When it comes to building houses, Archeage Unchained is kind of an advanced and more hardcore version of The Sims. There are countless houses, manors, farms and even badass castles that you can build across the open world. You can choose to build a house in an easy place with lots of resources, and diverse climate and environments… or choose a more hardcore location where battles often erupt!
Claiming Your Land
The first step in building your dream home in Archeage Unchained is to choose and claim the piece of land you want to build on. Throughout the entire map, there are large housing provinces and areas of land where you can settle. You can easily see most settlements on the map. However, some are unmarked and can only be found by brave explorers.
To determine which lands are desirable, you’ll need to take a lot of factors into consideration. First of all, are the housing areas in a protected zone where you can build and thrive in peace? Or are you willing to fight each time you want to enter your own home?
You also need to analyze the region’s accessibility if you plan of farming there. That means checking resources, merchants and climates. Another great advantage of certain terrains are the NPC vendor hubs. These vendors usually sell useful items, like farming seeds and farm animals.
Buying a House Design
Once you find the perfect spot for your home, buy it and travel to Mirage Isle. Here you will find NPCs with a lot of toy-sized houses sitting right by them. These houses are small representations of the real thing, to let you get a feel of what your home could look like.
Before making your purchase, make sure to see the deed details. That way, you’ll to learn more about the amount and type of resources you will need to actually build the house, once placed.
You can upgrade most of the houses you build in Archeage Unchained, which is a cool feature. You can turn a thatched farmhouses into your harvesting station, to improve those harvesting skills. Medium and large houses can support processing and production skills.
Building Your Dream House
Building in Archeage Unchained follows a simple rule: the bigger the construction, the more complex it will be to build. Farm construction is mostly all about placing a few boards together. Houses on the other hand require more materials, as well as a specific order of construction.
The materials are measured in packs, by which I mean backpacks of refined materials. These materials can be: lumber from logs, ingots from iron ore, stone bricks from raw stone, and so on. This is also the part where having friends comes in handy. A player can only carry one backpack at a time, and they restrict movement. That means low running speed and no ability to teleport or glide. By having multiple friends help you, it will speed up the entire process.
Ownership Costs
Yup, that’s right. Owning a home means paying taxes. In fact, you’ll have to pay taxes each week, and in advance!
You’ll receive a fancy in-game email bill, which will allow you to pay your debt from anywhere on the map.
The taxes are relatively small for plain houses. However, increasing to a larger house size or owning more than three properties means more taxes. These taxes will cause a HUGE dent on your (in-game) bank account!
Failing to pay the taxes for a week will result in a late payment penalty, but your home will be kept safe. However, delaying the payment 2 weeks in a row holds much more dire consequences. What do I mean by that? Well, your home will be left unprotected, and might even disappear.
That’s it! As you see, it’s quite simple to build a house in Archeage Unchained. The only hassle is the preparation and research you do beforehand, like finding the perfect piece of land and analyzing whether you have enough resources and money to afford the project. Checking whether the land is good for farming and if the area is calm or violent is also important. All of these factors play a major role in deciding which land and type of house you should buy.
Once done, you can move on to building or buying the furniture to go with it, because let’s face it: we all like a well decorated home! Then, whenever you get bored of that house design, just upgrade it or demolish it. Just remember: while the deed to the house or farm is returned to you once you demolish the house, you won’t get back the resources you invested in the house!
And keep an eye out on SQUAD, I will be writing an article on how to upgrade your home real soon!
