Homes and Castles FAQ

[Lady_Rachel]

1. Buying/Selling a House

* Trial accounts cannot place *

The buyer and seller stand under the house sign.
The seller brings up the house sign menu, under ownership he chooses Trade House. Clicking this he then targets the buyer.
The buyer will get a gump reminding him that on completion of purchase all existing homes will become condemned. (Only one home is allowed per account unless grandfathered homes are involved.)
A trade window will open and a blue deed will appear.
The buyer then places the check/checks for purchase in the trade window.
When all parties are happy the trade is completed.
The buyer should be able to access the house sign by double clicking the sign post and getting the house menu which will confirm that the transfer is complete.






If you own more than one home, meaning you have an account that has grandfathered houses on it, note that selling your houses does not make you loose the grandfathered status of the remaining, in fact it does absolutely nothing to your account. It is safe to sell. No house timer is set, nor removed by selling a house. If you have an account with multiple homes across different shards, or even the same, or if you just own one home, you should be aware of ways you can loose them:

1. Acquiring a new house on any shard will cause your established homes to become condemned.
2. If you try to upgrade the plot size of one of your established homes, the other houses on all shards will become condemned.*
3. Setting one of your established homes status to a Primary house will cause your other homes to become condemned.
4. Non-payment of the account for longer than 90 days will cause all your homes to become condemned.

 

[Lady_Rachel]

2. Placing a house



Using a house placement tool to place, you will have only so many attempts to place before the housing tool locks you out. The amount of times is random. Once locked out there is a cool down time that is also random before you will be allowed to place again. Using a new tool will not circumvent the cool down timer. This was instituted to stop scripters from placing.

1. Terrain must be even.
2. Obstacle free outer perimeter of the house.
3. 5 tiles free on the North and South side of the house.
4. Things you normal cannot place a house foundation on.
5. West and East side spacing

Even Terrain
To get a good understanding of what a foundation is, you can do this experiment, go to any house West or East side, and turn up your circle of transparency option to 200. then take a look at the house, you’ll notice the tiles of the house directly next to you are visible but beyond that you can see the terrain the house is on. If you walk completely around the outside of the house you will see the entire foundation. This foundation has to be placed on even terrain, no part of the foundation can be elevated higher/lower than another. However the inside foundation can be uneven to an extent.
Log cabins may have the advantage when placing over tough terrain with hills, maybe OSI intended this to be so, think on this, you have to walk up 2 or 3 tiles to get to the door, so the floor is a whole 2-3 tiles above ground.

Obstacle free outer perimeter of the house



If you look at the image above, the outer perimeter is in red, you must be able to walk this perimeter without being stopped by some object.
This perimeter has been known to be the beginning of a drop in a hill.

Tiles free on the North and South side of the house.

Also from looking at the above image, you have the 5 tile rule being shown in yellow. This area can have really anything in it, except for other houses, and some in game objects.

The blue is where some house combination allow placement. It is not a guarantee, but it may be a possibility. Below is an example of what I mean.



Here I am using a Villa and a Small Marble. The most important thing to remember is not to invade the 5 tiles directly to the South of the house or to the north with your house, nor should you invade the 1 tile directly East or directly West of the house. The Blue/Red tiles represent the mixture of the 1 tile to the EAST for the Marble and the 5 tiles to the North for the Villa, both houses are using the area to supplement their requirements.
Things you normal can’t place a house foundation on but can be within the footprint

If you cannot walk threw it, a foundation cannot be on it. That is pretty much the rule. Some flowers can also prevent a foundation from working also. If you’ve traveled around enough, you may see a foundation appear to be on top of the flower, however the flower graphic is simply overlapping the tile.

A thing to keep in mind, walk threw objects are not a 100% thing either way, try to place on top, and if that does not work, simply make the house foundation larger and cause the object in question to become part of the inside of the house where it is less of an issue.



This is a prime example of what I am meaning.. the picture above has circled the objects that can be inside the foundation.

Notice I have a rock of good size, a lot of flowers and a small hill. All of which fit nicely into the inside of a houses footprint.





These are some of the plants that can be within the footprint.

Since AoS, some people have also manage to place the small patches of crystals (not the large ones), into and right under the foundation of the house.


West and East side spacing

Take a look at Figure 1.1 and Figure 1.2

In figure 1.1 you can see the problem people are having, they think the gap in front of ghost Flippy is wide enough to walk through, while in fact it is not. They are not the only ones, the land survey tool used to say this is a valid spot, as long as all the other requirements were met.


Figure 1.1


Figure 1.2

Figure 1.2 is the correct spacing gap and it is a must to have. The only time you will see houses close like Figure 1.1p is in Felucca.

 

[Lady_Rachel]

Vendors: How often do they pay themselves a day? How do I get rid of one I own? How do I get rid of one I do not own but is in my house?

Vendors can be purchased for placement in your house through a banker NPC, who will carry both vendor placement deeds (white deed) and vendor rental contracts (red deed). The vendor placement deed is for use by the house owner for personal vendors, while the rental contract is made for others that want to place vendors in your establishment.

To use a deed, just stand where you want the vendor to be and double click the deed. The vendor will appear right where your avatar is standing. If your clicking on a rental contract, the deed will fall to the floor and lock itself down. Now double click the contract, choose the rental period, rent charged and decide if you want it to renew or not. Once you have made your selections, then you can target the player that you want to offer the contract to. Remember, both players must set the contract to renew if the vendor is to stay on after the initial rental period expires.

After placing a vendor in your house, and stocking it, you say Vendor Status or double click on the vendor to bring up the vendor menu. On this menu, you will find information on how many real world days the vendor can sustain itself on the gold held in its account, as well as how much it charges per day and how much gold it has on it.

To remove a vendor that you own, empty out its pack of all goods contained on the vendor and remove any gold that it may be holding. Once the vendor is empty you can either let it time out or just click dismiss vendor on the menu.
If it’s a rented vendor, and the contract has been set to renew by both parties, the only thing you can do is set it to not renew on the Landlord end of the contract and wait out its timer. Currently, Gm’s will not remove vendors from your house.

To get a vendor to face the way you wish stand in front of it and say the vendors name, and browse. Or go into customize the vendor mode and when done it should face you.


******Warning******
There is currently a bug with a Vendor placed on the edge of the steps of a tower, when going into customization of the plot without removing the vendor first.
As quoted from Maplestone who was kind enough to test this out when it hit another player who had lost considerable gold on his vendor when it poofed.

"Just to make sure I understood what you are talking about ... I reproduced the following situation: place a tower, place a vendor at the tip of the steps, customize to custom plot ... the vendor now sits just off the new stairs. Click on the vendor and he disappears. In my test, a backpack was left on the ground containing the cloths, contract and for-sale goods. The gold from the vendor however appears to go poof (I only had a few k on it and forgot to check before-and-after balances to see if it attempted to deposit it in the bank)."

If customizing your tower, take down any vendors first!

 

[Lady_Rachel]

Is there a list of footprints for houses?
Yes, there is. * Keep in mind as well, that accounts upgraded to the Mondain’s Legacy expansion pack receive a 20% bonus to their total house storage. *

 

[Lady_Rachel]

How do I create a custom roof?
Sarsmi has created an excellent FAQ regarding roof building and designs, which can be found here Sarsmi's Roofing FAQ

 

[Lady_Rachel]

What is this Housebuilder program I hear about?
Housebuilder is a offline program created by Kurgan that allows the user to design and build thier house outside of the game. The program can be downloaded Here.

 

[Lady_Rachel]

Housing Security
There aren’t many issues these days with house security, with the changes over the years that have been implemented in game. Years ago, if someone stole your house key, they also got your house.

Today there are only a few things you should be careful of in regards to house security. The first and most important is to always use the detect hidden skill before you unlock anything of value in your public house. You don’t even need to have skill points in the skill to use it in your own house with 100% success. This simple step will nearly eliminate the possibility of you falling victim to a thief standing hidden in your house waiting for you to unlock that mega rare.

Another thing to remember is to include the northwest corner pole tile when designing your house. Without this tile in place, it leaves a small gap in the corner of the walls, in which a magical creature can teleport into the house and attack you at the most inconvenient times (like when you just logged in with your crafter character).

 

[Lady_Rachel]

Remember there are permanent objects in the game that can prevent you from placing a house, that are in no short order:

1. Other houses. (see House Spacing)
2. Rocks, logs, twigs, water.. objects that you cannot walk over basically, these objects cannot be directly under the foundation of your home, stairs, or within 1 tile of the outside of the foundation. (see House Foundation Rules )
3. No housing Zones. If you get a message saying “Housing cannot be created in this area.”, then it is a no housing zone for a number of possible reasons:
   a. Its in a guarded zone.
   b. Next to an entrance that needs to be free of houses.
   c. It’s a spawn zone.
   d. It’s open land, somepeople call it landscape.
   e. Its land in Malas that is being reserved for possible future housing.
4. Water barrels that have water in them, you will need to empty those out.
5. House Add-Ons that did not disappear after a house either A-Fell, or B-Demolished. (see IDOC Camping)
6. The mask of ships have been known in the past to prevent houses from placing.
7. Dead corpses that you can walk under.
8. Gradient Hills that are more than 1 tile taller than the foundation, there are exception to this.
9. Uneven terrain directly under the foundation of the house.
   (see Foundation)

Some things to keep in mind:

Objects that can not be walked over now apparently can be within one tile of the INSIDE of the foundation. I have done this a few times myself, in the past before AoS, it was a rarity that I could place with an object up against the inside foundation of a home. This is good news, really. Just don’t bank on it completely.


Placing a house

Once you find a area of land in which you believe a house can fit, double click a house placement tool . Select the size you feel could fit. Keeping the list of blocking objects in mind, start with the smallest possible foundation and then work your way up. If you reach a size that fits, don’t stop trying to get larger, keep going until it is invalid.

When you get your first invalid, you’ll need to find out if it is due to terrain, landscape, or housing. If it is terrain, or a small hill you may be able to keep going in size, moving the terrain to within the inside of your foundation. If it is a house, you may need to stop, or try expanding north to south opposed to going east to west or vis-versa.

Once you are satisfied with the size of the plot, simply click ‘Okay’ on the warning gimp that comes up. You will have the dirt plot there ready for you to Customize!

 

[Lady_Rachel]

The Large Tower and the mystery of the wings.



The questions have been asked many times. "'Can you explain the footprint of a large tower" or "'what is the deal with the wings" or perhaps you are thinking of buying a few houses near you and upgrading to a large tower. Well, you're not the first. This is to help you decide if you want to take the risk of upgrading. On this page we'll use a large tower as an example.
Let's first setup a tower's footprint by placing colored clothing around where the foundation should be, along with a few other tricks.

First I arrive and place the pieces of cloth all around the foundation of the house. (I call these Markers) Figure 6.1

I had to work a bit on the wings, the South side is easy until I try to figure out when to stop! How?
First I got up next to the wall on the East Side Corner
Figure 6.2 Notice how you can see inside of the tower, and that there is no support beam above me? Next I take 2 steps forward Figure 6.3 Now you can see the support beam of the wing! The support beam acts like the foundation does, It is picky about what can be under it. Next, I lay down a few Blue pieces of clothing to mark the area under the wing. But the question is how do I know where to stop? How do I know where the edge of the wing is? It's easy; I take one step forward.. Figure 6.4
Now I see the wing in its wholeness, my theory is this 'While I am under the foundation I will only see parts of the foundation. Once I'm out from under it I see all of the wing.' Using this theory I place my white pieces of cloth on the tiles going South to North, in other words, the tiles I'm standing on in the Figure 6.2 thru 6.4


Figure 6.1



Figure 6.2Figure 6.3


Figure 6.3


Figure 6.5

In Figure 6.5 I place blue markers under the west wing also. Now we take our markers to the Rook and Mark the Wings.
To the right on Figure 6.6 I have placed Yellow Markers for what I note has the floor of the east wing. I also placed Red markers on the outer foundation. When the tower is taken down, the theory is the yellow will fall on top of the inner Blue markers on the ground, the red should fall on the outer blue markers on the ground because those outer blue markers represent the outer foundation of the wing. Well when the tower was deeded the Yellow markers fell right where I thought they would, the Red markers however stayed where they where, due to being on the foundation and not on the floor.


Figure 6.6

The next step is re-deeding the house.. Even on the Test Rewards 1 Shard, the shard that has time warped every night, I felt nervous deeding the place... BUT I did!.

After deeding I had sort of a panic attack. Someone out of the blue showed up, and I wanted to deed the tower to see the stuff moved out of the way, so I was quick in taking pictures, and then I placed the house in the same spot. Kinda easy when the outline is already there.

Notice the Red Markers? They all got put under the sign, since they were 'floating' in the air, and did not fall to the ground.


Figure 6.7


Figure 6.8


Figure 6.9

Figure 6.10

This testing, laying of clothing and deeding, has created a footprint for us to use when placing a house. Although there are still some question has to what plants can be under the wings and on the white marker area, it is still useful just to know if you have the space or not. I took a picture of the ground after the house was deeded. I show this to you know, but with a lot of lines that represent the conclusions I came to.

Remember :
Don't test deeding your house while the server is saving. Wait until it has stopped saving and then try.



Figure 6.11

Unlike its smaller version, a small tower, the large tower is not a "perfect" square or rectangle. It is composed of rectangles. 3 to simplify.
Going from South to North we have

1. he stairs leading to the front door
2. The largest rectangle after the stairs that includes the wings foundation, known to me has the front half.
3. The back part.

We can simply say that including the stairs and 'free for walking' tiles around foundation, a towers footprint is
26 West to East by 18 North to South (26x18)
But we do not live in the land of ample space. So let's take a closer look at the footprint.

The Black line is the outer foundation for a large tower, this is including the wings.
The Bright Green line is front side of the tower, the Blue is the back side.
You should consider the footprint to be the following : 26x9 + 18x7
The front side rectangle is 26x9 and the back side is 18x7
I've numbered it all for ya..
Heck you can even make your own outline in minutes. Just reference my picture for the inner corners and your set!
Figure 6.11 Legend

1. Black Line = Foundation
   Black line surrounded by Blue = Inner Foundation
   Clothing Squares Required the area be walk over able. (free walking area)
   Clothing Squares with 2 Red Bars = Inner Required free walking area.
   Clothing Squares with Black Dots = Grey area with Rules.
   Green rectangle = Front side of tower
   Blue Rectangle = Back Side of tower.
   Yellow and Blue Clothing Squares = Defined Later.

A few rules to recap..

The foundation cannot have any house blocking terrain, this includes uneven terrain, some plants, most rocks, and the bumpy area of a fallen log.

The tiles directly outside of the foundation (the white markers) require that a person be able to walk through anything that might be on the square.

Other houses need to be clear of your tower by 5 tiles on the North and South facing walls, this rule applies to the wings also. If a house is on the same tile lines as your stairs are, (the middle 2 tiles on the stairs that are right in front of the doors) your tower will need to be 6 tiles away from the house, not 5.

Some ground objects that normally block house placement have been know to be under the clothing squares marked with black dots, such as small rocks and bushes.

 

[Lady_Rachel]

Resizing your Home


PLAN...PLAN...PLAN
before resizing.

Once the plot is bare you should have a good idea if something bigger will fit and where to place it. Your housing tool will only allow you so many times to attempt to place before locking you out and requiring a cool off time. The number of times you can use your tool before it locks up is random, and the cool off time after it locks can be random also. If the tool should lock a second time it will take longer to cool off. Using a new tool with that character will not circumvent the cool off timer.


Resizing

Resizing will give you a 1 hour window of time when no one else can place at that spot.

You need to move everthing out of the house first. Move it to another house, bank box, beetles, boats, friends, etc. When you resize you home it is like an IDOC. Everything falls to the ground and is freely lootable.

With a housing tool in your backpack stand near your house sign and say, " I wish to resize my house". It will disappear.
You now have 1 hour to replace a home undisturbed.

Tips

* You may want to try placing a larger home on the same site on the Test Center first, or check the spot on different shards to see if a larger home fits there....keep in mind each shard is a little different in terrain. What fits on one will not necessarily fit on another.

*If you have UO Assist use the UO Automap to walk off the dimensions of your larger plot. Determine where the center of the front wall of your new home should be and be sure to show your cursor coordinates. This way when the house drops you can walk right to the spot where your house should fit.

* If you don't have UO Assist use items to mark where you think the new perimeters of your plot should be. It will make the placing quicker.


* You cannot resize if you have items in your moving crate.

 

[Lady_Rachel]

A special thanks to Flippy and all the builders and decorators that have over the years compiled the basis of this faq.