Help, I'm stuck!

[Old Wolf]

Edit: Wow this is a long one, it's not as bad as it looks! :X

Howdy all!

I really want to get my castle organized... it's a ridiculous mess right now (and I'm starting to have trouble finding things). Anyway, my decoing abilities are somewhat limited (I'm not afraid to experiment, but to be honest, I'm just not that creative), and my organization skills are worse.

That said, what I really am hoping for is to make my castle somewhat "realistic." By that, I just mean that I'd like to cover the basic areas you would expect to find in a real castle (guard room, kitchen, dining hall, master bedroom, treasury... you get the picture). But while doing this, I very much need practicallity... or I'll just end up letting my stuff pile up where ever is convenient. :X

Things I have to have (not necessarily visible, but storage and appropriate add ons for each):
1. Crafting areas: blacksmithing, tailoring, carpentry, alchemy, cooking, and inscription. I'd like it if the areas that would share resources (IE, inscription and alchemy or blacksmithing and carpentry) are in the same general area to make grabbing easier.
2. Along those same lines, I'd like somewhere around 15-18 secures for bods. It's been a while since I've done bods, but I believe I used about that many secures for sorting. It would be very preferable to have these with their two respective crafting areas, but I can make do otherwise.
3. Armor/Wep/Jewels storage. I have a lot of jumbled items that I'll eventually sort through, what I mostly need now is just a designated area for them.
4. Somewhere to show off my older rares, daily rares, ect. Are their any cool ways folks are doing display now?
5. A place I can stock all my "easy to grab" stuff, things I might need in a hurry.
6. A place for my higher end items to sit that's fairly easy and quick to access.

Now I'll fill in what I have so far (remember this is in a castle, so that will explain my directions).
1st floor:
-Not a lot has been decided here... I was thinking of doing the bedroom to the left of the entrance since it's one of the two more annoying places to go.
2nd floor:
-In the middle I have the dining hall planned, maybe with a desk or piano, we'll see.
-To the north side I have my kitchen, on the west by the stairs I have a little pantry, to the south I have the guard room, and to the east my armory.
3rd floor:
-On the north side I have a cider press (thanks again for that idea, it's very nice looking).
-On the east and south sides are my guard towers.
-I was thinking of doing a garden in the center and a shrine of some kind on the west.

What I'm wondering then, to come down to it, does anyone have suggestions for where to put the various crafting stuff mentioned, where I should store my weps/armor/jewels (I currently have them on the first floor in chests along the north west hall, but it seems a little cluttered... just not sure how else to do it), the displays, easy to grab stuff, and my higher end stuff?
Originally I was going to put a common area in the middle of first floor... but would it look ridiculous to put my shop there instead? Should I attempt to hid the storage space, or make it part of the design?

Thank you for your thoughts, to be honest I'm a bet overwhelmed!

 

[Sarsmi]

Castles are annoying to get around in in any case. Having to open three doors just to get somewhere is a pain in the booty. So! You want to work your storage in that ground floor center room, I'm thinking. You can hide it behind the south or east walls or work it into deco. Basic storage deco is stacked chests or stacked orange boxes layered with benches. Or you can stack those short armoires, throw in a desk etc.

For bod storage: it is legal to use player vendors. This saves a great deal of space, to store a bod book you throw a bunch of gold on the vendor then put the book in their bag. Hit esc so that it is not for sale, mouse over the book to make sure it says not for sale. None of the bods inside the book should be priced.

You can disguise the use of vendors as bod storage by making them look like castle guards or putting them in various areas and dressing them up accordingly. Like a smith in the NPC smith area etc. However doing this your bod storage will be a bit spread out, so it might only be a good idea if there are a lot of bod books you don't really use that often, or if you line up the guards in maybe that center upstairs room so they are fairly convenient.

Now, you can have visible useful items in the areas you set up, such as a forge and anvil in the smithy room, you can also have these useful items hidden from view in your bottom center room, near all the storage. So basically you can craft where it is convenient but have this stuff set up for show.

I've seen some cute ways to hide forges/anvil, like by putting them under raised abbatoirs and making those into tables or even fountains, or putting the addons under raised stone tables etc. Lotta ways to hide them.

For the rares you might want to list what you want to display and then work them into your castle areas. Some thing just can't be worked in, so you might want to consider investing in some rubble display cases or making display cases of your own and then making a display area for these rares. Which area would be dependant on how many rares you need to display. You can make homemade display cases out of stacked goza mats or gozas on top of other items like decorative boxes.

 

[Old Wolf]

Great first response, a lot of good ideas in there.

I should have mentioned that I have a ladder that runs from the entrance steps (where the front door is) to the 2nd level, so the two floors are about equal in access conveniences.

I like the idea of hiding the forge and anvil for a convenience, I might have to capitalize on that. I sort of have an image of a long counter space on the first floor center area running along the west wall, with cabinets and what not. That would be kind of cool.

Any other ideas?

 

[Basara]

For my Smith BOD storage area in a custom house, I took medium tables of each granite color, one at a time, and broke them, end to end, to where each half-pedastal was 1 chest wide, then I set a paragon chest of the matching metal color on the table, for that color's BODs. I used normal tables, and (at various times) colored wood boxes or the normal, Luna and Umbra colored chests for the tailor BOD area, on two tables. You could do this down the side of one of the long hallways.

As for the forge, you could do what one person here did as a form of deco. Stack 3 small forges in one spot (using gozas to raise them), to create what looks to be a structural brick column.

 

[Old Wolf]

Is there any chance I could take a look at your castle Gamlin? I'd like to see what that looks like.

 

[Basara]

well, it's not a castle, it's a 13x15, but I'll make a quck screengrab of it.

I did it in my house, after seeing what someone did in a castle that way.

 

[Old Wolf]

That's pretty cool looking, I might have to do something like that!