Wizard101 Castle Tours: Journey to Castle Auditor

Karamelle got most of the attention in the new update, but Wizard101 made a lot of other cool changes and additions too. Among them are new items for use in housing included placeable banks and spiral doors. But to buy the recipes for some of these items, you'll need to acquire one of the many new badges that were also introduced with this update for decorators.

There are three new badges that we know about so far for rating castles in castle tours:

• Castle Tourist - Rate 10 Castles
• Castle Auditor - Rate 100 Castles
• Castle Assessor - Rate 1000 Castles

While most of the items unlock at Castle Auditor, there is a Wizard City Castle Tours Apartment that requires the Castle Auditor badge.

I decided to go for the Castle Auditor badge so that I might be able to craft some of these new items, and because I was interested to see what I'd find in Castle Tours. To rate new houses, there are really only a few different options you can choose from. I chose to go to random houses (of any category). This means that unlike viewing houses on the leaderboard, there's no guarantee they'll be any good.

The other new part of the update that affects ratings is that rating castles now requires you to visit both the interior and exterior of a house and to spend at least 30 seconds in one of the zones. Seems easy enough. I decided to take a look, and in my journey to Castle Auditor and rating 100 castles, I stumbled upon a few particularly cool houses that I thought I should share!

Above you can see a few notable places I visited. One was an almost unrecognizable dorm room with Storm furniture all over. The two doors to the left take you to a second level in the dorm! In the process of exploring 100 castles, I ran into a lot of the smaller Marleybone homes. One owner had actually repaired both sides of the broken road. The other side had a hot air balloon ride. The third image is one that I believe belongs to Iridian WillowGlen. The Sunken Palace is a house that isn't used as often, but it's a beautiful one! Inside, she has used castle blocks to create beautiful walkways through the decorated water areas. The last image is a mushroom house village that I thought was pretty cool, especially given the rarity of some of those items.

Now check out these video tours of three others houses I thought were really cool! These all got four out of four stars from me (or would have if I could rate them in one case).

The MooShu Village

One of the first houses I ran into was a Red Barn Farm that was completely unrecognizable. Unfortunately, a lot of the house isn't accessible and it's unable to be rated for that reason, which is a shame. I don't think you need to use both zones to make an amazing house. Check out this MooShu Village, which includes a secret training area, a marketplace, and a ship dock.

The Darkmoor Mansion Maze

Mazes have always been a lot of fun and used to be a pretty big deal at events. I'm recalling Anthony Deathbane's mazes at events from Legends of the Spiral. Now there's a whole housing category dedicated to them. While this maze is fairly standard, it uses some cool castle magic mechanics to rearrange pieces. It also utilizes castle magic for some cut-scene-style showings of the maze mechanisms.

The Fantastic Fair

I think the coolest house I ran into by far was this fair. It's extremely interactive and the things that it manages to do are wild. I'm honestly not sure how they're accomplished. There are a variety of interactive games and a few rides. The owner has taken the carousel and placed a platform underneath so you can walk on it, for example. From jumping inside tent housing items to indoor amazes, there's a lot to love about this house!

And with those, I have officially earned my Castle Tourist and Castle Auditor badge! I don't know if I'll ever go for 1000, but I might visit other houses worth sharing in the future, so stay tuned!

What'd you think of these houses? Have you earned any Castle Tours badges?

Thanks for reading and see you in the Spiral!