Decorating Houses


 * For an overview on house ownership see Housing

Decorating a House or home is when a player makes, buys, or uses furniture to customize housing for characters in the world of Norrath. The actual activity is often referred to simply as "decorating" on the official EQ2 forums, in game Chat Channels, and on external websites that have databases of furniture and information about the activity.

For the purpose of simplicity, this article refers to the general activity as decorating, its enthusiasts as decorators, and all house items as furniture. The term "decorating system" refers to any features in the game that allow players to place furniture or customize (like changing walls and flooring) the appearance of a house.

Decorating is an activity in Everquest 2 that makes it unique when compared to other Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) in the fantasy genre. This is because EQ2 has a team of developers dedicated to this activity and the furniture created for its purpose. The decorating system and variety of furniture is robust, offering countless ways to customize housing. EQ2 has a loyal following of decorators who spend hours working on "normal" looking homes or who build incredible things like mini-cities and ships.

How to Decorate a House
In order to decorate a house you must either own the house or have the owner grant your character Friend or Trustee access. If you have access you can begin by getting furniture to place in the house.

Getting Furniture to Decorate a House
There are several way to get furniture to put in a house.
 * As of 2011 several quests were added to the low level adventuring zones and cities that give furniture as a quest reward. When you buy your first small house, you can get a quest from a NPC standing just outside of the small houses. The quest First Time Buyer will reward you with 4 furniture items for your house.
 * You can buy player made furniture on the broker.
 * If you have status points to spend, you can visit a city merchant
 * If you have sufficient Faction with the right allies, they will sell you some furniture.


 * For further details on types of furniture its function see the Housing article.

Placing Furniture
Once you have furniture in your inventory while you are inside the house, you're ready to begin placing it. To place furniture:
 * 1) Right-click on the furniture in your inventory. Doing so will bring up a list of options.
 * 2) Choose Place from the list and the furniture will appear in the room.
 * 3) Use your mouse to move it to the location you want it in.
 * 4) Left-click to set it down.

Not all items can be placed anywhere in the house. Some items are only placeable on the floor, while others must be placed on walls or the ceiling. The limits are (generally) as follow:
 * You can only place an item when it turns green
 * If an item is red you can not place it in that location

There are ways around placement limitations using the Layout Editor described later in this article.

Moving Furniture Inside a House
Once you have placed furniture you can still move it around inside the house. There are two ways to do this in EQ2.

The standard way to move items is done as follows:
 * 1) Mouse over the furniture you want to move
 * 2) Right-click on the furniture and select Move from the options list. The item will turn green when it is active.
 * 3) Move it with to the desired location with your mouse.
 * 4) Left-click to place it again.

Pressing ESC on your keybaord at any time will cancel the placement process. This is helpful if you decide that you like the original location better, because the furniture will automatically return the the previous location.

The second option for moving house items was added in early 2012. It is a special decorating system that allows for movement in smaller increments and greater control. Unlike the standard way of moving furniture, this system using a special interface. You activate and deactivate the new decorating system by pressing CTRL and E at the same time.

The new system to move things is done as follows:
 * 1) Press CTRL and E on your keyboard at the same time.
 * 2) Click on the furniture you want to move and A ring will appear in front of it. You will see 5 icons on the ring that have different functions (described after these directions).
 * 3) Choose the icon that suits they way you want to change or move the furniture.
 * 4) When you are satisfied with the change, left-click to place it.

How the 5 icons in new system allows you to move furniture:
 * Up and Down: using the icon with double arrows in red and blue (one points up,one points down)
 * Rotate items: using the icon of the circular arrow in green and gold
 * Change scale (size) of the item: using the icon of boxes with a green arrow between them
 * Return the item to your inventory using the treasure chest icon
 * Move it back and forth using the icon that looks like group of 4 arrows in green, pointing in 4 directions

All of the functions in the new system listed above are still available using the standard means of moving furniture. The following keyboard/mouse shortcuts can still be used instead:
 * Up and Down: Hold down the CTRL Key and use your middle mouse wheel to raise and lower furniture
 * Change the scale (size) of the item: Hold down the Shift Key and use your middle mouse wheel to make it smaller or larger.

Saving and Loading House Layouts
Once you are satisfied with the decoration of your house, you can save the layout. Layouts are special files that EQ2 saves that can be manipulated in a variety of ways; more details on how to manipulate layout files are described later in this article.

The Save Layout/Load Layout feature was added to make it easy to recreate the same home in a location with the same floor plan. This is helpful if you choose to move from a house that has a mixed coin and status cost, to a home that only requires a coin payment for weekly upkeep. Rather than starting from scratch you can move to the new house (as described earlier in this article) and load the new layout to automatically place everything in the same manner as the old house.

How to save a layout file You can save the layout or load it by do the following:
 * 1) Go to the (inside) front door of a house and right click on it to or type /house to open the housing window.
 * 2) Choose Access from the options that appear.
 * 3) Click on the icon with a blueprint and downward facing arrow. This will open a smaller window with a list.
 * 4) If you are saving a new layout, give it a name that's easy to remember. If you are saving the same layout again, select it from the list.
 * 5) Click the OK button to save the layout file

The process above applies to loading layouts from previous save points, except you will choose a file to load from the list, instead of creating a new name for the layout.

The Benefits of Saving Layouts
 * You can experiment with furniture placement in a house. If you don't save a new version of the layout file, you can load the old layout and you won't loose the work you have done. All of your furniture will return to the same locations you had them in before you changed the house.
 * It is not uncommon for house owners to accidentally move or pick up an piece of furniture in their house. This system allows you to replace it automatically, using the saved layout file.
 * If someone really likes the way you decorated a house, you can buy duplicate items (all the same things in your house) and use a saved layout to automatically recreate the same house. Both houses must have the same floor plan as each other for this to work

The House Layout Editor
In addition to the internal decorating systems in EQ2, a player (and decorator) named Jedsyr developed a third-party program that makes it possible to do almost anything you can dream with a house and furniture. The program is known as the Layout Editor. Though it is not officially endorsed by SOE it is widely used and/or accepted as a powerful means of creating amazing designs, with some houses created using it winning awards and appearing on the Housing Leaderboard as developer picks.

The program allows players to move things in ways that are extremely difficult or not possible otherwise, including:
 * Flipping furniture on its side.
 * Turning furniture completely upside down.
 * Turning furniture so that it sits an angle, like 45 degrees.
 * Placing one item inside of another--which is not always possible with the in-game decorating features.
 * Scaling (resize) items in decimal increments.

"Breaking Out" of a House
The term "breaking out" out "break out" is used when a decorator is able to place teleportation pad (a means of transpotation within a house) outside of the normal boundaries of the walls and floors in a house or guild hall. This has lead to several decorators creating entirely new structures in the zone surrounding the house. Breaking out can be achieved by placing a tetelportation pad in a spot where a "hole" exists in a wall or on a balcony. Once it is in the right spot a second teleportation pad is placed, so the decorator can move around in the area beyond the house.

The break out area around a house varies by its location and is (usually) the nearest zone adjacent to the housing area. For example, break outs in Gorowyn allow players to build on the hillsides and beaches of Timorous Deep and a break outs in New Halas allows players to build in the region where the New Halas dock is located.

The layout editor described in the section above made breaking out of a home even easier. The interface of the layout editor uses the coordinates for precision placement. Once a player has reported the layout coordinates on the forums or EQ2 related website, it is just a matter of putting them into the layout editor, saving the layout editor file and reloading the layout again with the telepotation pad outside of the house.

'''Warning: though use of the layout editor and breaking out is not discouraged by SOE you can loose furniture due to bugs in the program. Use the layout editor at your own risk.'''