Dataminers turn up potential details on WoW's upcoming player housing feature—from the Cataclysm Classic PTR, of all places

A mug that reads home sweet home sitting on a wooden table in front of a fireplace in World of Warcraft — (Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

The dataminers appear to have struck some hypothetical gold while panning for details in, bemusingly, Cataclysm Classic's public test realm (PTR) of all places. In case you aren't in the know, player housing—an oft-requested feature of the 20 year old MMO—is absolutely coming to World of Warcraft in the game's next expansion, Midnight. The only question is, what's it gonna all look like?

As spotted by WoWHead, a list of revelatory files popped up on the Cataclysm Classic PTR, via a file named "PlayerHousingConstantsDocumentation.lua". While .lua files have a broad variety of uses in coding, they're most often used by players in the construction of addons—as for why it's showing up on a Classic server, which probably won't be getting the new feature, some players theorise that it's just a quirk of the system.

As one player claims in the article's comments, "The Interface files from the export are the same across all WoW versions. There's one master set of Interface files and every version loads what it uses, just like how addon .toc files work now … It just so happens that the Cataclysm PTR has the most up-to-date set of Interface files."

Which makes the most sense to me, seeing as it'd be a real headscratcher of a choice to be developing a retail feature in Classic WoW before doing it anywhere else—let alone transporting a retail feature to a Classic server in the first place.

As for the notes themselves—which are subject to change, naturally—the dataminers have dug up hints that players will have access to themes like "Folk, Rugged, Generic, Opulent", which can also be divvied up between the house's floor, walls, ceilings, and tabletops. There's just one exterior theme listed ("Human"), suggesting you'll be able to fiddle with the outside of your property, too.

Most exciting are the "permissions" hinted at, here. Namely, that there'll be options to not just add decor, but to move it around—which is crucial for this sort of thing. Housing systems in MMOs live or die based on their customisability, and if you give players an inch, they'll take a mile—for the better, I might add.

The Elder Scrolls Online, for example, has a budding community of housebuilders recreating things like Howl's Moving Castle by shoving objects into each other to "cobble" new ones. In other words—let your assets clip and jank, Blizzard, it'll pay off. I promise.

Again, these datamined options should be considered the most workiest of all work-in-progresses—we're talking echoes of hints of features, wrapped up within these .lua files. But it's a glimmer of a home, sweet home full of all the customisable doohickeys, one that players have been yearning for since Garrisons missed the mark in Warlords of Draenor.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.