WoW Housing Update Adds More Storage, Layout Saves, and Pets

Hello Neighbors!

Housing Early Access has been out for a few months now and we’ve loved seeing your creativity and builds. As a reminder, Housing is an evergreen feature that we will continue to build and iterate on. So, as we approach Midnight, we want to discuss what we’re currently working on and what you can expect to see in the months to come.

Our usual disclaimer applies here: We’re discussing this far in advance of when we’d normally talk about in-development features because we want your feedback early and often. This means there’s plenty of time for things to change, priorities could shift, names or aspects of features might be different by the time they launch, and things might be pushed up or back (or even cut entirely). Keep this in mind as you read on.

Hot Topics

We want to first acknowledge that there are some things that we’ve seen come up often in community conversations around Housing and we’re actively working on them. Here’s what we mean:

• Maximum Decor Storage – Now that we’re seeing usage numbers, we plan to increase the maximum amount of decor storage by around 50% in the coming weeks.
• Decor storage and deletion – As you approach the maximum amount of decor storage, it can be confusing because some items don’t count towards the cap but also can’t be deleted while others do count. It’s not clear which is which by looking in the House Chest. This makes it difficult to delete items to free up room and players can end up “soft-locking” themselves without much recourse. To address this, we’ll be changing things to allow these items to be deleted while leaving the original as undeletable since you can’t get it again. So, if you get an item through an achievement, and buy too many extras, you can delete the extras without deleting the achievement item.
• The weird rotation bug – We’re aware of a bug that causes some items to slightly rotate themselves when you re-enter your house. This is caused by certain angles of rotation being saved and reloaded incorrectly. We have a fix for this but because it touches a lot of fundamentals in decoration, we want to put it through some rigorous testing. We’ll roll it out when we’re confident that it’s both safe and fixed.
• House XP loss – There’s been sporadic reports of House XP (experience) loss with updates. We’ve added additional logging here to try and isolate what’s happening. We’re working on it, but don’t have any additional updates right now.
• Exterior limits – Lastly, we still want to increase the exterior decor limit, but we’re gathering some more data here (see down below).

What’s Coming in Future Updates

Some things you can expect with nearly every update: new decor, bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and more. These things will be consistent throughout updates, but what about the larger features? Here are some things we’re working on right now that we’ll be introducing later.

Exterior Lighting and Exterior Limits

In the Midnight alpha, we had to disable exterior lighting due to performance concerns on the client. We’re currently working on a way to re-enable this in a way that remains performant. At the moment, this is taking the form of proximity restrictions so two light sources outside cannot be placed too close to one another (which is where the bulk of the performance impacts come from). This restriction will only exist outdoors and you’ll be free to place all the lights on top of each other indoors like you can today.

Once this is implemented, we’re going to run additional performance tests to see how exterior lights affect performance in a Neighborhood with a lot of players and every plot fully decorated. Assuming these numbers come back favorably, we’ll be increasing the exterior decor limits again as well.

More Endeavors

More Endeavors are planned for the future with more cultures coming to your Neighborhoods. They’re excited to share their traditions, activities, and let’s be honest, most excitingly, their decor with you. We’ve been watching what tasks folks are enjoying and which ones they’re shying away from in our current set of Endeavors. Future Endeavors will continue to experiment with new types of tasks while adding more of the kinds of tasks people like and pruning those that are less popular.

“Layouts” and Import/Export

We’ve mentioned this in a few different interviews, but let’s talk more about them! At their core, Layouts allow you to import and export the decor and rooms of your house, allowing you to effectively save and load various configurations and states. These can be used strictly for yourself or shared with other players, but regardless of how you choose to use them, they enable a host of interesting functionality:

• If you’re looking for inspiration or just a base to build on, importing a Layout gives you a great starting place.
• If you’ve built a holiday room and want to “take down the decorations” after the holidays, it’s simple to swap back to your “normal” decor (and then put things back up next year).
• If you’re about to embark on a major redesign, export your current layout and use it as a “save point” that you can rollback to if things don’t go how you thought they would.
• If you want a house for different characters, Layouts let you build one for each and swap between them as desired.
• If you make a “build guide” for a house or room, you can include example Layouts for people to pull apart to really understand it.
• But that’s not all! Layouts can also be used as a stop-gap solution to get around some of the current limitations in the room system. If you want to change around your hallways without having to redo the rooms on the ends from scratch, just export them and reimport when your new hallways are ready and rooms are ready.

Currently, we’re planning for Layouts to work on a room by room, an exterior plot, and a “whole dang house” basis but we’re also exploring some other finer-grained options here too.

It’s important to note that the sharing of a Layout is an explicit choice and up to the sole discretion of the house owner. Unless you, as the owner, decide to export and share a Layout, players (even those who have permissions to your house) cannot access or import it.

Another important note is that when you import a Layout, you don’t need to own all the decor, but you will need to have any necessary rooms or houses unlocked. We’ll try our best to make the import work (leaving out objects you don’t own, not coloring objects you don’t have the dye for, etc), but some things would break the bounds of physics too much for a direct import!

There’s a whole lot of logistics for us to figure out still since we want these to be very flexible and usable by everyone, but we’re excited to talk more about Layouts in the future!

Bring Your Pets Home

What’s a home without a cute and fluffy (or oddly tentacled or precisely machined) friend to come back to after your adventures? In a future update, you’ll be able to place (almost) any of your collected pets.

To do so, you’ll place a “pet bed” decor item (or other thematically appropriate piece of decor), and from its customization menu, you’ll be able to select a pet as well as whether it should stay still or wander around. (We see you tripping hazard cats.)

There are a few limitations on pets, however:

• When we launch pets-as-decor, they will be placeable both inside and out, but pathing will only work inside your house. There’s more work to be done on exterior pathing and that will be enabled further down the line. We’d rather you have placeable pets sooner rather than later!
• Pets will NOT be limited by the amount you own, assuming you have at least one collected. If you want to go full-on cat person with a bunch of Black Tabby Cats, we won’t stop you.
• Pets will have their own limit on placement, separate from decor limits, to prevent performance problems with 100s or 1000s of tiny things wandering around your house. (Also, tripping hazards again.)
• Lastly, a very small number of pets will not be placeable due to various concerns, some technical and some functional.

“Showcase” and Visitor Codes

One more thing before we go! We’re also in the early stages of something we’re calling Showcases, which gives players a way to submit their houses to an either timed or themed showcase as well as browse and visit houses that have already been submitted. While visiting a house in a Showcase, if you like it, you can leave an upvote. At the end of the Showcase, the houses with the most upvotes will earn a small trophy they can show off as decor.

Our goal is to give players an easy way to check out interesting houses in a central in-game location for inspiration. Going a little further to enable easy sharing of your house, we’re also going to implement “Visitor Codes” which let you generate time-limited codes that can be shared to allow other players to visit your house directly.

It’s important to note that when you submit to the Showcase or a Visitor Code is generated, we’re going to “snapshot” your house and that snapshot will be used to spin up a new instance for visitors browsing via the Showcase or visiting via the code. This means 1) you’re free to (re)decorate without worrying about someone showing up mid-remodel and your place being a mess, and 2) players aren’t entering “your” space and you won’t be bothered by a stream of lookie-loos checking things out while you’re washing your hair or something. These visitors will be in their own shared instance together rather than in your private one. Your actual house’s permissions will still be respected while allowing you to show off your creations.

We’re also experimenting with a Guest Book as a part of this, where players can leave pre-written notes for the owner. When the owner logs in, they’ll be able to see who visited and any notes left for them.

We’ll have more to share on the Showcase and Visitor Codes later!

Onwards!

This is just a quick look at what we’re working on right now, but there’s so much more coming your way in the coming months (and years) with Housing. As things come online and firm up, we’ll be sharing more. In the meantime, keep your feedback coming and send along any concerns you have, what excites you, and definitely keep sharing your amazing builds!