another will have six Red Housing Dyes, and the last will have three White Housing Dyes.

When you customize a dyeable decor in your house, it’ll work just the same, except with more colors – you’ll see every color in the game now, plus the new ones. The big change is that instead of needing different items for Void Violet or Netherstorm Fuchsia, you’ll only need that same quantity of Purple Housing Dyes.

We’ve also retired the Teal category, bringing us down from ten pigments to nine housing dye items. Every dye color that was crafted with Teal has been rolled into either the Blue or Green category, and Teal Dye Pigment will get turned into Blue Housing Dye.

And maybe what’s best here is that having so few dye items to craft means that we were able to significantly simplify the crafting process. Now it’s much simpler, as housing dye pigments are a thing of the past. Simply take the herbs you want to use to the dye station, make sure your character is an alchemist or scribe, and turn them directly into dyes by clicking the dye station. There are no recipes in your own crafting book to manage. Eliminating the intermediate step in the process should make life simpler and easier for everyone.

CONCLUSION

This all started with player feedback. And it ended up with a small package of changes that I think represent a significant quality-of-life improvement for all Housing players. Your feedback is irreplaceably valuable, so on behalf of the entire World of Warcraft development team: thank you, and please keep it coming.