Homesteading
Janthir Wilds’ homesteads arrive at a point in Guild Wars 2’s story where Tyria finally has room to breathe. The Elder Dragon saga is done; the Commander is no longer sprinting from apocalypse to apocalypse, and the Isles of Janthir shift the focus to older magics, seers and mursaat, and the kind of political and mystical tangles that do not necessarily end with the world breaking in half. Within that quieter, stranger space, the ability to claim a piece of land and start putting it in order feels less like a side system and more like a reflection of where the game has gone.
A House After Dragons
Janthir Wilds launched on 20 August 2024 as the fifth expansion, built around two main maps in the Isles of Janthir, the new spear weapon, and the renewed Warclaw—now Journeykin—alongside homesteads as a third pillar that was always intended to grow over time rather than arrive fully formed. Homesteads unlock early through the story and are fully instanced, with each account getting its own personal map instead of bidding for a plot in a shared district. There is no lottery, no upkeep, and no risk of losing the space if you take a break; the entry door simply appears in the world once you have done the relevant story step, and from that point on, your characters can step through it whenever they like.
Because access is account‑wide, all of your characters share the same homestead. Any alt you bring into the homestead before logging out is then visible as an ambient NPC when you come in on another character, quietly going about their idle animations while benefiting from the homestead’s resting bonus. It is a small touch, but it means your roster starts to feel like a household rather than a set of isolated heroes parked in different cities.
Tools and Bones
Decoration in homesteads uses a three‑axis placement system. Instead of fixed hooks, you can move any eligible piece freely along the X, Y and Z axes, rotate it, let it float, sink it slightly into the ground, or clip it into other items. In practice, this turns the system into a light map editor: floor tiles become walls, walls become roofs, and standard props can be stacked into towers, bridges and multi‑storey houses. ArenaNet leaned into this in early demonstrations by building structures like lighthouses and multi‑level homes entirely from modular components.
At launch, there were already a few hundred decorations, with more arriving through Janthir Wilds’ quarterly updates: craftable pieces, achievement rewards, drops from the new maps, and Black Lion/Store items. Gem‑store decoration sets come with multiple placeable copies and an account‑wide recipe, so you can craft additional instances without repeatedly dipping into gems once you have bought a design.
Homesteads inherit your existing home instance unlocks. Ore veins, plant nodes, lumber, cats, visitors and personal curios all appear in your estate, so years of slowly filling out a racial home instance are not wasted. On top of that, homesteads add their own facilities: a mine, a logging camp and a farm, all of which can be upgraded via the Homesteading mastery line to increase daily yields and unlock extra functionality. Armour and weapon display stands allow you to hang up favourite skins, while stables and skiff moorings give you somewhere to park and show off mounts and boats. Up to thirty players can be in one homestead instance, which is enough for small gatherings, decorating parties and tours of particularly elaborate builds.
The exit behaviour mirrors other personal instances: there is a dedicated button that sends you back to wherever you were in the open world when you came in, and this persists across logouts as long as you do not visit another instanced space in between. That makes homesteads usable as a genuine base of operations rather than a one‑way trip.
Hearth’s Glow: Fixed House, Flexible Yard
Hearth’s Glow is the original homestead map, tied closely to the Janthir story and the Homesteading mastery track. It is framed as a small rural estate—a main house with a basement, a yard, a shed, fields and nearby woodland—that you gradually open up and claim as you invest mastery points. Early on, several doors in the house are locked, certain fences and outbuildings are inert, and some rooms are inaccessible; as you rank up homesteading, those doors start to open, and additional spaces and functions come online.
The fixed house is the main structural constraint. The building is baked into the terrain mesh, basement and all, rather than dropped in as a separate, movable object. Community discussions and developer commentary have both pointed out that if ArenaNet simply let players delete or drag the house, they would expose a literal hole into the void where the basement currently sits, and they would also break the logic of mastery‑gated rooms and doors. Later homestead maps, such as Comosus Isle, were designed with this in mind: fewer progression‑critical doors, no hard‑wired basement, and more open pads of land that better support freeform building.
Within those bones, Hearth’s Glow is surprisingly accommodating. The small shed, fenced fields and corn patch give you an implicit “farmstead” template that takes well to crafting stations, gathering nodes and rustic decorations, while the surrounding slopes and clearings are deliberate blank canvases for gardens, training grounds, workshops or improbable architectural projects. With collision kept relatively light in most of the outer areas, larger builds—roller beetle tracks, courtyards, multi‑level compounds—have room to breathe.
Ambient behaviour helps sell the space as a lived‑in property. Mounts placed at the stables wander and snort instead of standing stock‑still. Your alts populate the homestead, switching positions in between log-ins, and story NPCs linked to Janthir drop by as you progress, making the estate feel like a hub for the Commander’s quieter moments.
A Layered Record
ArenaNet’s Homestead Essentials notes made it clear that homesteads are meant primarily for solo or small‑group use, not as replacements for guild halls, and that home instances would not be removed but folded into the new system. That continuity is particularly obvious in Hearth’s Glow, where long‑unlocked nodes, cats and visitors sit quite naturally alongside Janthir‑era decorations and new facilities, turning the estate into a visual timeline of an account’s history.
There are still rough edges. Some players have criticised awkward decoration block zones, bugs and the fixed nature of Hearth’s Glow’s core house, and there is a sense that later homestead maps are already benefiting from lessons learned about basements, doors, and how much structural geometry should be movable. At the same time, the system has quickly become a practical convenience—bank, crafting, portals, resting buff—for alts, and a playground for decorators who have been pushing the three‑axis tools as far as collision and instance limits will let them.
More broadly, homesteads and Hearth’s Glow in particular fit neatly into the post‑dragon shape of Guild Wars 2. They provide a concrete, customisable place to come back to between excursions to Janthir’s storms or whatever comes next, and they tie together progression, old collections and new mysteries in a way that feels consistent with the game’s habit of carrying its history forward rather than abandoning it every few years.
