Greetings, Tyrians! Gather around the fire and settle in as we chat with Andrew Gray and Joel Eckert, two of the designers working to bring you one of the newest features in Guild Wars 2®: Janthir Wilds™. Today, they’ll conjure a magical doorway and take us on a tour of Homesteads.

With the launch just a few weeks away, we’re excited to answer some essential questions that will help you on your journey to turn a plot of land into a home. In the next few weeks, be sure to check out our social media channels for inspiring homestead designs, and join us soon for a livestream where we’ll explore Homesteads even further. For now, we’ll be covering some of the general Homesteads information that you’ll need to know.

Q: How do I get my homestead?

A: The story of Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds will introduce you to the plot of land that you will tend to and claim as your homestead.

Q: How do I access my homestead?

A: Once your homestead is unlocked, you’ll have access to a Summon Conjured Doorway Mastery skill. Any character on your account can conjure a doorway and simply step through into the homestead.

Q: Can friends visit my homestead?

A: Yes, you can invite your party members to your homestead via your conjured doorway. Players who are not in a party can use the door to request a party invitation from the door owner, and the owner interacting with the door will initiate the instance-transfer countdown. You can even give your visitors permission to help decorate your homestead!

Q: Can I return to my original location (the place I entered from) when I exit my homestead?

A: Yes, you’ll find a familiar instance exit button on the lower right of your screen that will return you to your previous location. This will even persist across sessions, so if you log out and log back in to your homestead to take advantage of the homestead’s resting bonus, upon logging back in, the instance exit button will return you to your last open-world location. This will not persist if you visit another instance, though.

Q: What can I unlock for my homestead?

A: As you progress your Homesteading Mastery, you’ll unlock more rooms within your homestead to decorate. You can also unlock improvements to your lumber mill, mine, and farm facilities. Because upgrades and spawns for your personal story home instance carry over to the homestead, you can also collect various gathering nodes, convenience features, and characters like the hungry cats.

And, finally, you can unlock decorations through the handiworker discipline, which is a refined, account-wide crafting ability.

Q: Can we control where unlocked nodes spawn?

A: Things like resource nodes, cats, and chests are placed in predetermined areas to ensure they all function properly.

Q: Where do homestead decorations come from?

A: Handiworker is the new crafting discipline that will be used to create decorations. New decorations are unlocked via Mastery points spent in the Homesteading Mastery line.

Q: Tell me more about handiwork, the new personal version of guild scribing.

A: Handiwork functions very similarly to scribing, but it is designed and balanced for a single player to be able to craft things on their own. There is a material cost for each copy of a decoration that you craft, but the prices for personal decorations via handiworker crafting are significantly lower.

Q: Why is handiworker crafting part of a Mastery line and not leveled like other crafting disciplines?

A: Since your homestead is account bound, we also wanted your handiworker crafting discipline to be account bound. We also wanted to create a stronger synergy between the content of Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds and your homestead, so, rather than reaching higher levels of the crafting discipline by crafting more decorations inside your homestead, you’ll instead do so by playing the rest of the Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds content and earning regular experience points.

Q: How do I decorate my homestead?

A: A “Decorate” button on the heads-up display or the skill panel will activate decorating mode.

In this mode, players have access to various skills on the skill bar for placing new decorations, modifying already placed decorations, or removing decorations. Additionally, you can enter a flying mode that allows placement of items anywhere a player normally cannot reach.

We’ll be demonstrating homestead decoration live on Twitch this Friday, August 2, at noon PDT (UTC-7). Join us to catch the placement tools—which include a Toggle X-Ray Vision skill and flying mode—in action.

Q: How do the characters on my account interact with the homestead?

A: When you exit to the character selection screen while inside your homestead, the character you were playing will be visible in your homestead as an NPC while you play other characters. These NPC versions of your characters default to one of three predetermined locations in the homestead, based on whether they are soldiers who wear heavy armor, adventurers who wear medium armor, or scholars who wear light armor.

• Soldiers are found around the main homestead structure and the entry area near the portal.
• Adventurers are found on the far side of the river near the main homestead building, in a wilder area.
• Scholars are found in and around a secluded cave away from the main homestead, which is perfect for concentrating.

If you approach any of these logged-out alternate characters, you can ask them to follow you and lead them elsewhere. When you’re ready for them to stay put again, you can ask them to stay, and they’ll stop following.

Q: Will all of the characters I leave in the homestead when I log out show up? Can I control which ones show up or disable them?

A: All characters left within the homestead when you log out will be visible when you’re playing other characters.

Q: Can we control the appearance and dyes of mounts in the stable? How are those chosen?

A: Mounts housed within the mount stable will have the same skin and dye settings used by the player character that is currently accessing the homestead. The skiff’s dye and skin are controlled by the same means.

Q: Will there be a livestream to show off Homesteads?

There will be a livestream! As we mentioned above, we’ll be showing off the design elements and finer details of the Homesteads feature on our Twitch channel, on August 2 at noon Pacific Time (UTC-7). We hope to see you there!

Prepurchasing any edition of Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds before the expansion launches will grant you the “Homesteader” title, the Whispering Serpents Pauldrons skin, and a box with your choice of one Serpent’s Wrath weapon skin.

Visit the official store page for full details on the items included in the Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate editions.