House Decorator's Guide: Improve Your Style I

[Dancetwist]

Navigating the Series:
Guide I: Introduction to Creative Placement Techniques
Go to Guide II: Deeper into Creative Placement Techniques (*New!)

Welcome to our first guide! As more players are beginning to enjoy their first homes and apartments in Eorzea, it’s come to our attention that many novice decorators are finding that the basic features haven’t quite quenched their creative thirst. Our goal with this guide is to show you just a few of the many not-so-obvious tools that can unleash your creativity and make FFXIV one of the best decorating systems of any MMO!

Improve Your Style I:

Basic Controls: The Housing Menu
[⭐] Floating Furniture (*Updated 4/24/17)
[⭐⭐] Levitating to Any Height
[⭐] Sit Here? Sit There!

How do we use Star difficulties?

⭐ Beginner Trick ➞ Accessible to almost any homeowner within 1 - 2 clicks, use it everywhere!
⭐⭐ Experienced Trick ➞ Accessible to anyone with patience, requires careful positioning and some experimentation for new furnishing combinations
⭐⭐⭐ Masters Trick ➞ For the most complex decorating projects, relies on multiple setup tricks and can take several hours to master use
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Pure Luck ➞ Reserved for tricks where we have only been able to replicate it in a few special cases so far, such as a specific house plot or specific character races

Just want some inspiration or pictures to enjoy?
Visit our screenshot gallery showing a variety of decorating projects from the Pomwreath estates

Basic Controls: The Housing Menu
For players who haven’t tried their hand at decorating yet, we’ll briefly explain each of the key menus you need to get started!

The starting point for most house owners is the Remodel menu, which allows you to change structural elements of a room like wallpaper, flooring, and lighting. All items used here are single-use only, but you can preview the results (and even interact with them) before confirming the changes.


The interface that we’re most interested in is the Housing menu, which offers a variety of tools to place all the elements of your decorating project. The primary ones are the Move Tool for X – Y – Z placement of items in valid locations, the Rotate Tool for spinning items on either the X or Z axis depending on type, and the Remove Tool for picking items up again.

Two additional options are available, and these serve important roles in a lot of advanced decorating projects. The Counter Placement toggle determines whether your Move Tool will look for valid surfaces (such as counters or walls) to place objects on or bypass those to place on the foundational floor and walls of the room. The Align to Grid toggle will switch between precise or grid-based mouse movements with the Move Tool and Rotate Tool. The grid can be helpful for aligning furniture consistently, but decorating often needs a finer touch.

There’s a lot more to discover on how to use these tools effectively, so don’t stop yet!

[⭐] Floating Furniture
Allows decorations to remain in midair

First, we’d like to share credit with Jeykama and Soric Reisa for providing brief guides around this technique in the past. We’re planning to go into a lot more detail on the steps to recreate it and how the placement mechanics work so you can make it an everyday part of your decorating kit! As mentioned before, all of these steps can be completed with just the basic controls we described in the previous section.

Eligible Items:
Tabletop
Wall-Mounted

Steps to Perform:
1) With Counter Placement enabled, use the Move Tool to place an object on a table, wall, or other surface (non-foundational)
2) Disable Counter Placement
3) Select your object, then Cancel it
4) Use the Move Tool to pull away the table or wall before turning Counter Placement on again

Decorating Result:
Your object should remain floating in the air, right where you placed it! While this may seem like a simple trick, it opens the door to a lot of creative combinations that wouldn’t be possible otherwise—so think of this as your biggest tool as a decorator!

The main challenge with using this trick is to start with a surface at the appropriate height. To simplify this for you, we’ve compiled a blueprint with all the necessary furnishings to use:

[You’ve learned the Floating Object recipe. View blueprint?]

Advanced Usage:
Under specific conditions your object may “autosnap” to a nearby surface, like the region shown in the blueprint above. This will only occur with foundational surfaces (like the floor or house walls), so you can avoid it by putting more space between those and your decorations.

Updated Notes:
As of Patch 3.5, you can use the new White Partition for some added flexibility on wall-mounted item placement! We've included a comparison of the changes to help with your decorating process:

[You’ve received a bonus edition recipe. View blueprint?]

[⭐⭐] Levitating to Any Height
Allows decorations in midair to be repositioned from afar (best for height)

Is floating items not quite enough for you? Well, we’ve got another trick that no one’s talked about so far to help you unlock even more creative potential!

Eligible Items:
Tabletop

Steps to Perform:
1) Set up a Floating Object as mentioned in the previous technique
2) After removing the table, enable Counter Placement
3) Use the Move Tool to place a shorter table or wall shelf at a location below your object
4) Select your object, then Cancel it. Your object should now highlight when you mouse over the table or shelf below it
5) If other objects you don’t want to move also highlight, disable Counter Placement and Select, then Cancel each one individually. These will reset if you exit the Housing menu
6) Use the Move Tool to reposition your table or shelf until the object reaches the desired position
7) Use the Floating Object technique to remove your table or shelf

Decorating Result:
When you place the shorter table or wall shelf under your floating object, it will re-link with the surface and behave like you just placed it on top—even though it’s still hovering above! By repeating this process a few times, you can use it to extend items anywhere you want in a house including staircases, ceilings, upper-stories of large rooms, and more.

[You’ve learned the Levitating recipe. View blueprint?]

Advanced Usage:
Get creative with your partitions! Using one combined with a wall shelf gives a ton of flexibility, and by pushing each one as far out as they go in valid placement you can reach a lot of places that would be otherwise impossible. Weird rotations and angles are fine too, as you can always use the Rotate Tool once your object is floating in the right spot.

[⭐] Sit Here? Sit There!
Allows players to sit or sleep on a variety of surfaces

We’d also like to share credit on this one with Olivine Peridot for showing how to do it with round tables, along with the many others that have found creative uses for it on their own. While this may seem like an experienced trick (⭐⭐) that requires lots of experimentation, we'll show you how the placement mechanics work so that even a beginner (⭐) can do it easily!

Eligible Items:
Tabletop (solid)
Furnishings
Outdoor Furnishings

Steps to Perform:
1) Pick a solid furnishing you’d like to use as the target, plus a chair or bed of smaller size that can be hidden inside of it
2) If using a chair, place it so that the centerline of the chair lies inside the furnishing
3) If using a bed, place it so that the centerline for where a character sleeps on it lies inside the furnishing
4) Adjust both items until the chair or bed is suitably disguised from view

Decorating Results:
Next time you feel like relaxing, just /sit near your target furnishing to sit directly on it! Your character will interact with the furnishing exactly as if it were a chair or bed instead. You may need to test it out a few times to find the comfiest spot, but it should work for any character race or height if you follow the blueprints below.

[You’ve learned the Sit There! recipe. View blueprint?]

Upcoming Articles and Screenshots!

That’s it for our guide this time! Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. If there’s enough interest, we’ll try follow up with more not-so-obvious techniques to help you get the most fun out of decorating in the early summer.

If you'd liked to explore more examples of our past decorating projects, we've also put up a gallery of screenshots available for you at:
Decorating Portfolio – Stylish Examples I

[Mhaeric]

Housing tips and tricks

Nice guide! One thing that I do is subtle, but provides a lot of ambience and interest. You can hide lighting objects inside of other objects to drawn attention to certain areas or provide additional ambience to a certain spot. This works best with lower overall lighting in the room, but even in higher lighting situations the subtle placement of hidden lights along with smart placement of standard visible lighting can really make your decoration really pop.

Here's a corner of my FC room as an example. There's a hidden light inside the potted plant on the left, inside the armchair, and hidden in the stack of books in the right.

[Wilan]

Great guide! Looking forward to the next one.

[Elany]

Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to make this guide.

[Dancetwist]

Update: To help with visibility when we post new articles, we're moving Guide II over to its own thread. We'll also post future editions separately to make it easier for readers to spot them, so feel free to continue using this thread for questions or comments related to Guide I or the series in general.