The Dorm

Where to Find It

The Dorm is administered from one desk, an arrangement the castle arrived at only after trying two:

• Your profile's edit page hosts the "Decorate Your Dorm" panel — the same page where "Dress Up Your Avatar" lives, on the theory that the person and the room they stand in are ultimately one problem. Everything happens here: pieces you don't own appear with their price attached and one click buys them into your storeroom; rooms, sets, and the daily featured shelf all keep their office hours on this panel.
• The "Your Dorm" door in the Prefect's Lounge still exists, but opening it now simply walks you to that panel, the castle having concluded that a second shop selling identical goods at identical prices was less a convenience than a hallway.

To see someone else's dorm, visit their public profile at /user/<them>, where the finished room is on display — the only place it is. There is no in-game dorm page; the room lives on the profile and nowhere else.

Choosing a Room

The room itself — walls, floor, the implication of a ceiling — is chosen, not placed. Every dorm starts as the free Standard Dorm, serviceable and exactly like everyone else's, which is the point of a standard. Those who'd prefer a view may buy a different room outright from the Decorate panel; once bought, a room is permanently yours, and you may switch between the rooms you own as often as your sense of self shifts.

Furnishing It

Decor comes in kinds — things for the floor (rugs), things for the wall (posters, windows, banners), and furniture (beds, desks, chairs, chests, plants, lamps, bookshelves, the aforementioned cauldron). Pricing follows a four-rung ladder, each rung labeled in the currency it answers to:

• Free — a handful of starter pieces, yours from the beginning and owned by everyone, which is what "starter" means.
• Gold — the bulk of the catalog: everyday chairs, desks, plants, runners, and the House banners and rugs. Priced to give your accumulated fortune somewhere dignified to go.
• Gems — the step up: arched windows, floor lamps, and the fancier rooms, for those who carry the rarer stone.
• Donator Points — a small shelf of donor exclusives that cannot be had for any amount of gold or gems, on principle.

Every purchase, in any currency, is permanent — bought once, yours forever, no upkeep, no repossession.

The four House themes each come as a three-piece set — the room, the banner, and the rug — and any student may buy any House's set, the castle having decided that decorating in a rival House's colors is your own social risk to take. Complete all three pieces of a set and the castle pays out a one-time gold reward, once, with a small ceremony consisting of a message. The Decorate panel keeps score for you ("Gryffindor 2/3"), quietly.

You arrange pieces in the "Decorate Your Dorm" panel by dragging them where you'd like; the room redraws as you go. A dorm holds up to 30 placed pieces, after which the castle's fire regulations, invented for the occasion, politely intervene. Things placed lower in the room are understood to be nearer, and overlap accordingly, so a chair may sit convincingly in front of a desk.

You may own more decor than you've placed; the rest waits in storage to be arranged, uncomplaining.

The Featured Shelf

Each day the Decorate panel puts a small selection of the catalog on a featured shelf, under a sign reading "back tomorrow," and each day it means it. The rotation is decided by a process the shop describes as impartial and declines to describe further; nothing on the shelf costs more or less than it does anywhere else in the catalog, so the shelf is strictly an editorial opinion. Items you already own may still appear there, at which point the shelf simply congratulates you and moves on. Checking it daily is not required. The shop merely notes that people do.

The Weekly Inspection

Once a week, a clipboard visits your dorm while you sleep and scores it out of 100. The criteria are unpublished but observable: a room with things in it outscores a room without, a room with different kinds of things outscores a wall of identical chairs, and a complete House set standing in the room — actually placed, not hoarded in storage — impresses the clipboard considerably. Your score is converted into gold and deposited without ceremony at your next new day. An empty dorm is inspected, found to be an empty dorm, and paid accordingly, which is to say nothing. Your latest grade is kept on file in the Decorate panel, in case you wish to be haunted by it.

You, Standing in It

Your avatar stands in your dorm — the same avatar you assembled in the Wardrobe, feet on the floor at the room's appointed spot, drawn at the correct depth so that furniture in front of you sits in front of you and furniture behind you does not. Change your robes and the figure in the room changes with them. The overall effect is of a person who lives somewhere, which is, administratively speaking, an illusion, but a well-composited one.

On Display

The finished room — furniture, avatar, and all — is rendered as a single picture and shown on your public profile for anyone who visits, along with a running count of how many students like it and, where applicable, your last inspection grade, displayed with the neutrality of a plaque. Guests may look at your dorm, never touch it, which spares everyone the indignity of a visitor rearranging the furniture. They see the room exactly as you left it, which is either a comfort or a warning.

Should you prefer fewer witnesses, the Decorate panel offers a small chip labeled "Who can see this on your profile": Everyone (the default), Friends Only (when the Friend List is in service), or Just Me, for the fully monastic. None of this affects your own view — you go on decorating, dragging, and inspecting exactly as before; the setting only decides who else is let in on it.

Visiting, Liking, and the Guestbook

Other students' dorms are viewed on their public profile (/user/<them>), where the room is displayed. Directly beneath it, two forms of appreciation are available, both administered by the castle with its customary paperwork:

• Liking. You may like a dorm exactly once, ever. The like is recorded, counted, and displayed; it cannot be retracted, escalated, or duplicated, no matter how sincerely you press the button a second time. The ledger already knows.
• The guestbook. Every dorm keeps one. You may sign it with a note of up to 280 characters, which is displayed to subsequent visitors with your name attached — a detail worth remembering before committing anything to ink. The book accepts one entry per minute from any given quill, on the grounds that anything worth saying twice in sixty seconds probably wasn't. The last ten entries are on display; older wisdom is retired to the archive, where it rests.

You cannot like your own dorm or sign your own guestbook, a restriction the castle describes as "for your dignity" and declines to elaborate on. Be nice in other people's books: the notes are plain text, permanently attributed, and read by everyone who walks in after you.

In Season

Some decor is seasonal: it appears in the shop only during its appointed window — a lantern in October, a garland in December — and vanishes from the shelves the rest of the year, in the manner of all respectable holiday stock. Two administrative mercies apply. First, owning is forever: anything you bought in season remains yours, placeable and displayable, in any month you like; the shop's calendar governs the selling, never the keeping. Second, nothing is retired: a seasonal piece you missed comes back around with its season, the castle having concluded that manufactured scarcity is beneath even it.

Notes

• The catalog is fixed: you place pieces the shop sells, and nothing else. There is no way to upload a picture, type a sign, or otherwise smuggle in your own content — a deliberate omission, and a load off everyone's mind.
• If your browser declines to do the dragging, the same placing and removing is available through plain links, and visitors always see your room as a single finished picture regardless of what their browser can do.
• An empty dorm is a valid lifestyle choice and displays without complaint.