Housing features and benefits

STRONGHOLD

Housing can be unlocked shortly after completing the epic war scene from retaking Luterra Castle through the main quest The Glorious Wall around level 25-28. Open up the quest journal and accept the quest [Clerk Theo’s Invitation] under the tab labelled Guides.

We’ll receive a teleportation song upon completion. This house is a large estate located on a private island near the beach. There are special merchants, crafting stations, access to the bank and much more!

⚖️ Merchants

Our estate hosts a variety of merchants! It’s also worth noting that accessing common services is much easier and faster through here than, let’s say, riding a horse back to the nearest city (the teleport is also free). This gives quick access to the mailbox, storage and equipment repairer.

Common services

Craft station 
Mailbox 
Market broker 
Repairer 
Skin modding
Storage

Housing exclusives

Crafting recipe exchange 
∙ Exchange currency earned from dispatch to get crafting recipes

Dispatch station 
∙ Send out sailors on a mission. They'll come home with loot and currencies

Farm & cave manager 
∙ NPC within the gathering and farming area

Feast menu 
∙ Used to host a delicious meal that can be shared with everyone visiting our house. The feast gives temporary stat bonuses for a limited time. Very useful before heading out to a difficult dungeon or raid.

Manor management 
∙ Prompts UI for stronghold management

Research lab
∙ Prompts UI for stronghold researches

Roster resource exchange 
∙ Exchange high quality gathering resources for lower quality ones (but receive a generous quantity). Can also exchange for and use trading skill powders.
 
Special exchange 
∙ Exchange currencies obtained from dispatch for materials to host a Feast and rare crafting materials used for decor. We can also trade the dispatch seals for different seals (ie, give 100 adventurer's seal to receive 65 victory seals)

Structure exchange 
∙ Exchange currencies obtained from dispatch for decor!

Trade merchant
∙ Exchange currencies obtained from dispatch for various items. There's a new trader each day with new items and, sometimes, they will bring extras for our friends to buy. Be sure to visit your friend's strongholds for more items 🙂

 

⚙️ Manor management

Our stronghold can be leveled up and everything that we do on the island will consume “act. energy.” The amount remaining is located just above the exp bar at the bottom of the screen. This quantity regenerates slowly throughout the day. As we’d expect, the higher level the stronghold; the more features and recipes becomes available.

To access the manor management menu, press [B] to shuffle through the skill bars until we can see these icons: (the shortcuts may be different if we’ve changed the defaults)

The [music sheet], [mount] and [trading skills] work just as we’d imagine so we’ll skip these for now and focus on the housing specific options…

Management

Allows to fully manage all interactables within the island without having to walk and talk to each NPC individually. This includes: research, crafting, dispatch, manor buffs, etc

Placement

Opens up the decor vault

Wardrobe

View rapport NPCs who are visiting our house and change their outfits

View far / View close

Change camera view to far or default

⛏️ Farm and cave

Once the stronghold is level 10, we can complete a quest to gain access to a farm and a cave – where we can gather materials. Gathering here has a daily limited quantity. For example, each fishing area can produce x fish each. Then we’d have to wait until server reset to get more.

Both the farm and cave have a merchant where we can purchase basic trade skill tools. An “exchange” merchant is located on the farm as well. This one allows the trading of our gathered-at-home materials for powders and higher grade ingredients.

It’s worth nothing that the materials gathered at home are not tradeable in the marketplace or auction house. So it may be a good strategy to use this only when we need it…

⚒️ Crafting

At last, we can craft things! The process is pretty simple: talk to the NPC and click [craft]. This will consume certain materials, currencies and stronghold action points. Then we wait x minutes for the NPC to complete our request.

Materials

This is mostly gathering materials obtained from trade skills. Some items are acquired through exchange at the various npcs located near the daily trader on our stronghold.

Currencies

Sometimes silvers, sometimes gold. Gold can be obtained as quest rewards, but also from selling things in the marketplace. A large variety of craftable items can be traded, so it’s possible to turn them into profit 🙂

We can expand our repertoire by purchasing recipes from exchange traders within the Stronghold, and sometimes through npcs out in the world. Leveling up the crafting workshop and stronghold can also grant more options, as well as more slots in the crafting queue.

Crafting UI

The left panel shows the crafting queue — As we can see, crafting isn’t instant. This is a request we ask of our talented NPC. It takes time for items to be ready. There’s also a limit as to how many items they can work on at once. This can be increased as our stronghold levels up.

The middle panel is where we can browse our recipes…

And the last panel shows recipe information — View material and resource requirements, length it’ll take to craft the item. Also worth noting, crafting will give us Stronghold EXP.

🧪 Research

This ought to be one of the most important features of our island; as it enables us to improve and expand all other buildings. Similarly to crafting, doing research requires materials along with silver, gold or pirate coins, and stronghold action points. The research timer on these mostly varies between 20 minutes up to 12 hours.

The countdown continues while offline. So it’s a wise strategy to research a big one just before logging out – and small ones while playing.

Pirate coins

This special currency is a reward from dispatch as well as quests from various islands visited with our personal boat. This boat is acquired some time after completing a quest to gain a Sailing License.

⛵ Dispatch

Because this is the main source of seals currency, the Dispatch Station is probably the 2nd most important tool of our stronghold. Here we make use of our sailors and tell them to go on an adventure on our behalf. Whenever they come home, there will be rewards to be had.

Normal missions

Basic adventures will be available as soon as we unlock the stronghold. Each one of them takes 2h to complete and rewards us with stronghold EXP, pirate coins and a variety of seals.

Adventure seals | Raid seals | Victory seals

All three of them can be used interchangeably with the NPCs around our island to purchase furniture, recipes and materials.

Special missions

There is a chance to receive a special mission upon clearing a Chaos dungeon, Boss rush, Guardian raid or a Platinum field event. Sending sailors here will consume an entry to said event in our behalf, as if we physically participated. It’s worth gauging the pros and cons of the rewards offered as per sailor vs if we went ourselves. This may help decide whether or not it’s worth going.

The special mission rewards are in correspondence with the event triggered; ie a sailor heading to chaos dungeon will bring back loot related to the chaos dungeon.

Choosing sailors

Each adventure comes with challenges such as windy and icy weather. Stationing sailors who excel in these domains will boost our adaptation to these conditions – which in turn increases their chances to bring home higher tier loot!

NOTE: The adaptation % is only tied with the probability to obtain better loot. There is no fail rate on these adventures. Which means, a mission with 4% will still succeed. We may just get a few less pirate coins, for example. Whereas 103% would bring more coins.

A few sailors are unlocked through the beginner housing quest and then some purchased from the daily trader. Pets can also be deployed and they have weather resistance capabilities as well.

Ship maintenance

As time goes by, our ship will require repairs. This is as simple as clicking “repair ship” inside the usual dispatch UI. Looking into the “ship list” will reveal all the ships we have at our disposal. It’s possible to unlock more with the combination of blueprints and research.

🕒 Craft, research & dispatch timers

Keeping an eye out for completed crafts, researches and dispatches is important and we can do so even while travelling all over the world of Lost Ark. Mousing over the little house icon in the bar at the very top of the screen will show if there’s anything ongoing:

🪑 Decor

There are many ways to obtain decor for our beautiful island — through quest rewards, exchange merchants and crafting. Once the item is in our inventory, simply clicking it will send it into the decor vault, from where we can use and place them.

To open the vault, press [B] to trigger the housing menu and then select [placement]

Decor types

Our items are automatically sorted into predefined categories:

Facilities
• Structures will have outdoor decor and small buildings like tents
• Furniture has indoor furniture (can be placed outdoors)
• Props will have smaller items like wooden barrels and wagons

Characters
• Roster characters and NPCs with full rapport can also be placed as decor items. They are animated as well, with “standby” motion.

Placement points

We’ve noticed that the counter indicating how much decor can be placed isn’t relevant to the quantity of items placed – but rather, to the amount of space an item is taking. For example, vine hedges uses 3 placement points, whereas a watermill uses 28. This information can be seen from the vault by mousing over a decor piece and reading its description.

Decor properties

High-grade decor identified as rare or legendary will also bring special properties such as passive buffs to decrease research time, etc. Only a select few can be activated at a time and this can be done through the [manor management]

Removing decor in bulk

There is an option to remove all decor at once. It’s located at the very right side of the screen in the UI showcasing the unlocked areas and decor count available. There is a button beside each area to wipe only one area at a time — and another button at the bottom of the list to wipe the entire stronghold.

🏯 Manor buffs

As mentioned above, certain decor pieces can provide passive buffs to help us progress faster and more efficiently. The decor rapport NPCs may also bring extra outfits with them — some of these may offer bonuses and they are activated the same way we would do for a regular piece of decor.

Here’s an example with the fountain’s bonus being activated:

👘 Wardrobe

The wardrobe is, unfortunately, not for us to play dress up with. It’s a feature that can be used with the rapport NPCs we have fully unlocked. Once they come over to our island, we may place them wherever we wish – just like any other decor. Flipping through the wardrobe allows us to see if they brought extra outfits to wear. Clothes can only be worn by its corresponding NPC.

Access the wardrobe by pressing [B] to activate the stronghold menu, and select [wardrobe]

⚔️ Training room & knowledge

If we suffer from alt-itis, as my friend likes to call it, the training room and knowledge features are definitely worth looking into. These dojo allows us to passively level up our alternative characters without lifting a finger. Both options use timers, so we should consider some light planning if we want to use x character for a specific event.

Training room

This dojo will train our alts up to two levels below our main. The remaining two levels have to be done the old fashioned way.

Knowledge

If we have extra gold to spare, this dojo will get any alts of our choice to level 50 without using the powerpass.

🐰 Pet ranch

The other version of Lost Ark has a pet ranch where we can set loose our beloved pets. They will farm cookies overtime and we can use that with a special trader [???]

🎎 Friend’s benefits

Now that we fully understand how this Estate functions, it’s time to tweak some settings and invite our friends! The settings can be opened by clicking the cog icon in the stronghold info box. A pop-up opens with options such as who can visit, use our merchants, eat our feast and who can gather the nodes in our farm.

Allow All = everyone
Allied Strongholds = allies
Friend Request = friend list

Benefits of sharing with friends

If our settings permits; friends visiting can make purchases from the daily trader and gather very special trading skill materials once our farm and cave are open. We can also share a wonderful meal with them. This gives a temporary buff increasing the stats of all players roaming on our island. It’s very useful before a difficult dungeon or raid.

Don’t forget to give friends a like when visiting for the first time! 💗

Here we come to an end for Lost Ark Housing Features and Benefits Stronghold hope you enjoy it. If you think we forget something to include or we should make an update to the post let us know via comment, and we will fix it asap! Thanks and have a great day!