Creating Cities with Castle Magic and Monstrology

You've seen the content, now meet the creator. Tarlac shares his many creative housing builds and decorating accomplishments including an updated version of his MooShu home previously featured in a post here!

Along with many other Wizard101 decorators, I started decorating in the good ol' rug glitching days. So imagine my surprise when, after returning from a long break from Wizard101 I discovered that decorating had evolved with features like castle magic, advanced movement, and house guests - on top of seeing what incredible things decorators were now capable of.

By using these awesome new decorating tools, I was able to develop my own decorating style - creating cities or villages within my houses that are inspired equally by real life places and in-game visuals. In the houses I will share below, you will see examples of castle magic used to cover large areas, and house guests used to bring liveliness to my houses.

Monstrology in Decorating

One thing you will notice in my houses is the extensive use of house guests created through Monstrology. Although collecting animus may seem laborious to some, I find it to be a worthwhile investment of time and quite satisfying when you finally create that awesome house guest you've been wanting. By using house guests you can bring a great liveliness to your projects. A great way to do so is using pet breadcrumbs to change the behavior of your house guest. You can also set a breadcrumb chain that they can follow.

The Zafarian Outpost

Although this house is one of my early builds, it was made to test my limits using the new decorative tools at my disposal. This was the first house where I used advanced movement quite heavily to go past the bounds of the house itself and use the rest of the landscapes within the house box to create new areas - these areas being an elephant town, an umbra rhino hideout, a lion village, and a gorilla treetop. While the options for Zafarian house guests is limited, I was still able to use undead house guests. By using an opaque castle magic spell, it will make their see-through appearance look normal.

The Yakooza Village

I've always been very interested in and amazed with Japan and its landscapes and architecture. So my Yakooza village not only takes great inspiration from Japan in real life but also the incredible visuals of MooShu in Pirate101. The idea I had for this house was to transform it so that it no longer resembled a red barn farm with the use of castle magic and house guests. I believe I was successful.

As far as castle magic, I make use of three separate reflector chains to give specific housing items different growth rates. Luckily, MooShu has a variety of mobs that we can collect animus from, so creating house guests for this project was easy. Using these tools, I was able to create what I think is a great homage to MooShu.

The Great City of Tenochtitlan

Being of Aztec descent myself, I always found Azteca to be an awesome world. So this project was a great way to use decorating to create something that ties in with my culture.

Tenochtitlan was an ancient Aztec capital city in what is now Mexico City. During its prime it was one of the largest cities in the world, with towering pyramids, beautiful temples, and bustling markets with a wide array of foods and luxuries. It was also an area plentiful of natural gems and gold.

For this project I decided to use the Pyramid of Lost Horizon, since this house already had the figurative bones I needed. It is also absolutely massive, so it was quite a challenge figuring out how to balance filling its exterior and interior while leaving enough item space for decorative details. Using two reflector chains to grow housing items and as well as strategically placing those housing items allowed me to naturally cover a lot of ground. By doing so I was able to build a central plaza and market area with several smaller villages on the outskirts of the plaza. In the interior I was able to create several different rooms, including a library, a council room, a hidden sauna room, and even a mining operation within the existing tunnel network. Azteca has a great variety of collectable mobs, so you will see quite a few different-looking guests.

The Aquilan City-State

The ancient Greek or Roman city states were areas that were autonomous and self-sufficient. I wanted this house to reflect that by having its own military training grounds, temple, ship docks, colosseum, and other things a city might need. This house also draws heavily from Pirate101, so I wanted to include an Aquilan ship to add to that aesthetic. Creating ships from scratch is quite a difficult task with the current housing items available, although not impossible.

Another challenge I faced for this project was the existing landscape of The Acropolis. The exterior, narrow pathways and weird-shaped outdoor areas made it an interesting endeavor. Another challenge was that the house guest options for Aquila are extremely limited unfortunately, so I used castle magic growth spells on pets to add a bit of diversity to the house guest pool.

The Housing Community

I have been really lucky to have discovered such a great community, and to be welcomed into it. One of the great things about this community is how everyone is always so willing to help each other out, be it with ideas, advice, or housing items. So I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been so kind and welcoming, and encourage others who are just starting decorating to join the community as well.

Thanks to Tarlac Mooncaller for sharing his amazing houses!

What do you think of Tarlac's creations?

Thanks for reading and see you in the Spiral!