- Author: Luxrah
- Date: March 12, 2025
- Updated: March 12, 2025
- Expansion: World of Warcraft
Last month, Blizzard gave us a sneak peek at the upcoming Player Housing system for World of Warcraft, with a look at some concept art and how neighborhoods will work. Today we have a new, more in-depth preview of the feature that focuses on the nuts and bolts of decorating your new home in Azeroth.
There will be two different modes for decorating: Basic and Advanced. Basic mode lets you plop items down with a simple and intuitive snapping system that should make it easy to place your furniture and decor without having to spend too much time manipulating it. Advanced mode offers much greater control and complexity, allowing players to rotate, scale, and position items with much greater precision.
You’ll be able to decorate your house with many existing items that you can see already in NPC houses throughout World of Warcraft. There will also be new assets created just for this system, and these newer items will have many options for color variations. The example shown is a bed on which you can select the color of the wood, the metal, and the fabric for the bedding. On top of placing items you’ll also be able to select different walls, ceilings, and floors. You can mix and match from all different sets as well.
The interior and exterior of your house will be unconnected, so you can choose to have the outside look however you like and the same for the inside. In the preview images, we can see what appears to be a capacity limit in the upper-right corner of the UI, likely determining how much stuff you are allowed to place inside your home.
When selecting an item to place in one of the videos, we can see 6 categories along the left side:
- A table and chair icon, likely for standard furniture items
- An icon showing a painting, probably for wall decorations
- An icon showing bricks being laid, possibly for selecting walls, floor, and ceiling
- A candelabra icon, which may indicate items that specifically cast light
- A flower pot, probably for smaller decor items
- A sixth icon that is a little bit harder to make out, but seems to indicate some sort of effects
There are also five icons along the bottom of the UI:
- A hand icon that most likely toggles on Basic Mode for moving items around
- An axis icon that opens Advanced Mode for rotating, scaling, and other fine-tuned placement
- A palette icon that says Customize Mode which is used to select colors and may have other functions
- A broom icon that says Cleanup Mode when the cursor hovers over it – perhaps for quickly removing items, or a special tool for development
- An open chest icon for getting a top-down view of your house
In the top-down view, we can see the layout of a house that says “Room Limit: 2/10” and “Floor: 0” in the upper right corner as well as “Square – Large” in the middle, indicating that we can expect varying sizes and layouts for player homes.
Blizzard concludes the preview with a promise of more information coming soon, with specific mentions of how professions fit in and how you can show off your collections inside your house.
Welcome home, Adventurers!
In our previous Housing article, we shared a high-level overview of our plans and philosophies. This time around, we are getting concrete and discussing specifics for decoration systems. It allows us to not only show off some of what’s possible but also to answer some of the common questions and concerns we’ve seen come up from the community.
A couple disclaimers:
- This article only focuses on interior decoration systems and only in a single room. There’s still plenty to cover beyond the basics of decoration, but that’s for another time.
- We’re going to show you a lot of work-in-progress assets and UIs as well as using some terms that are not finalized, so please focus more on the functionality and less on the details of just how specific things look or sound just yet.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about decoration in Housing!
Getting Down to the Basics
Decoration has two primary modes, Basic and Advanced, and you can freely toggle between them at any time while decorating with a keypress.
Basic mode allows you to quickly place (or remove) objects and move them around while keeping their movements somewhat constrained to make putting something together quick and easy. It has a number of rules in place to help with this:
- Decor can be moved around on the ground and will move on top of things as it bumps into them or down to the ground as they reach the edge. This lets you move around and have them interact in the expected way .
- Decor can be rotated around its “up” axis with rotation snapping to 15 degree increments so objects don’t accidentally unalign with other objects as you rotate them.
Basic movement for object placement. (All UI shown is subject to change.)
- Decor has collision with other pieces of decor as well as the floor, wall, and ceilings and players are unable to move decor through other things. No losing things in the walls!
- Decor will align to the floor, wall, or ceiling depending on what sort of decor it is (e.g. a rug will align with the floor, while a painting will align with the wall). If you move it around a corner, it will continue to align properly. This also means decor will snap to the ground if you move it off something.
Basic snap placement on surfaces. (All UI shown is subject to change.)
- Certain types of smaller decor will “parent” to certain types of larger decor when placed on top of them. This means when you move the larger decor, the smaller decor moves along with it. This allows you to, for example, place books on a bookshelf and then move the whole shelf instead of having to move everything individually.
Example of items being placed on a “parent” object.(All UI shown is subject to change.)
- Players can show a grid and enable “snapping” which will snap decorations to the points on the grid, helping you keep everything neat and tidy. It will even shrink down when you’re placing something on a smaller surface like a table.
Advanced Interior Design
“But that’s so restrictive!” we hear you saying. Don’t worry, just switch to Advanced mode and feel the true power at your fingertips! Advanced mode effectively turns off a lot of the rules of Basic mode but also offers up additional tools of its own as well.
- Decor has no collision in Advanced mode. Want to push a chair into the wall? Enjoy!
Advanced Clipping (All UI shown is subject to change.)
- You can enable gimbals (little 3d controls on objects) which will let you move objects on all three axis, including floating them up into the air without having to jump through hoops.
A gimbal is a pivoted support that permits rotation of an object about an axis.
Advanced Floating (All UI shown is subject to change.)
- A different gimbal can be used to rotate an object freely on ANY axis as well.
Advanced Rotation (All UI shown is subject to change.)
- Finally, a third gimbal can scale an object’s size up and down (within some generous limits), making something smaller or giant.
Advanced mode lets you interact and design things with very specific controls to make whatever your heart may desire. Internally using this, employees have taken bushes and made them into garland for their fireplaces, constructed a boat’s prow from a bed, or made paint buckets into small spice racks for their kitchens.
We’ve been DYEING for Housing
In addition to the decoration modes, we wanted to call out some other functionalities and choices we’ve made, some because they’re cool and worth sharing, and others because they directly answer some of the questions we’ve seen since the first article went up.
For newly created assets (as opposed to legacy ones from existing art), we’re allowing players to dye them a variety of colors, so if you find a chair but wish the upholstery was blue instead of grey, you can make that change. But what if the blue doesn’t match the stain of the wood or color of the metal now? Well, you can fix that as well!
Make your space your own with living color. (All UI shown is subject to change.)
But that’s not all!
It’s not just decorations you use to customize your space, but the wallpaper, ceiling and flooring as well. You can mix and match these to elicit various cultures and vibes or just make up your own. You can take things a step further too and use “partition” objects to build walls where none were before, letting you make rooms with arbitrary interiors.
House Layout from above. (All UI shown is subject to change.)
Speaking of mixing and matching, we saw a lot of questions around what would be allowed in terms of decor. Inside your home, you can decorate however you want, so if you want Blood Elf wallpaper with a stone roof and wooden floor, go for it.
Before we go (outside)
While we’re not really talking about exteriors in this article, it’s worth mentioning that the outside size of your house has no bearing on how big the interior is. If you want a huge mansion outside with just one room inside or a tiny shack on the outside but a dozen rooms inside, you do you.
We’ll share more about the exteriors for your home later though!
There’s so much more to discuss with decorations (“Where do we get stuff?”, “How do I show off my collection of transmogs, pets, and mounts?”, “How do Professions fit in?”, and more) never mind Neighborhoods, and we can’t wait to share more. Please keep sending us your feedback and we’ll keep building, but in the meantime here’s another screenshot a team member made mixing some various styles.
We look forward to sharing more with you as we continue to give you more insights on the new Housing system.
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