Player-owned house

A player-owned house (often shortened to POH) can be bought from an estate agent and created, expanded, and upgraded by members. It is the result of a player's efforts in the Construction skill.

If any player dies within a house (via the combat room or dungeon rooms), they will retain all their items. However if a player dies just after leaving or getting kicked out of a house while being poisoned or under the effects of Vengeance, they will die a normal death. Also, during the Halloween Events, The Grim Reaper comes just like a regular death.

With the 18 August 2009 update the house got faster to enter, more intelligent Servants, a new room, and Lecterns with make X options. Additionally, players got the ability to choose whether to teleport into the house, or outside the portal. On top of that, when teleporting to your house, the game would remember your building mode and teleport players to their house in that building mode.

House Locations
Players can enter the house through purple POH portals, which are located in six different places:

House styles
Estate agents can also redecorate the outside of a player's house for a fee. Along with a total redecoration of a house, each house style comes with a unique tune that plays upon entering the house.

The Varrock estate agent charges half price after completion of the Varrock elite tasks.

Building a House
To build a house, a player must enter their house portal and go into building mode. This can be done either by using the portal or changing the building mode settings in house options in the options menu. If you change these settings while not in a house, you will automatically be in building mode the next time you teleport to your house using the teleport or teleport tablet. You cannot turn building mode on while there are guests in your house.

Building Mode
A basic house starts off with only a parlour and garden, but more rooms can be added at higher levels. In building mode, players will see ghost versions of some furniture and doors called "Hotspots", where new objects can be built in the various rooms. Right-click on these and select build to construct different items for the current room, if you have the required materials and tools. You cannot drop items while in building mode. building mode can be turned on and off using the house options menu, as this makes it easy to enter building mode while inside the house instead of going out and back in to the house.

Rooms


There are twenty types of room that can be added to a house. The house begins with a garden and parlour, more rooms can be added. Different rooms will require different Construction levels and amounts of coins.

Additional exits that can be built:
 * Garden / Formal Garden: House exit portal or dungeon entrance (if there is more than one garden).
 * Portal Chamber: Teleportation portals
 * Quest Hall: Mounted Glory amulet teleports

Useful Rooms

 * A Kitchen can be used to cook food, fill buckets, and numerous other food related tasks, as well as being useful for training cooking for free or for a cheaper price. Various levels of shelves are possible, which contain unlimited kettles, teapots, gilded cups, beer glasses, cake tins, bowls, pie dishes, pots, and chef's hats. These allow player to make a cup of tea with the various other items in the kitchen, which gives a temporary one to three level boost to Construction. The level boost depends on the type of shelves the player builds. At level 67 Construction the best shelves can be made. Players can also cook here if they wish, and re-building oak larders is a fast method of training construction.
 * A Dining Room's most notable feature is the bell-pull (level 26), which allows players to summon a servant quickly. Placing the dining room and therefore bell-pull close to the kitchen or the workshop is recommended, so that the butler can be summoned quickly to be sent to the bank or sawmill.
 * The workshop allows players to build flat-pack furniture at the workbench, make clockwork toys at the clockmakers bench, repair barrows armour, and less significantly, paint steel and rune armour (this makes them nontradeable), and make banners.
 * Players must have two bedrooms if they wish to hire a servant. Bedroom furniture can change your in-game appearance.
 * The study has a lectern (levels 47, 57 and 67), which allows players to make magic tablets, using soft clay and the runes to cast the spell required. The eagle lectern is used for teleport spells, whilst the demon lectern is used for enchantment spells. The best eagle lectern can create: Level 1 enchant, Varrock Teleport, Lumbridge Teleport, Falador Teleport, Camelot Teleport, Ardougne Teleport, Watchtower Teleport, and House Teleport.
 * The Quest hall may contain an Amulet of Glory on the wall, which will give unlimited teleports. This is useful for quick banking once finished in the house.
 * The costume room can be amazingly helpful in storing items that would normally be taking up room in the bank. Considering that every item in this room may be made into flat-packs at a workbench, any player can have a very useful costume room.
 * The chapel may contain an altar, up to a gilded altar (requires 75 construction). In addition to being able to recharge prayer at this altar, players may also train prayer here, by using bones with the altar. With one incense burner lit, the gilded altar gives 300% Prayer experience per bone. When both are lit, it gives 350% Prayer experience
 * With a Portal Chamber a player can create portals with any teleports available to them. In particular, a Kharyrll teleport portal can also be created (teleports the player to Canifis) making the portal chamber very useful for playing the Barrows activity.
 * The Menagerie can contain many pets and Mini obelisk can restore Summoning points.

Number of Rooms / Maximum Area
The maximum number of rooms that a player can have depends on the player's construction level.


 * Houses may only have up to 32 rooms (starts at 20 rooms at level 38 or below and makes its way up to 32 rooms at level 99).
 * Houses may only be up to 7 by 7 rooms (starting at 3 by 3 and making its way up to 7 by 7 at level 60).
 * Houses may only have up to 3 levels: 1 below ground, the ground floor, and 1 above ground.
 * To add a room on the level above ground, you must already have a room on the ground floor. If you later decide that the ground floor room below needs removing/replacing, you must first remove the room above on the upper level (doesn't work with gardens).
 * Many rooms, such as gardens and dungeons, are restricted to a certain floor.
 * You may not drop items in building mode.
 * You may not enter building mode with a pet, familiar or follower out.

House planning
To get the best out of the house takes a little planning. Consideration should be given to:
 * The limit of 32 rooms at 99 construction (including gardens).
 * The limit of 7 by 7 by 3 rooms.
 * Which rooms are useful (for example, the Parlour has limited use).
 * How many doors the rooms have, and which way the doors will face.
 * Which rooms to have close to the entrance (for quick access).
 * Oubliettes should be below Throne Rooms.
 * Only the Quest hall, the Skill hall and the Dungeon stairs may be built above or below a room with stairs. However the Dungeon stairs may only be built below ground.
 * Rooms can be expensive to move (replacing expensive furniture after move).

Planning the layout
While each house can be customised to suit the personal taste of the builder, there are a few important points to consider when building a house. The first is what rooms are placed next to a portal. For example, Portal Chambers are very useful to place directly adjacent to the portal, since this allows quick and easy access to any portals, for when players wish to use their house as a teleport hub. Another room that is useful to put near the portal is a Chapel, which will allow players to train and recharge prayer more quickly. A Menagerie is useful near the portal for similar reasons. Players may also wish to put their Studies close to the portal since this will increase efficiency when making Magic tablets.

Another important point to consider when building a house is which direction stairs face. While this is not a huge concern for Spiral staircases, since they may be accessed from any side, normal staircases can be annoying if built facing the wrong direction. Formerly, when adding a Skill Hall or Quest Hall, from the default position, staircases going down will have their top step facing the doorway from whence the room was built. For staircases going up, the bottom of the stairs will face the doorway opposite the one from whence the room was built. Now, these rooms can be rotated upon creation.

When a staircase is added to a Skill Hall, they will connect to the room above or below by default if and only if the room is facing the proper direction. If it is not, then one of the rooms will have to be demolished and rebuilt in order to secure a connection. This restriction is in effect for both normal staircases and, even though they do not have a "direction", spiral staircases.

POH rooms such as a chapel, throne room, study, and dungeon rooms, once filled with expensive gilded/opulent furniture, cannot be moved. Plan a house layout using a fansite or a sheet of paper; well-planned houses (altar, lecterns, dungeon entrance, etc. next to portal) are more convenient to use, look much more impressive, and can also conserve millions of coins.

Removing rooms
Some players occasionally decide to remove rooms, such as when they wish to build different types of rooms but have reached their limit for the number of rooms in the house. A room can be removed in building mode by right clicking the door to the room and select the 'build' option. This brings up an option to remove the room. You cannot remove a room that is supporting another room on the upper floor.

It is advisable to remove all the built items in a room before removing the room. In most cases, nothing is gained by removing items, but in some cases items are recovered. For example, armour, swords, and capes that are part of a display can be recovered.

Sometimes a room will be removed if the stairs to it are removed. This seems to occur only in cases when the room will have no access to no other room once the stairs are removed. The player is warned when this will happen and can abort the process.

Moving Rooms
It is possible to move a room which you may only have 1 of (examples being the Menagerie and Costume room). To move a Menagerie or Costume room, one must simply try to build a new one without removing the current room. They will then be told that they can only have one and will be asked if they want to move it. Upon selecting "yes", the player will be prompted to choose the rotation of the new room. The new room (after being relocated) will have all the same items, furniture and pets as it had at the old location. The player will have to pay the cost of building the room in order to move it.

Room exits
The following list of rooms shows the number and position of doors:

Healing and Dying Inside a House
Dying inside a player-owned house will result in the player being sent to the house portal outside, all skills returned to their normal level, and poison and disease cured. No items are lost. Previously, poison would still continue even though a player has exited the house, and the player would not regain any lost health incurred within the house. Now, if players leave the house without having died (walking out the entrance portal for example), any skill that is lower than it was upon entering the house is restored to the level it was before entering. For example, a player entering with 800/800 lifepoints and leaving with 150/800, will be restored to 800/800. A player entering the house with 150/800 and gaining lifepoints while in the house (through respawing in a combat room, natural healing, food, etc.), leaving with 350/800, will have 350/800 lifepoints.

Trivia

 * Player owned houses were mentioned as early as 21 February 2002, but came out 4 years later, on 31 May 2006.
 * During the first 6 months of Runescape Classic there were player owned houses, but they were soon removed due to lack of space.
 * The first person to reach 99 Construction, "Cursed You", had a massive party upon reaching it. He then logged out but the massive lag caused a glitch where people could teleport or walk from the house and still attack people if they were in the dungeon or combat ring. This led to the infamous "Falador Massacre".


 * Using an enchanted catspeak amulet it has been found that player owned houses are to the far south east of runescape.
 * If you are outside of your house and press the "Expel Guests" button under "House Options" it will say "You're not in a house. You can't expel people from the world, even if you don't like them!"
 * When in the tutorial, clicking house options says "You won't need to control your house from here"
 * A POH is one of the only places in the game where it is possible to get the option "Examine Nothing." When examined, it will say "There's nothing there."


 * If a player is in a Boxing Ring, Fencing Ring, or a Combat Ring and leaves (by jumping over the ring, not getting expelled or dying), then he or she may click attack on another player. However, a message will appear saying, "That player is not in a combat ring".
 * If a player dies in a Combat ring while frozen by an ice spell, the freezing effect will strangely carry over when the player respawns outside the ring, preventing them from moving until it wears off. This is a glitch, and has yet to be fixed by Jagex.


 * There is a glitch in the Throne room, a player stands on the floor decoration and does an emote while the lever is pulled. The player will not fall, and sometimes the trap will close and it will have to be pulled again for the player to fall.
 * Turning chair.jpg Sitting in any Bench, Chair, or Throne and then using the "Leave House" option will cause the piece of furniture to disappear. Exiting and re-entering the house with no one else inside will cause the furniture to reappear. Another method is to log off and log back in, then re-enter the house. This also can happen with a Workbench where the bench will only disappear; Although, If a player uses the work bench, the bench will re-appear.


 * When sitting on any chair in a POH, interacting with another item (e.g. Search Larder, Enter Portal) will cause the chair to spin to face the object.
 * Poh pet glitch.png An uncommon glitch occurs as a pet walks by the opened doors between any room and garden. The fence from the garden suddenly appears in front of the windowed wall for a split second. This glitch may be caused by having a high fence in your garden and the style of the wall of the house (such as fancy stone, lattice, etc.)


 * A rare glitch is when you exit the house, you will be completely logged out (not just sent to the lobby.) This has yet to be fixed.
 * There's an occasional glitch that if you enter a house portal and while the house is loading, you open your stats interface, you will see that all the skills will be at 120 for a few seconds until the house fully loads.
 * There is a glitch where you enter your house and your Life Points, Prayer, and Run Energy will all appear to be zero for a split second. This hasn't been fixed by Jagex yet.
 * There is a current glitch where you enter your house and the ground will be covered in streaks of grey, which will constantly shift about with a glitch effect. This has yet to be fixed. (This glitch can be fixed temporarily by going to "Video Settings" then "Custom "and selecting "Software")
 * There is a rare glitch whereby if you're not in building mode and you look at stairs going to the basement, the bottom part will look as if it were in building mode. The glitch has not been fixed. Poh stair glitch.jpg
 * There is a very rare glitch in which you can delete a downstairs room without the room above being removed, thus causing the upstairs room to float. (The room up stairs can still be used as normal.)
 * When utilising the "Cabbage-port" option on your Explorer's Ring 3 while sitting at your workbench or other chair, you will remain sitting while the cabbage appears around your feet.
 * If a player is sitting on a bench, you may be able to walk on top of them. If the player stands up, the other player will still be standing up in the bench.
 * At the loading screen, you are still able to rotate your view (as you can see from your compass), even though the screen is black.
 * At the loading screen, if you right-click, you may see options to remove or examine certain objects around your house. You may even see "Nothing".
 * Since the z-buffering update on 21 September 2010, players with a dungeon in their Player-owned house the ground floor of the house will have a glitch where dungeon floor is mixed with grass and inside floors.

Fixed:
 * There was a glitch in mid August 2009 with the release of Menageries, where if the player tried to get in it would repeatedly say "Invalid teleport" and then throw the player outside of her or his house. This was fixed just a couple hours later, but still does it rarely even today.
 * If a player teleports to his or her house with a pet out, the pet will be inside even if the player is in building mode. This has now been fixed in a recent update.
 * When in building mode, you can run out of a second floor hotspot and walk around the area around your house. This has been fixed by Jagex.
 * There was a glitch that while sitting on the dining bench your character will stand up. This has now been fixed.
 * Butlers seem to be unable to detect the house owner's presence in a house when a guest is visiting. This has been fixed. Butler glitch.png
 * At one point you could do a glitch where on a second floor where a parlour was if you clicked at the then completely black space and quickly ate food you would be in the black space and walk around this has been fixed
 * There is a glitch where if you sit in a chair with a two-handed weapon and click a one-handed weapon (even a bow) you will hold the one-handed weapon like a two-handed weapon. Or if you sit with a one-handed weapon and click any two-handed weapon, you will one-hand the two-handed weapon. This has been fixed.