Crimson Desert Housing Guide: Howling Hill, Furniture and the Outdoor Overhaul

The best base in the game starts with a chore

Somewhere in Chapter 3, a Greymane named Luke asks you to carry a flower basket into an abandoned house to freshen the place up. It is the least glamorous quest objective in Crimson Desert, and it is also the key to the entire housing system — a three-room clifftop residence, a placement editor with its own control scheme, a furniture economy spanning shops, crafting stations and an actual claw machine, and, since June, the ability to decorate the land around the house too.

Most players do the flower basket, glance at the empty rooms, and never come back. That is a mistake, because Pearl Abyss has been quietly feeding this system in almost every patch since launch — 58 new house items in one update alone — and the house sits next to one of the most convenient fast-travel points you will ever unlock.

Here is how the whole thing works, from the audience with a marquis to the Sotdae in your front yard.

How Howling Hill becomes yours

You do not buy your house. You are handed it by aristocracy.

The housing thread runs through the Chapter 3 story arc about rebuilding the Greymanes. The main quest "The First Step to Rebuilding" ends with an audience with Marquis Serkis — his residence is Oakenshield Manor in central Hernand, a former oak farm turned mansion, and he is the right-hand man of Duke Celester. Serkis grants Kliff ownership of a property called Howling Hill, a clifftop site just south of the City of Hernand, intended as the place where the Greymanes rebuild their fallen stronghold.

A soldier escorts you to the property, where Barden Middler — the man overseeing preparations — greets you and, in the same cutscene, introduces Damiane, the second playable character. That double duty is worth noticing: the game attaches its housing tutorial to one of its biggest character reveals, which tells you how central Pearl Abyss considers this place.

The camp itself gets built by your own hands during the quest "A Fresh Start" — moving sacks, pushing a wagon, raising the banner. (That quest is still being tuned: the August 1 patch adjusted where the sacks have to go.) Later in the arc, the "Rustling Hill" quest asks you to open the map, highlight the Howling Hill base and inspect it, after which the house on the hill — southeast of the central camp, up the rise — is yours to enter. The Howling Hill camp below it grows into your cooking, farming and dispatch hub; the house is the private floor above the shop.

Luke's flower basket unlocks the whole system

Owning the property and decorating it are two different unlocks.

After the handover cutscene, talk to Luke at the camp. He asks you to place a flower basket in the abandoned house on the hilltop just past him. Walking in triggers the Home Decoration tutorial: three rooms, sparsely furnished with a bed and a few tables, and a prompt explaining how placement works. Return to Luke afterward and the cliff-top house is fully unlocked as your permanent residence.

Two details matter here. First, this is the sixth quest in the Greymanes' "Grounds of the Sunrise" mission list — the same chain that feeds you comrade recruits — so if you have been ignoring that faction thread, you are locked out of decorating entirely. Second, you must be playing as Kliff to complete it. Damiane and Oongka can walk the property, but the unlock quest is his.

How Decoration Mode actually works

Approach the house and press the Start button to enter Decoration Mode. The camera pulls out to a full view of the interior, and a list of every installable object you own appears in the top-right corner. Only items marked with a home icon show up in that list — everything else in your inventory is invisible here, which is the game telling you exactly what counts as furniture.

The placement controls are their own little vocabulary: Rotate, Move Camera, Control, Stow, Drag and Deploy, with a quick Undo button for reversing your last action. It is closer to a lightweight builder mode than a menu, and after the early patches it behaves like one — version 1.12 fixed a camera-angle glitch when entering Housing Mode and a Mac-specific bug where keyboard-and-mouse players could not place items at all, and the August 1 patch stabilised placement controls when moving items near walls.

One rule will trip you up constantly until you internalise it: you cannot move an installed piece of furniture if another item is sitting on top of it. Clear the table before you move the table. Decorate top-down — large pieces first, clutter last — and you will fight the editor far less.

Where furniture actually comes from

The furniture economy has four supply lines, and they are not equally obvious.

Found items. Exploring Pywel turns up interactable objects with the home icon. If it has the icon, it can go in the house — this is the slow, free route, and it is how most players furnish their first room without realising the system goes deeper.

Vendors. Three are worth knowing early:

The utensils are the sleeper pick. Cauldrons and pots bought from these vendors are not just set dressing — they let you craft food and alchemy items like porridge and Palmar Pills at home instead of trekking to a public cooking station. Furnishing your kitchen is a quality-of-life upgrade wearing a decoration costume.

The Box of Fortune. Added in June to the Mysterious Shop at 100 silver a box, capped at three purchases per restock. It is a cheap lottery ticket that can pay out house items, and at that price there is no reason not to clear the cap whenever you pass by.

Claw machines and challenges. The official patch notes list claw machines and the orb roll challenge as furniture sources, and they mean it literally — Crimson Desert has working claw machines, and the toys inside them include things you can put on your shelves. The flower basket crafting mission pays out house items too.

The 1.12 update turned the yard into the good part

On June 19, patch 1.12.00 shipped the single biggest expansion the system has had: a new feature that lets you decorate the area outside your house. Until then, everything stopped at the front door. Now the clifftop itself is a canvas, and Pearl Abyss backed the feature with 58 new house items in one drop:

Ten Sotdaes deserves a pause. A sotdae is a traditional Korean village pole with a carved bird perched on top, and Pearl Abyss shipping ten of them for your fantasy front yard is the most Korean-studio flex in the whole catalogue. Between those, seven fountains and six wells, the outdoor set clearly wants your clifftop to read as a lived-in settlement rather than a lawn.

The catch: most of these are not simply bought. The items and their crafting manuals come from shops, claw machines, the flower basket crafting mission, the Box of Fortune and the orb roll challenge — and then the items themselves get crafted.

Workstation and Loom: where the outdoor items get made

Patch 1.12 added two crafting stations for exactly this purpose. Workstations handle the woodwork and stonework side and can be found in multiple places, including the Greymane Camp and Timberham Sawmill. Looms cover the textile side — carpets among them — and sit at the Hernand Tailor's Shop and other locations.

If you have been feeding the camp's logging and gathering loops, this is where that material stops being an abstract number. Buy a manual, walk it to a Workstation, and the fountain is yours.

Housing is still getting patched

The June drop was not a one-off. The July 3 update (1.13.00) added crafting recipes for four types of carpets, purchasable from shops, and a small change with outsized charm: summoned pets now rest together with your character when you sleep in a bed. It also fixed a nasty furniture-shop bug where selling and repurchasing certain furniture wiped the repurchase menu.

Version 1.12 also closed the loophole that let items be placed outside the designated housing area — a sentence that implies at least one player turned greater Pywel into their living room — and 1.16.00, which landed August 1, stabilised placement when moving installable items near walls, in a patch otherwise devoted to a massive trading overhaul.

That cadence matters if you are deciding whether to invest. Across the full patch history, housing has picked up content or fixes in nearly every numbered update since June. The official June roadmap also named quality-of-life work on non-combat systems as a through-September priority. This is a system Pearl Abyss is actively growing, not a launch checkbox.

What the house is actually for

Strip away the decorating and the house still earns its map icon three ways.

Time control. Sleeping in your bed skips the time of day — the cleanest way to force a morning shop restock or a night-time activity without standing around.

Storage and crafting. The house works as an item stash, and a furnished kitchen turns it into a private crafting station for food and alchemy. The very first post-launch patch added extra storage at the Howling Hill Camp below, so the whole hill functions as your logistics hub.

Position. From Chapter 4, an Abyss Nexus fast-travel point sits right beside the house. That single fact changes the house from a novelty into a place you pass through constantly — which is exactly when having your cauldron, your bed and your stash in one spot starts paying rent.

And if you need ambition fuel, ride past Glenbright Manor in the Hernand Highlands — Count Grace's walled estate, all gardens and poplars. You will never own it, but after the 1.12 outdoor tools, a decorated Howling Hill with braziers lining the path and a fountain by the door gets closer to that energy than a launch-week player would believe. One honest limit: there is exactly one house, at Howling Hill. Nothing in the game or the patch notes points to buying property elsewhere in Pywel — this is a homestead, not a real-estate portfolio.

Quick Action Checklist

• Progress Chapter 3 to "The First Step to Rebuilding" and take the audience with Marquis Serkis to receive Howling Hill.
• Do Luke's flower-basket quest immediately — it is the sixth Grounds of the Sunrise quest, requires Kliff, and gates all decorating.
• Enter Decoration Mode with the Start button at the house; only home-icon items appear in the placement list.
• Place big furniture first — you cannot move a piece with an item sitting on top of it.
• Buy utensils from Vincent, the camp merchant, or Alden so you can cook porridge and craft Palmar Pills at home.
• Clear the Box of Fortune cap at the Mysterious Shop when passing: 100 silver each, three per restock.
• Collect crafting manuals from shops, claw machines, the flower basket mission and the orb roll challenge, then craft outdoor items at a Workstation (Greymane Camp, Timberham Sawmill) or Loom (Hernand Tailor's Shop).
• Sleep in your bed to skip the time of day — your summoned pet rests alongside you since 1.13.
• Use the Chapter 4 Abyss Nexus beside the house to make Howling Hill your default logistics stop.