In the September 2010 update, the Home addition was introduced to Atlantanians. Homes can only be purchased through the NPC named Caitsith whom is located in Rome in the “My Home” area. You can quickly access the My Home area by clicking on the Rome icon and you should now see a menu listing for “My Home.”
When you are ready to purchase a home; you will see there are 3 different homes to choose. The house floor plan is the same for every home; the only differences are the roof colors and the layout of the front yard.
After you purchase your home the next thing you will want to do is choose which facility you want to add to the front yard. Facilities offer items that are necessary to craft home furnishing and decor. The facilities to choose from are a farm, mine, garden and lumber yard. Each of the facilities offers their very own items that can be acquired from them. A lumberyard yields Ginko wood and in order to gain lumbering skill you will need to visit the NPC named Jack Lumberman in the Rome My Home area. For each of the facilities there is a specific skill needed so you will need to locate the various NPCs in the My Home are before you can acquire skill.
You level up your facility by using your facility and by others using it. As your facility gets used the yields percentage of the acquired items will drop. You can view your facility’s information by right clicking on the facility and choosing “manage” from the menu. As the yields drops below 100%, you will be able to water it and transplant it which helps you level up the facility. Once your facility hits level 30, you can then occasionally collect high quality items from it. The higher the level of the facility, the greater the chance of high quality goods and you also increase the chance of collecting more of them.
One of the best benefits of having a home is that you can place up to 3 mercenaries to stay in your home. To place a mercenary in your home, you need to first be visiting your home and you need to have the mercenary of your choice placed in the merc room and then you will see an option that says “send home”. There is no level limit for a mercenary to be sent home. Every 2 hours exactly on the even hour mark, your mercenary will ask for a gift. Sometimes they will ask for atlas fragments but they almost always ask for elements. If you give them the gift they ask for, they will receive experience. The experience is much lower for mercs below level 80 but they can still level up rather quickly through the house gift method. To increase the amount of experience they receive you will need to furnish your home. It is still speculated that the more comfort you have in a home, the higher the experience your mercenaries will receive. I happen to believe it is not comfort based but that it is dependent on a balance of both culture and comfort.
Another benefit of having a home is that you will get an experience buff from resting in your bed and this buff lasts an hour. You may receive this buff up to two times a day. It is also speculated that the more comfort in the home, the higher experience bonus you will receive when resting. The housewarming furniture only offers a 1% experience bonus but as you place more furniture in the home you will raise that percentage.
The homes are quite pricey and can only be purchased through Caitsith for 500 million gold. Although they are pricy, it is definitely worth the cost.