Deceptively Spacious

This was going to be the post where I showed off the newly-decorated interior of my house in Villagers and Heroes. Things are never as simple as you think they're going to be, are they?

Even though I posted about it back when it was announced and even tipped the news to MassivelyOP, I still managed to miss the arrival of real housing in the game by a week. The long-awaited update finally dropped on 15 May. Well, almost. Given the update's called Homestead Part One, I'm guessing it's still a work in progress, even now.

Let's not carp. It's a very substantial upgrade to the existing housing system, which was perhaps unique in the genre in that you could own a house that you couldn't enter. You had to be content with admiring it from the garden, where you were free to tend crops and raise animals. 

You can still do those things, of course, but now, when you've finished your day's work, you can open the front door and step inside for a well-earned rest, on your bed or in your fireside chair. Or you will be able to, once you've bought or crafted yourself some furniture. 

Needs updating. No mention of interior design.

And that's where this falls down. I'd forgotten I'd only just started my character on the Steam version of Villagers and Heroes. At Level 3, getting hold of any furniture at all proved a lot harder than I was expecting.

I used to have a character who was in the twenties or thereabouts. She had a house, a garden, some sheep and who knows what-all. She probably also had the skills to gather materials and craft the furniture as well, not to mention enough money to buy the recipes and maybe some vendored furnishings as well. .Sadly, I've long since lost the account details needed to log her in.  

My current character didn't have any of those advantages. Fortunately, you don't need any of that to "buy" a basic house in V&H. All you have to do is ask. 

First, you have to choose which village you want to live in. 

How is Agartha Spanish, exactly? Remind me...

 

Without reading up on it (Again.) I can't recall the exact mechanics of how Villages are created but there are lots of them, some run by some kind of player council, others by Guilds. I picked one I liked the name of - Agartha Hamlet - because it reminded me of The Agartha in The Secret World. 

It turned out to be named after the ancient ruins of the mythical Spanish city of the same name. I'm guessing it's run by a Spanish-speaking village council. That'll be handy for practicing my very basic tourist Spanish in the unlikely event I ever have to speak to anyone.

I found a decent spot and clicked on the "To Let" board. There are plenty of options for various sizes and styles of building but only one I could afford - the one that costs absolutely nothing:  the Rustic. It's a wonky-looking structure, with a crooked chimney and a bowed roof but it's by no means unattractive, especially for no money down and a monthly rent of bugger all.

That chimney's never up to code.

Even though there's no rent to pay, you can't just sign the lease and forget about it. If you don't want to come back and find yourself homeless you have to make sure to log into the game at least once a fortnight. What happens to your stuff if you don't, I have no idea. 

And for the moment I don't much care, either, because I have no stuff. The inside of my new house is delightfully minimalist right now. Nothing but bare boards and whitewash. 

When I took possession and opened the door, I found just a single, windowless room but I wasn't at all disappointed. It's a big room with a very high ceiling and some quite impressive beams. Like the TARDIS, it's bigger on the inside than the out.

Pretty sure you could put four of my house inside my house.

Once I'd taken stock of the amenities (There are none.) I thought I'd go see what the housing vendors had to offer me. I'd read in the update notes that there were two new NPCs:

• Lazy Susan - ‘Housing Expert’ located in villages
• Supellex Copia - ‘Housing Vendor’ located in villages, Ardent City, and Summer’s Hollow

The quotation marks around "Housing Expert" were a little concerning, but although Lazy Susan seemed like a bit of a smartass, she did at least know what she was talking about. She explained the various ways I could furnish my house - buy stuff from vendors in the game, find it while exploring or get a few choice pieces from the cash shop - but her recommendation was that I craft my own.

Sarcastic Susan, more like.

 

That seemed like sound advice. She even gave me a starter quest to make a very basic stool, which sounded like something I ought to be able to do. 

Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

It took me a little while to find the recipe and when I did I barely had enough cash to buy it, even though it had clearly been priced at what was meant to be an absolute giveaway price. It brought home to me just how very new and unpayed my character was and how I was almost certainly going to be in over my head very quickly indeed unless I went and did some seriousl levelling.

I bought the recipe for one silver piece. That left me with two. Then I checked the map and found the woodworking station. I went there and opened the interface, only to find I couldn't even scribe the recipe I'd bought until I had a Woodworking skill of 15. Mine was zero.

At least I was able to see what mats I needed: 240 logs. Seems like an awful lot of wood for one small stool but who am I to judge, me with a woodworking skill of zero? Off to chop trees I went!

Except I didn't have the skill to chop wood either, or not in the woods around my village, anyway. The lowest level tree in Agartha Hamlet is Level 30 and my skill was five. I chopped and chopped but not a splinter could I make. I had to go back into Summer's Hollow, the starting town, to the portal for the lowest level area I could find, which turned out to be somewhere called Gandymeade Grove.

There I found not only trees my level but trainers of all kinds, willing to give instruction on how to chop wood, mine ore and similar essentials. As I tracked down the nodes I needed I was frequently set up on by the local wildlife, wargs and the like, all of which I handily dispatched, earning myself a couple of adventure levels and pretty much a full set of Hunter's leathers in the process. 

I was having such a good time, I did the full circuit of the Grove, hunting down and slaying all the named creatures marked on the map. In V&H you get to kill each of them once a day for a big XP bonus and an enhanced chance at their good loot. It's a nice version of the traditional daily quest.

After all that, I was still only Level 10 at Plant Lore, the gathering skill that covers the cutting down of trees. As for woodworking, I hadn't even started.

At this rate it's going to be weeks before I can come here and post proud pictures of my tastefully-decorated country cottage. I did try to cheat by going into someone else's house and getting some screenshots of their furnishings but although the default setting is Open Access for All, just about everyone in Agartha Hamlet has changed that to Private. The only houses I found that were admitting visitors were as bare inside as my own.

Consider this a work in progress, then. Much like the Homestead feature itself. A good start but with more to come. If I remember to log in, that is. If not, I guess I'll find out the hard way what happens to your funiture when you don't.