If you’ve ever tried buying real estate, you know it’s not a fun activity. You have to camp outside the plots, wait for hours and just mindlessly click on the signs, it’s boring. It’s also very annoying when other people get it, especially if you suspect they’re using a bot or script to automate clicks.
If you are tired of buying real estate and you already have enough gold, consider buying yourself an apartment. It’s an initialized housing, so there’s more availability and you don’t have to wait for any timers. You can get it right away and start solving your interior decorating problems.
Here’s what you need to know about buying apartments, the features you get, and the difference between apartments and other players’ houses.
Contents
What’s in the apartment?
You can use your own room for decoration. It’s like a motel room, except you can customize it and don’t have fancy wardrobes (…but mind you, this is added to the player’s house).
You will get a new teleporting option in the “More” tab in the apartment. The teleport here actually takes you outside your apartment building, which is probably even better. There is a market board and summoning bells, and chocobo cages that you can use. There is also a delivery guy in the lobby.
You can use the Stables to embellish your chocobo and change its color. Remember that the Chocobo Cage needs to be cleaned with the Magic Broom, which is the shared responsibility of all those using the Cage.
You can buy flower pots from the apartment seller in the lobby in the “Purchase of furniture (Other)” section. With up to two of these plants in your apartment, you can grow each plant or crop. You can also place orchestras, summoning bells, crystal bells, wardrobes, and NPCs like repairman, material consolidator, scrap dealer, etc.
You can store 100 pieces of furniture and place another 100 pieces of furniture. There is no outdoor interior space.
How to buy an apartment
To buy an apartment, you must reach level 50 in any job. You must also have the rank of Second Lieutenant or higher in your Grand Company. If you specifically want the apartment in Shirogane, you also need to reach a certain level in the MSQ by completing the “Not without accidents” quest. It’s still pretty early in Stormblood.
Each residential area has an apartment building. These buildings always have a designated piece of ethernet outside. These will be the Hill of Lily from the Bed of Lavender, the Top Mast from the Mist, the Breath of Sultana from the Goblet, and the Little White Palace from Platinum and Gold.
Go to an apartment building in a residential area and enter the lobby. You will see a table with NPCs behind it. The apartment caretaker will allow you to buy an apartment for 500,000 gil. Space is required in the building (there are 90 units) and you will buy the first available apartment on the list.
You can only own one apartment at a time. Regardless of the area where you live, you will need to move out of your current apartment to buy another one.
decorate your apartment
As mentioned earlier, you can only use furniture to furnish your apartment. You can buy some furniture from the apartment seller in the lobby. They will also sell you items like NPC licenses, some orchestral scrolls, flower pots, seeds, and soil. If you’re looking for a wider variety of furniture, there are plenty of household items that you can buy or craft, so market boards are often the best place to go.
If you’re looking for resources outside of the game, check out ff14housing for tons of housing items. For design inspiration and to see what others are doing, check out sites like tumblr or housingsnap to browse photos and albums of other players’ interiors.
To manage your belongings, go to Social > Housing. From here, you can also click “Property Settings” to manage any player houses you have access to, which is where you leave apartments vacant.
Apartment and Manor
There are some major differences between apartments and real estate. Depending on your goals for player housing, these may or may not be a big deal for you.
The biggest difference is obviously you get a single room with an apartment. This seems small compared to the estates, as even the smallest estates have two floors and the entire courtyard is outside. If you are looking for a little hideaway of your own, the apartment is your choice. If you want a spacious space for you and your friends, you might like the biggest estate you can find.
The remarkable point is that the apartment seems to be as large as the FC house and can be owned at the same time. An apartment is 200,000 gil higher than FC’s private room, but it’s not tied to FC, so you don’t have to worry about what happens if you change FC or disband. However, if you’re fairly comfortable with FC, you’ll probably want a less expensive option.
You have less stuff to put and store. A small plot has 200 spaces for indoor furniture and 20 spaces for outdoor furniture. Big real estate up to 400/40. With an apartment, you have 100/0, so you won’t be able to store a lot of stuff or create a cramped room.
If you are looking for more storage space for the furniture on your estate or until you manage to get your property, an apartment may meet your needs. If you just want to be a little different with the interior, you might be fine with just an apartment, not even a property.
Apartments are a starter environment, unlike open communities where you can walk from one lot to another. This makes Ward feel very homely, but at the same time taxing the servers a bit more. This is why Square Enix cannot simply add more wards, as they are continuously loaded instances, unlike individual rooms that are loaded as the player enters them.
Your apartment does not have an idle timer. If you do not enter the village within 45 days, you will lose your property. The apartment is never vacated, so you can keep it forever or until you voluntarily vacate it. This is a real advantage because you don’t have to worry about losing your apartment if you cancel your subscription for a few months.
You cannot hybridize plants and crops because there is no room for flower beds. They are outdoor furniture only, so your indoor pot is your only way to grow plants one by one. You can also only have two flower pots in the room, and while one flowerbed has room for eight plants, you can have 1-3 flower beds, depending on the size of your property.
Honestly, gardening takes a lot of time and effort, so unless you’re really committed, I don’t think it’s going to miss much. You can still use pots to grow flowers, put them in vases, decorate your room with seeds, or get some common items from seeds. You cannot set the cross cycle that some people do to get rarer items and possibly earn more gold.
In short
In fact, I think the apartment is pretty amazing. If you want to start decorating your own room but can’t understand the “house games” enough, this is a quick and easy option. While FC’s private room is cheaper, I personally find it more comfortable to have an apartment that is not related to FC.
If you desperately need a way to train or paint your chocobo but you don’t have an FC or a chocobo with an inheritance, you don’t have to wait either. The Barn allows you to do it all.
Even if you already own a property, apartments can provide extra storage and a second aesthetic that you can create and use. Before, I didn’t know how easy it was to find an apartment, I would definitely tinker with a second space, I knew I would always have it and get out of the game even when I was resting.
What do you think? Are you satisfied with an apartment or do you feel they should be improved in some way? Let me know in the comments section.