A Home of My Own

Last night, I dinged 14 in Wildstar.  I know, I know, a week ago I was level 10 so obviously I’m not making that much progress.  Though I’m not as hardcore as other bloggers who have made it almost to max level already, I am really enjoying the time I have to spend in the game.  Between work, real life, and League of Legends, I am lucky if I get an hour to play Wildstar every night.  At level 14, you finally unlock housing.  This is a game changer here, folks.  I am going in basically blind because I haven’t done much research about the housing and I certainly didn’t get this far in beta.  That means everything is new and shiny!

After you ding 14, you can take a taxi to Thayd (if you’re Exile anyway) and you will get a quest on your Holocron about housing.  It takes you to an area where you can see samples of housing already built and then you can go to your plot of land.  I was so excited to see this HUGE area for basically unlimited building!  You get plots so that you can add different structures in different areas.  Since I preordered the game, I got this awesome Rocket Ship house which you can see in the background of the screenshot above.

I’ve been collecting “FABkits” which are apparently used to build structures on your plot, but I haven’t figured out how to use them yet.  You also get a daily 24 hour XP/rep-gain buff when you visit your home, so that’s helpful.  So far, the interior of my home is looking a little sparse:

However, my costume is pretty rad isn’t it?  I think my Aurin looks so cool.   Another neat thing is that you can visit other people’s houses and check them out.  I saw some interesting things for sure, such as this one that had a full Lopp party on their plot!  How freaking sweet!

Right now, I’ve been dealing with the fact that ever since the patch, my computer is having major slow down.  Sometimes it’s low FPS like in Sylvan Glade, but other times the game chugs practically to a halt, making it look like a slide show.  I was disappointed that this was happening during my first taxi into Thayd, so I didn’t get to experience the grandeur of going into the city for the first time.  I get it on log in as well, or when I zone. It seems like it takes awhile for the game to render in all the assets.  I’m hoping I don’t have to reduce the graphics settings, because I’m currently playing on Medium and if I go much lower, it’s not going to look as gorgeous as it does now.  My PC isn’t that old or anything, so I’m hoping this is just a bug that they end up optimizing and fixing.  I would hate if my computer makes Wildstar unplayable, because it’s basically my main game right now other than LoL.

I forgot to mention that I picked up crafting as well and decided to go with Architect because I want to be able to make awesome housing furniture and decor.  However, now I just looked at this chart and I see that I need to use materials from every single gathering profession.  Yikes.  I don’t make things easy on myself do I?

Have some more screenshots: