Customizing Your House

A customizable house lets you design the whole interior — walls, floors, stairs, roofs, doors, and teleporters — yourself, tile by tile, instead of living in a fixed shell. This page is the full walkthrough of the design system. For the house shells themselves and how to get one, see House Types; for the day-to-day mechanics (lockdowns, decay, vendors), see Housing.

What can be customized

Only a customizable foundation can be redesigned. When you place a foundation deed you pick the footprint (an empty platform), then build the structure on top. Classic pre-built houses (the cottage, tower, keep, castle shells) are placed as-is and cannot be freely redesigned — choose a foundation if you want to design your own layout. See the two paths on House Types.

Entering design (customize) mode

Stand in your house, open the house sign, and choose “Customize This House.” Only the owner can do this, and not while in combat (“Wouldst thou flee during the heat of battle??”). Entering design mode (HouseFoundation.BeginCustomize):

Clears the house for editing — your locked-down items are set aside, and any other players and pets inside are moved out to the sign. Stewards/mannequins are re-deeded.
Drops you into a private design view where only you see the work-in-progress; visitors outside still see the old house until you commit.

Your belongings are restored when you commit (see below).

The design tools

In design mode the client shows the House Design Tool palette. The building actions (Designer_* packet handlers in HouseFoundation.cs) are:

Tool	What it does
Walls	place wall, window, and archway pieces around the footprint
Floors / tiles	lay floor tiles (and the various floor materials)
Stairs	place stairs that connect one story to the next
Roofs	place roofing pieces (Samurai-Empire roof system: pitch and height per piece)
Doors	place house doors — tracked as fixtures (see below)
Teleporters	place paired teleporters — also fixtures, used to link floors
Eraser / Delete	remove the piece under the cursor
Level	switch which story you are editing (see below)
Synchronize	re-sync the design view with the server if it drifts

Doors and teleporters are fixtures: the foundation tracks them as a set and rebuilds them around your walls, so you place them with the door/teleporter tools rather than as loose items.

Stories (levels)

A foundation supports multiple stories, set by its footprint (HouseFoundation.MaxLevels):

3 stories for normal foundations, 4 stories if the plot is 14 tiles or larger in either dimension.
Each level sits 20 z apart (GetLevelZ), and you switch between them with the Level control while designing.
Use stairs to walk between adjacent floors, or teleporters to jump between any two (handy for towers and split layouts). A roof tops the structure.

Committing, backing up, and reverting

Designing is non-destructive until you commit. The design tool gives you:

Backup — save a checkpoint of the current design.
Restore — roll the design back to your last backup.
Revert — discard all changes and return to the last committed house.
Clear — wipe back to the empty foundation to start over.
Commit — finalize the design, rebuild the real house, and restore your items.

When you commit, items that were set aside come back; anything that no longer fits the new layout is dropped into a moving crate inside the house (BaseHouse.MovingCrate) for you to re-place. Because moving a wall can shift where a decoration lands, expect to re-place some locked-down décor after a big redesign — see Decorating.

What it costs

Activating customize mode is free on this shard (CustomizationCost is 0 under AOS; it was a flat 10,000 gold only on pre-AOS rules).
Committing a design charges gold from your bank equal to the price of the new design minus the price of the old one (HouseFoundation commit logic). A bigger or more elaborate layout (more walls, floors, fixtures) costs more; if you simplify a design, the difference is refunded to your bank instead (“~~1_AMOUNT~~ gold has been withdrawn from / deposited into your bank box.”).
You therefore need the gold in your bank to commit an upgrade — if you can’t afford the difference, the commit won’t go through.

A practical workflow

Empty the house first (or accept that loose décor lands in the moving crate). Bank anything you don’t want disturbed.
House sign → Customize This House.
Build floor by floor: lay floors, raise walls, add doors, then place stairs (or teleporters) to connect levels, and finish with a roof. Use the Level control to move between stories.
Backup often so a misstep is one Restore away.
When happy, Commit (pay the difference) — or Revert to throw it all away.
Re-place décor from the moving crate and decorate with the Interior Decorator.