Decorating your home

As you survey the bare, echoeing halls of your recently built dream home, you are probably wondering how to make the place a bit more livable.

Good news! Decorating your home does not have to be expensive. If your finances are a bit tight after splurging on a lavish new abode, you can save money and gather raw materials yourself, purchase a few inexpensive things from the shops in town, grow a few plants, and you are all set.

More good news: recent changes have brought new interesting items such as rugs, tapestries, lamp posts, granite tables, and plants, with which to deck our halls. These items can be obtained from crafters, as rewards for completing bulk orders, or by the adventurous types in dungeon Doom.

If you fancy something that no crafter can make, such as a stylish fish tank, comfy couch or a cozy fireplace, don’t despair! With a bit of creativity, you can build all of these things and more out of common household items. A look at the tips page and the Decorating Ideas will help you and perhaps give you ideas for your own creations.

Tools of the Trade

You don’t need a lot to start decorating your home:

• The single most useful tool is the Interior Decorator tool , that allows you to raise, lower and turn locked-down items. You can obtain these from the Architects in most carpentry shops in town, for about 10.000 gold. Though a bit pricey, you’ll find this tool invaluable for your decorating efforts.
• Another useful item is a hatchet , to remove add-ons or trash barrels with. If you remove an add-on, you will receive back the deed for it.
• It’s very handy to have a craftsman on hand, and sufficient tools and raw materials for him or her to work with.
• Being able to recall or gate to town and back will prove convenient, as you’ll aways find that you will need a few odds and ends from the shops in town.
• It’s a good idea to have a dye tub and a few dyes on hand. A furniture dye tub should not be hard to come by either.

Using the Interior Decorator is easy. This tool operates in one of tree modes, Up, Down, or Turn. Double-click the tool and targeting a locked-down item will raise, lower or turn the item according to the mode that the decorator’s tool is set to. The Turn function is useful for making chairs and such face the right way around a table.

When you use the tool for the first time, you will be presented with the menu to set the desired mode. You can bring up this menu and change the mode again, by using the tool on itself.

Decorating rules

There are a few rules to keep in mind when decorating your home.

• You can lock down blocking objects near stairs or doors, since the Age of Shadows.

• Home-grown plants are a bit tricky: you can walk through some of them, but not through others.

• You cannot raise items more than 15 ‘clicks’ above the floor or lower them below the floor when using the decorator tool (but see the tips page for additional information).

• If you attempt to place a house add-on that comes in deed form, the item appears in the tile you have clicked, extending southwards or eastwards (depending on the orientation of the item). An item that is said to be ‘facing east’ will run north-south, ie. with its longest side facing east. Similarly, an add-on ‘facing south’ will be turned with its longest side facing south, like in the images below:

  
  

  If you place an add-on in the wrong spot, or if you just wish to remove a previously placed add-on, simply use a hatched and target the add-on. It will disappear and the deed for the add-on will be returned to you in your backpack.

The last rule is more like a suggestion, presented with the risk of being accused as the ‘style police’.

It is hard to give examples of things that are ‘wrong’ by definition: what may seem wrong to one person might be just the thing that another person is trying to achieve. It would be very strange to have an otherwise normal-looking house with one room filled with bones and blood…. unless you’re Bluebeard. An evil wizard would not be living in a pinkish ‘my little pony’ house… unless he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s evil.

Make good use of color and pay attention to the effect of a particular piece on the look and feel of your house: a regular granite table looks okay in a sandstone house, but if your place is built out of white marble, such a table will make the place look even colder than it already seems. Likewise, torches look very good in dressed stone houses such as the pre-build small and large towers, but in the Tudor style houses one would expect the more civilised lanterns.

Try to set the purpose of each rooms as you would in your real house. You probably wouldn’t have guests entering the house through the bedroom or through a workshop. Having your dining hall on the ground floor and the kitchen on the 3rd floor would be rather inconvenient.

As in real life, the nicest looking homes are those in which the owner has achieved a good balance. A balance between the materials and colors of his house,and the furniture in it. A balance between the purpose of each room and the chosen decoration in it. The look and atmosphere of a house is a statement about the personality of the owner.