HOMESTEADS: How to start preparing today to copy awesome homestead designs when Visions of Eternity launches

When Visions of Eternity is released, it will come with a Homestead Layouts feature that will allow players to export the designs of their homesteads as an .xml file. When other players share these online, you'll be able to load this file into your own homestead and benefit from some truly awesome decorating without even having to place a single object!

But, to fully benefit from this feature, you need to have already crafted the decorations from these homestead layouts. (Otherwise it will only load with the decorations in the types and quantities you've already unlocked.) Thankfully, most homestead decorations are inexpensive, with many many decorations costing 1 gold or less each. However, to be ready right when the expansion launches and get the cheapest prices for these, you can start your preparation today with these steps.

Tip 1: Level up your Homestead Mastery

Each of the three quarterly updates added new tiers to the Homestead Mastery line, for a total of 7 tiers requiring 28 Mastery points. If you haven't paid too much attention to Homesteading previously or if you got to a previous maximum tier and stopped, now's the time to make sure you're up to date. Along with other bonuses, each tier of this Mastery track allows you to craft a new set of decorations.

Tip 2: Unlock as many recipes as you can now!

The basic recipes offered by the Mastery tiers above is a good start, but there are hundreds of Homestead recipes you can unlock in the game! Thankfully, these are condensed into books. The GW2 Wiki has an amazing resource where you can put in your API key and see if you've missed any. You can find this in the Handiworker article.

Here are where to find these books:

• Each of the six renown heart vendors in Janthir Wilds offers several books of recipes, and I recommend getting all of them. Note that the Godspawn release added more to each heart vendor, so it's worth checking to make sure you have them all.
• A ton of seasonal recipes are available from NPCs in Hooligan's Route, the northwest cave in Lion's Arch. And not everything is candy canes and jack-o'-lanterns; there are some cool flexible-use ones here too.
• Scholar Glenna offers raid decoration recipes too, both for the item from each boss and the trophies. If you've done any raids, you may have the tokens or raid currency, and could visit her in each raid instance.
• Deft Lahar in the Homestead offers a few more, similar to the raid ones but for certain world bosses.
• There are also a bunch of recipes you can get via map achievements! You can see a list of them [here](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Janthir_(achievements\)#Home_Sweet_Homestead). Deft Lahar sells these too, but you can get them for free by doing events on the map. You do not have to do 100 events per map!
• Skirmish Supervisors in WvW have recipes for replica non-functional siege weapons plus a few statues found in these maps.
• The Gem Store also has few recipes if you're open to spending gems. Some of them, like the Sea Raider Homestead Pack, have a lot of amazing pieces you could use in a ton of different ways. Others, like the Twisted Imaginarium Homestead Package, target a very specific aesthetic that may or may not appeal. My favourite is the Ornate Grand Piano because it's a decoration and an instrument and a chair you can use anywhere chairs can be used!

Tip 3: Upgrade your material efficiency

Each of the refined material types has two permanent efficiency account upgrades. This means when you trade materials at the Homestead Refinement—Farm/Lumber Mill/Metal Forge, you cut the number of materials involved by half with one upgrade or to a quarter with both! One of the upgrades costs 30 Honey Flowers and 200 Ursus Obliges. The other upgrade costs 30 Charged Titan Ore and 8 gold. These are both worth doing for all three types!

To help see how this discount works, let's use the [Beach House Spiral Stairs](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Beach_House_Spiral_Stairs_(Handiwork\)) as an example. This decoration uses 30 Refined Homestead Wood. If you check the Homestead Refinement—Lumber Mill, you can see that Elder Wood Logs are the cheapest way to get these.

Here are the costs if you have no Trade Efficiency for wood:

material	buy order price
120 Elder Wood Logs	67s 20c
10 Jute Scraps	2s 10c
5 Coarse Leather Sections	1s 35c
total	70s 65c

Below is what it looks like if you have one Trade Efficiency for wood:

material	buy order price
60 Elder Wood Logs	33s 60c
10 Jute Scraps	2s 10c
5 Coarse Leather Sections	1s 35c
total	37s 07c

Below is what it looks like if you have both Trade Efficiencies for wood:

material	buy order price
30 Elder Wood Logs	16s 80c
10 Jute Scraps	2s 10c
5 Coarse Leather Sections	1s 35c
total	20s 25c

Tip 4: Start trading for materials this week!

There's a bit of timegating with refined materials, and there's a limit to how many of each type you can trade per week. Using the example above, the Elder Wood Log is currently the cheapest at 56c each. But the next cheapest currently is 3 x Soft Wood Log, which makes for 72c each. So the absolute most discounted way you can do this is to get your Trade Efficiencies up first, then trade for the cheapest material type each week. The worst possible thing you could do is use the "Black Market" prices, which are literally 50 times more expensive and make homestead decorating look way more expensive than it is! Never pay Black Market prices.

If you want as many materials as possible to prep, then you can use the wiki pages like this one for metal to determine which are the cheapest options. However, if you want the most materials, there's an extra tip for getting more. When you increase your efficiency on some materials all the way, they can't charge you half a log, so instead they give double the output! Your capacity limits how many trades you can get each week, not how many of each material you can get each week! This is especially relevant for fiber, because you can get double on every trade! In the wiki tables, you can see this as the ones with a cost of 0.5 of a material. In the game, it simply tells you that you get 2 of that material in the trade—two ways of saying the same thing.

Tip 5: When to craft

Do you want to use all those materials to craft now, or should you wait until the expansion launches? If you want to be 100% prepared, hold off on crafting until the expansion launches, you import a layout, and the game tells you which decorations you don't have yet. But for me, some decorations are too cool not to craft right away! I love the [Ascalonian Tree](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascalonian_Tree_(Handiwork\))! I love the Small Canthan Cherry Tree! The [Elonian Railing](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elonian_Railing_(Handiwork\)) is the greatest bargain ever! And the Armor Display Case might be the coolest of them all. If you have more willpower than me, start amassing materials now instead of consuming them all!

If you'd like a tour of the new Homestead map and a demonstration of how layouts work, be sure to watch this livestream from last week!

If you have any questions at all about homesteads or decorations as they are pre-expansion, myself or another reader would be happy to answer them for you.