Housing & Land

Everything you need to own land on Rookery Isles: the full house ladder from Cottage to Mansion, how to claim a plot, the weekly copper tax, building and decorating, and the farm structures that feed your crops.

Table of Contents

• Why Land Matters
• How to Claim Land
• The House Ladder
• Farm and Garden Structures
• Specialized Houses and Workbenches
• The Weekly Housing Tax
• Heavy Tax: Owning Many Properties
• Tax Certificates
• Where You Can Build
• Building a House: Designs vs Full Kits
• Decorating and Furniture
• Restyling and Demolishing
• Public Farms and Stables
• On Rookery Isles

Why Land Matters

Owning land is the spine of the ArcheAge 3.0 economy. A taxed plot is the only place you can plant crops that other players cannot steal, run your own private crafting workbenches, raise livestock in safety, and store goods, including trade packs waiting to be run. Without land you are renting space on public farms where anyone can uproot your crop after a short protection window.

On Rookery Isles, land is also the realm. Every plot sits inside a named province, and the House that controls that province collects a share of what flows through it. That House-tribute layer is a Rookery-custom system covered in the guild and taxes guide. This article covers the base-game foundation: the houses, the plots, the tax, and the build.

If you are brand new, read the new player guide first, then come back here once you have a little gold and some labor to spend.

How to Claim Land

Land on Rookery is claimed by placing a house or farm design on an open plot inside a housing province. There is no separate "deed" purchase; the design item you place IS the claim. The basic loop:

• Step 1. Acquire a house or farm design item, or a Full Kit version of one. Designs are bought from vendors, the Mirage Isle housing merchant, or traded between players. (The purchase price of a design is not stored in the server database, so this guide does not quote a buy price. The recurring weekly tax, below, is the cost that IS confirmed.)
• Step 2. Travel to a housing province that allows the structure you want (see Where You Can Build). Open plots glow when a design is on your cursor.
• Step 3. Place the design on a free plot. A Full Kit snaps up instantly. A plain Design drops a foundation that you then build up with construction materials (see Building a House).
• Step 4. Pay the weekly tax in advance using Tax Certificates. As long as the tax is paid, the plot is yours.

Once placed, a house gives you a garden radius around it for planting, a decoration budget for furniture, and (on functional houses) a built-in crafting station.

The House Ladder

Player homes climb a clear size ladder. Each rung is a larger footprint, more hit points, and a higher weekly tax. Every player house in this build shares the same decoration cap of 40 slots, and every house has a flat repair cost of 100 to fix damage.

The smallest-to-largest path is: Cottage to Manor to Townhouse to Villa to Chalet to Mansion. The Cottage is the cheapest way onto the housing ladder; the Mansion is the largest standard residence in the game.

Houses come in aesthetic families. Each class typically ships in several roof colours (Slate, Spring, Rose) across several wall styles (Tudor, Stone, Rustic), with Swept-Roof variants for the Haranyan East. The build also includes specialty residences: Solariums (glass houses in Ruby, Amethyst, Sapphire, and Rose Quartz), Treehouses (Oak, Cherry, Aspen, Birch), Bungalows, Farmhouses, and Chateaus. Villas and Chalets are by far the most numerous design families, followed by the Cottage, Manor, and Townhouse lines.

Farm and Garden Structures

If your goal is crops rather than a home, you place a farm structure instead of a house. These are the safe, private places to plant, and they are what most farming guide players build first. The plantable area is set by a garden radius: the bigger the radius, the more crops you can fit.

The Scarecrow Garden (radius 4.0) is the starter plot: cheap to tax and big enough for a handful of fast crops like Cucumber or Potato. The Scarecrow Farm and Aquafarm double the radius to 8.0, the Aquafarm being the sea-going version for kelp, coral, and other underwater crops. The Thatched Farmhouse has the largest plantable radius in the data at 11.0, making it the workhorse for serious crop volume.

There is no "16x16 tile" farm in this build. The structures are defined by a circular garden radius, not a square tile grid, so think in terms of small garden versus larger farm versus largest farmhouse. Premium scarecrow farm variants also exist (Solar, Lunar, and Stellar Scarecrow Farm Kits) that you craft and upgrade through the construction-design chain.

For what to actually plant, grow times, and the climate bonus, see the farming guide. Livestock pens are covered in the husbandry guide.

Specialized Houses and Workbenches

Some structures embed a crafting station so you can produce inside your own property. Two groups matter:

• Private workbenches (tax tier 11, 8m x 8m, 50,000c per week). These are single-purpose crafting plots: Private Smelter (18459), Private Loom (18470), Private Masonry Table (18471), Private Sawmill (18472), and Private Leatherwork Table (18481). Haranyan-styled versions exist as items 39764 through 39768. Each also has a "Full Kit" instant-build version. A Private Smelter lets you run ore-to-ingot smelts at home; see metalwork and smithing and the mining guide.
• Specialized houses (tax tiers 12 and 13). These are full residences with a workstation built in, named for their trade: Harvester's, Rancher's, and Miner's Farmhouse (tier 12), and Armorer's, Apothecary's, and Tradesman's Manor, Townhouse, Villa, and Chalet (tiers 12 and 13). They cost more weekly tax than a plain house of the same size but save you the trip to a public station.

There is also a Storage Silo (tax tier 15, 8m x 8m, 150,000c per week, design 40538 / Full Kit 40539) for extra storage capacity on its own small plot.

The Weekly Housing Tax

Every taxed property pays a flat weekly tax in copper. This is the recurring cost of ownership, and it is the number you can rely on: it is read directly from the server tax table. For how gold, silver, and copper convert and where to earn them, see currencies and vendors. Tax is paid with Tax Certificates (see below), and the number of certificates consumed per payment rises with the footprint.

Reading the table: the cheapest plots are the Scarecrow Garden and a Private Workbench at 5 silver per week. A starter Cottage or a Scarecrow Farm runs 10 silver. A top-end Mansion is 50 silver per week. All prices are entered and displayed in gold, silver, and copper in the game UI; 100,000 copper equals 10 silver.

Grace period. Player housing provinces allow one week of late tax before the property is at demolition risk (the tax-delay window is one week on all standard plots). Pay on time, or stockpile Prepay Tax Certificates, to be safe.

Heavy Tax: Owning Many Properties

ArcheAge applies an escalating "heavy tax" surcharge once you own several properties. Your first two properties pay only the base tax above. From the third property onward, a multiplier is added on top of the base.

In plain terms: your first two plots are cheap to hold; the third starts adding a surcharge equal to the base tax, and the surcharge climbs steeply, topping out at five times base from the seventh property on. The exact additive-versus-replacement math is engine behaviour, so treat these numbers as the bracket structure rather than a precise final-bill formula. The practical takeaway is the same either way: a small number of plots is cheap, a property empire is expensive by design.

Tax Certificates

Tax is not paid in raw coin; it is paid with Tax Certificate items.

Keep a stack of Tax Certificate (item 31891) on hand sized to your portfolio. A single Cottage needs 1 per week; a Mansion needs 4; multiple plots stack their requirements. Use Prepay Tax Certificates before a vacation so a missed week does not put a plot at risk.

Where You Can Build

Plots are organized into housing provinces spread across all three continents and the open seas. Different province types accept different structures (a Scarecrow Garden Zone takes gardens; a Mansion Zone takes mansions; a Marine Housing Province takes sea structures). The world holds 741 individual plot areas in total. Below are the regions with the most plots on each continent.

A note on safety. Auroria and the open seas are lawless free-PvP zones, so a marine farm or an Auroria plot is exposed in a way a Nuian or Haranyan plot is not. Pick your province for the trade-off you want: safer continental land, or riskier outland and sea plots near endgame resources. For the full zone breakdown and PvP status, see the world atlas.

Which House controls which province (and therefore who collects the realm tribute on it) is a Rookery realm-CMS overlay layered on top of these base plots, not a base-game property of the zone. See the guild and taxes guide.

Building a House: Designs vs Full Kits

Designs come in two flavours, and the difference decides how much work the build is.

• Full Kit items place the finished structure instantly. No foundation, no construction steps. If you want a house up now and do not mind buying the kit, this is the path. Example: Full Kit: Tudor Slate Cottage (item 13748) builds in one placement.
• Design items drop a foundation that you raise by feeding in construction-material bundles. This is cheaper in gold but costs you the materials and the time. Example: the plain Tudor Slate Cottage Design (item 21166).

The four universal construction bundles are the backbone of nearly every staged build. Each is crafted from a stack of a refined material plus a coin token.

This is where housing ties into the rest of the crafting tree: you need a carpentry and masonry supply chain for Lumber and Stone Brick, metalwork for Iron Ingot, and tailoring and leatherwork for Fabric and Leather. Stockpile bundles before you place a Design, or you will be staring at a half-built foundation. For the overall crafting picture, see the crafting guide, and budget your labor and proficiency accordingly.

A caveat on the level gate. The construction recipes carry a recommended-level label of 52 in the base data. Rookery patched the fork's level-52 gating for gathering and general crafting, so do not assume you are locked out at low level, but whether construction specifically is fully ungated on the live server is not independently confirmed here. If a build step refuses, that is the reason to check.

Decorating and Furniture

Once a house is up, you furnish it. Every player house has a decoration budget of 40 slots, uniform across all designs in this build, so a Mansion and a Cottage share the same base furniture cap. The game holds over 1,500 distinct furniture designs, from the purely cosmetic to the genuinely useful.

Functional furniture is the prize. A small set of workbench-style furniture grants a crafting bonus and lets you craft inside your home in that vocation. The build includes functional pieces for Alchemy, Cooking, Handicrafts, Husbandry, Metalwork, Tailoring, Leatherwork, Weaponry, and Carpentry. The vast majority of furniture (1,457 of the designs) is cosmetic, so plan your 40 slots: a few functional benches plus the decor you want on display.

Placement. Each piece carries flags for where it can sit: on the floor, on a wall, on the ceiling, or out in the garden. Larger trophies and tables are floor-only; vases and paintings can go on walls.

Who crafts furniture. Furniture is not a single vocation. The largest share comes from woodwork: the Lumber-processing side of carpentry and masonry produces around 157 furniture designs, and handicrafts and printing adds roughly another 135 between handicraft and print recipes. Smaller numbers come from Masonry, Leatherwork, and dedicated furniture-crafting skills. If you want to fill your home with your own work, Carpentry and Handicrafts are the two vocations to push.

Restyling and Demolishing

Your house is not locked into its first appearance, and you can pack it back up if you move.

Restyling. A built house can be re-roofed or re-walled to any sibling style in its family (turning a Tudor Slate Cottage into a Stone Spring Cottage, for example). A restyle consumes a pack of materials. The cottage restyle pack, for instance, costs 2x Enchanted Blueprint (item 34983), 2x Construction Brick Bundle, 2x Wooden Beam Bundle, and 2x Construction Tool Bundle. Larger houses cost more.

Demolishing. Tearing down a house refunds its Design item, so the structure is not lost, just packed back into a placeable design. Demolishing a built Tudor Slate Cottage returns its design item 21166, for example. Larger houses consume more property seals to pack up than small ones. Because the design is returned, relocating is a matter of demolish, travel, and re-place (plus paying the new plot's tax). Note that an advanced farm and house design upgrade can also consume a Building Management Title (item 28085) when crafted.

Public Farms and Stables

If you are not ready to pay weekly tax, the world provides free communal land. The build holds 26 public farm and stable definitions: 18 Public Farms and 8 Public Stables. Each public farm offers 5 plant slots and each public stable 5 livestock slots for mounts and other animals.

The catch is theft. On a public or communal farm, your crop is protected for 72 hours (3 days), after which another player can uproot and take it. That protection window is the trade-off for paying no tax. A player who steals an exposed crop earns Larceny proficiency for the act. For serious or valuable crops, a private taxed plot is worth the silver; for a quick early-game harvest, a public farm is fine.

Open-ground planting in the world is also possible for some crops, but those plants are fully exposed with no protection window at all. See the farming guide for which crops can go where.

On Rookery Isles

This article describes the base-game ArcheAge 3.0 (Revelation) housing system as it runs on the Rookery Isles server (AAEmu 3.0.3.0 NL0bP fork). A few things to keep straight about where Rookery layers its own systems on top:

• The feudal House-tribute economy is Rookery-custom. The base game models only a flat weekly copper tax per property (the per-tier amounts above) and a separate dominion tax. The 12-House realm, the sliding tribute percentage, House treasuries, and any noble or knight salaries are Rookery server and web mechanics built on top, not base ArcheAge. See the guild and taxes guide for that layer. Do not confuse the realm-CMS tribute with the flat copper tax described here.
• House sizes use exact in-game class names. Cottage, Manor, Townhouse, Villa, Chalet, and Mansion, with footprints in metres, not generic "plots." Farm structures use a garden radius (4.0, 8.0, 8.0, 11.0), not an NxN tile grid; there is no "16x16" farm.
• The level-52 label is not a hard gate on Rookery. The NL0bP fork shipped gathering and crafting bugged to require character Level 52; Rookery patched the gathering side so it works from Level 1. Construction recipes carry the same 52 label in data, but the live gate on construction specifically is not independently confirmed here, so it is flagged rather than asserted.
• A house purchase price is not quoted because the server database stores only the recurring weekly tax, not the one-time design cost. Every tax and material number in this guide is read directly from the live server data.

See also

• Farming & Crops Guide
• Husbandry & Livestock Guide
• Carpentry, Masonry & Construction
• The Realm: Houses, Guilds & Taxes
• Currencies & Vendors
• Trade Packs & Commerce
• World Atlas: Zones & Continents
• Crafting & Gathering Overview