Wizard101, the family friendly magical MMO, has added housing fairly recently. Here’s an overview.

Every wizard starts off with a dorm room that is accessible by two different ways.

 

Just inside of Ravenwood, from the Commons, you can find the door leading to your dorm room. Or…

 

 

 

 

You can click the go home button on the bottom right of your UI. This will instantly teleport you to your currently equipped castle, or dorm room. (if you do not have a castle) If you have a castle and would like to port to your dorm room, you can do so from within your castle using the Go Home button again. The cooldown is one minute.

 

 

Regardless of which way you choose to enter your abode, the inside of the dorm room will look a bit like this:

 

The dorm room comes with a bed and bank box, these other pieces I’ve gotten from various quests — you can also get decorative items from merchants. The dorm room holds 50 items, as shown in the ‘Item Count’ above — that bar is also the UI window used to interact with your decorations, the various tabs are filters. Actual interaction with the decorations is similar to Everquest 2′s housing.

 

 

 

As you can see, on the left when an item is in a location it cannot be it will be red — to the right the item is in a correct location. Also similar to EQ2′s system is the rotation of an item while placing so you can adjust it to suit your tastes.

 

 

 

Once you hit level 15 you can purchase a castle. These are far bigger and more expensive than the dorm (which is free) but you will still keep the dorm. In fact, you can have your dorm and up to three castles! Tons of room for house items. Of note: castles have a one time fee, no rent — once you purchase it you own it and you can sell it at a later time if you choose, also you can only have one castle equipped at a time (like any other piece of gear) and that will be your primary home teleport.

To get a castle seek out the castle shop. You can find one in the shopping district.

 

As far as I know there’s different merchants in the different worlds you can go to and they’ll have different castles to buy. The one in this post is for the starting world. Regardless, you’ll need to find a merchant like this one above. Once found you can view his wares…

 

There’s two types of housing available, a Wooded Cottage for 8000 gold and the Forested Mansion for 15,000 gold. Rather expensive. The forested mansion is greyed out here since I’ve already bought it. (more on that below) If you’re short on gold you can wait or buy some crowns and trade them in to Prospector Zeke for gold. Once bought, you simply equip the castle like any other piece of gear and you’re ready to use it. I’ve got a few shots of it I’ll go through below, then talk about it some.

 

 

 

 

Ok, the actual castle portion is a theatre complete with stage and curtains. (none of it move-able as far as I can tell, but a good amount of space) The house is rather large, at least compared to the dorm room. It can hold 250 items and has 6 rooms spread over 3 floors. On the grounds of the estate you’ll find some room for outdoor decor and a nice stream that flows into a small pond with a bit of a beach.

If you really love housing and have tons of decoration items stored up — this is definitely something to look into. I can’t find many other reasons to get it besides that or for bragging rights. Well, apart from this:

 

Yup, your own World Gate so you can hop to anywhere in the spiral that you want. I’m not sure if it comes with the cheaper cottage, but I would guess so.

For a family and kid friendly freemium MMO, and even for hardcore subscription based MMOs, this is quite a nice housing system. If you haven’t given Wizard101 a try yet, I recommend it.

Tomorrow will see the Lord of the Rings Online’s housing.