World of Warcraft's adding player housing in December, so naturally there's an add-on to let players earn as much furniture as possible in advance

A screenshot of the World of Warcraft: Midnight alpha. A wide shot of Silvermoon City, the golden elven city. A beaming building sits in the middle, surrounded by bushes and a glowing pool.

(Image credit: Heather N. / Blizzard Entertainment)

The next World of Warcraft expansion, Midnight, will finally add player housing to the venerable MMO. It arrives December 3 and the early signs are very positive: Blizzard may well have dragged its feet over adding a feature that much of the competition already has but, as PCG's Harvey Randall points out, it's also been able to learn from two decades of others' mistakes.

Needless to say, part of this new housing system is furniture. When the housing system launches, players will earn decor relating to achievements and existing in-game content: but this will also work retroactively, so achievements earned now will count toward furniture when housing goes live. The housing system is already live on WoW's Public Test Realm for the early birds, so players know what these achievements are.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. A new add-on called Home Bound by Bettiold (available on CurseForge) essentially tells players which achievements they should be gunning for in the runup to the release of the full housing system, whereupon they'll be showered with all their hard-earned furniture.

A promotional screenshot of the World of Warcraft: Midnight alpha. A wide shot of a dark red location. Many paths lead up toward a central location with jagged architecture reaching into the crimson sky. — (Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

There are over 100 different decor items available to earn in this way, so there's plenty to be getting on with, and this of course makes it much easier to track what you've got and what you haven't. The add-on also lets you filter out any previously earned achievements and items, or just the ones you're not interested in.

Finally, it converts "your scattered achievements into a beautiful checklist with 3D decor images." It also categorises the decor according to expansion, PvP and so on. So you can look through the list and decide what you actually want in your house, rather than just taking everything. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

Using the add-on is as simple as it gets: install Home Bound and, once in-game, type "/hb" or "/homebound" in chat. Then it's time for the Azeroth equivalent of a trip to IKEA.

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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

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