FFXIV: Housing Furniture Preview Feature
One of the features that launched with Shadowbringers that I would have been more excited about had I known what it was… was the housing furniture preview. When they noted this back in some fan fest or live letter presentation, I remember asking, “What does that mean?”
It wasn’t until I saw it in action that I understood how nice this QoL feature is! Up until now, if you wanted to know what a furniture item looked like, you’ve had to go to very useful sites like FFXIV Housing. And even then, it was easy to overlook furniture you didn’t know about because there’s just so much to sort through.
This preview system helps a ton with this. Basically, you can open up the Housing menu and select Preview Indoor Furnishings. This gives you a list of housing items, organized by category!
The system defaults to the most recent housing items added to start with. But then you can drill down into specifically what you want to see.
The best part of this system is that it places a temporary version of the item in your house. This way, you can check out what it looks like, how large it is, and how it fits with the rest of your decor. You can even use the dye preview to see what it looks like in different colors!
This would have been super useful when I was planning out my housing and room decorations earlier. I can’t tell you how many times I would buy something only to find it didn’t fit right, or was smaller than I thought it was going to be, or just didn’t mesh with the theme I was working on.
Not only that, but I spent so much time searching the housing website for specific things – bookshelves, lighting, beds, etc. And then when I found something I thought was right, I still didn’t know until I placed it and dyed it whether it was what I was looking for.
Of course, you can’t mess around with things like float glitches with the preview, so it doesn’t cover every base. But just to see in detail what something looks like before you make the effort to craft it or spend gil to buy it goes a very long way!