Housing in New World is quite an exciting feature. The game is designed so that it would be accessible for everyone as the benefits are helpful for everyone playing consistently.
You have a steep hill to climb as learning how to buy a house in New World will take a ton of grinding as a new player. The requirements you need can be done simultaneously, but it will still take a lot of time.
How to Unlock Housing
There are a lot of requirements you need to meet before unlocking housing. The most common one would be the required character level to unlock the ability to purchase them. All of the other requirements will be listed below.
Level Requirement
You need to reach at least level 15 to unlock the ability to purchase a house. It may sound easy but once you reach level 15, you still need the other requirements which will be harder to achieve.
This is why you should not focus that much on your level if you really want to rush to buy a house. You will reach level 15 in no time without even trying to do so, but you would still need a good number of other hours to finish the other requirements.
Money, Money and More Money
For purchasing houses, you will need a lot of coins. This is why many players opt for the cheapest house in New World. The number of houses in New World cost depends on the type of lot/house you are buying. If you go around the town, you can inspect each of these houses before purchasing. The larger the New World house price will be.
The New World first house discount applies if you’re one of the earliest players to buy a house in the game. You will. get a 50% discount for that location. This will help minimize your losses in the long run because the New World house tax will eat up your savings in the end.
The smallest house would be a 1-floor lot with a small space. It costs 2,500 coins (even with the 50% discount) and does not really look like it is worth the money.
Town Standing Level
This is probably the hardest requirement to grind. The town standing level varies for each house because they are all different. For bigger houses, you will need more reputation levels for the town.
The lowest standing level you need to reach would be 10 and it would only be for the smallest house. The next one would be 15, 20, and 30. Each town has a separate reputation level so make sure you are committing to grow your town standing level in the town you actually want to buy a house.
The game designers are making buying a house in New World an extremely big decision — as it is in real life. There are a lot of areas available with housing and you need to commit to one town at a time to buy a house fast. This is to take advantage of the huge discount.
This makes you more motivated to just prioritize a specific town to buy a house there. If you are planning on buying a 20,000 coin house, you might as well get the 50% discount and focus on grinding it because 10,000 coins is a huge amount of savings.
How to Increase Town Reputation
To increase your town standing level, you will need to complete all the town missions consistently. The town board will post these missions 3 at a time for you to accept. You can do them simultaneously while doing other missions.
You can even level your mining skill or level up your fishing while doing these missions. The missions vary from giving you +250 standing reputation, +500 standing reputation, or +750 standing reputation.
Some are easier than others but generally, the +750 ones are harder. All of these missions may involve delivery missions where you just need to hand in random supplies you get from exploring. It is always a benefit to explore and gather materials even if you do not need them (yet).
You also get raw reputation points by killing monsters near the town. Combine this with other missions and other gathering skills to be as efficient as you can be. If you know how to track objectives, you can prioritize the town missions so that you can recycle them quicker.
Can You Buy More Than One House?
Yes. As long as you do not exceed the maximum amount of houses in a particular territory, you can have as many houses as you can in different areas. This also means that you’d need to grind seriously to get your town reputation up on different territories as well as the coins needed to buy another house.
Again, you will deal with a lot of maintenance costs if you have multiple houses.
Benefits of Buying a House
Recall or Fast Travel
While Inns already provide you the ability to recall yourself from anywhere, the housing recall has a separate cooldown from fast traveling to your Inn.
This is probably the biggest benefit as going around the world and doing quests can and will make you run for more than 30 minutes at times. The extra recall will save you a lot of time and a lot of Azoth (when you use Fast Travel) down the line.
Each house has a different cooldown for your recall. The bigger the house, the shorter the cooldown. The cheapest house in New World will have a 4-hour cooldown while the most expensive house will have a 2-hour cooldown. These are the figures for the houses in Windsward, anyway.
More Decorations and Storage
For other players, designing your own home can be a fun endgame feature. There is no pressure and it is just purely aesthetic. You can even have house pets inside your home.
The houses are not visible to everyone unless they specifically find your house to visit it. Each player will see a “purchase house” interaction on each of the plots even if it is owned by another player.
Once they are purchased by the player, you will be able to see all the other players that own the same plot.
You would definitely want a bigger house if this side of the game is one of your biggest goals while playing New World. There is even a leaderboard for this feature which we’ll talk about later.
Trophy Slots For Buffs
For each house, you will have trophy slots that will give you a specific buff that either helps you get an advantage in combat or crafting.
The effect of these buffs will only be active if you are in the area (Windsward house – Windsward area). You will lose the buffs if you enter a different territory.
If you have a bigger house, you will also have more trophy slots which means more buffs.
Housing Taxes
This has been mentioned a lot before even purchasing the house. You will be able to see how much housing tax you need to pay every week to maintain your house.
However, failure to pay the taxes will not result in forfeiting the land you just purchased. It is just temporarily disabled. All the buffs, recall features, ability to decorate and leaderboards will all be halted until you pay your taxes.
The amount of taxes paid will depend on the size of your house. The cheapest one will be around 500 coins per week while the most expensive one will be 1,000 coins per week (Windsward housing).
Housing Leaderboards
After purchasing a house, you will be able to see a list of owners who own the same plot of land you just bought. You can open this by going to your front porch and interacting with your home.
You will see a leaderboard among the list of owners. This is the sort of competition homeowners have among themselves who own the same house.
Each house will have its own points that follow a point system. The point system has a ranking for each piece of furniture in the game and it just adds value to your house score.
It is a weird system since you can basically spam highly-rated furniture inside your home without having any thought to the overall design. However, it still pushes you to have diversity while going for quantity and quality with your furniture.
The top homeowners will have a random chance of getting their homes displayed naturally that other homeowners can see as they pass through the town.
Leaderboard Reward Example
Here is an example of how the housing leaderboards work in New World. You are a Player A that owns House A which is in the top 20 houses for all House A owners. Player B passes by House A and sees that your house is randomly displayed on his side of the game.
However, Player B owns House B but does not belong to the top 20 for House B owners. Player B will always see his/her own house in the House B plot since he/she owns it.
This means that Player A will never have a random chance of seeing House B until Player B gets to the top 20 houses for House B owners. The same goes for all the houses in that particular town.
You can manually visit each of the houses in the leaderboards just by pressing “Enter” beside their names.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to MMORPG housing, Final Fantasy 14’s housing always comes to mind as they embraced this feature and made it a big aspect of their game. While Final Fantasy 14 had housing issues they are finding hard to fix, New World seems to have been able to solve that problem.
There is no scarcity in housing in New World just because multiple owners can own the same plot of land. That makes houses a little less desirable but, with how companies and territories work in New World, it definitely balances out — especially if you add in the benefits of owning a house.
