Stronghold Starter Guide

Stronghold Starter Guide

Ready to get started on your first stronghold? Strongholds are Star Wars: The Old Republic’s version of player housing – you can buy a house, and then decorate it the way you’d like with decorations found all over the game. You can then invite others to see your stronghold, or place it on the public listings so people can find it and tour your house. Strongholds are also a very convenient because you can set up useful tools like your legacy bank and a GTN in whatever arrangement you want.

How to Get Your First Stronghold

To purchase your first stronghold, you must be able to reach the Republic or Imperial Fleet – so you can get your first stronghold after you finish your first quest.

There is also a great introductory quest to strongholds that I highly recommend doing which becomes available at Level 15 or higher, which will give you some free decorations. To start the quest, head to the Strongholds & Crew Skills section of the Fleet and look for the holographic questgiver.

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After you have accepted the quest from the strongholds hologram questgiver, turn around and walk over to the Stronghold terminals. This is where you can purchase and unlock your first stronghold.

The least expensive Imperial stronghold is the Dromund Kaas stronghold, which costs 5,000 credits.

The least expensive Republic stronghold is the Coruscant stronghold, which costs 5,000 credits.

You can have more than one stronghold, so most players start with one of those two!

To purchase a stronghold, right-click the directory terminal, then choose “Purchase” from the menu on the left, as by default, it shows you the Public Listings tab, which you can use to travel to and visit other people’s strongholds. Once you are on the Purchase tab, you can click the Purchase button if you have enough credits.

The next step of the quest is to go to your stronghold.

How to Use the Strongholds Panel

Once you have purchased your first stronghold, you can use the strongholds panel to travel to it. To open the Stronghold panel, hover over the icon of a triangle in the main menu, and choose “Strongholds”, or you can use the default shortcut by pressing the “U” key on your keyboard.

On the left, you can switch between Personal and Guild strongholds. If you are in a guild, they may also have a stronghold or flagship you can visit!

To go to your stronghold once you have purchased it, click the “Travel” button in the strongholds panel, and you’ll be teleported to your stronghold.

To complete the quest, take a few steps forward, and you’ll receive a handful of free basic decorations. You can do this quest on every one of your characters for more free decorations for your stronghold!

Your strongholds and decorations are legacy-wide, and all your characters on your server can visit and decorate your strongholds.

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Leaving Your Stronghold

When you are ready to leave your stronghold, press the “Exit Area” button or the elevator button.

The most common exit point is the “Return” option which allows you to travel back to your original location – so if you are questing, you can make a quick run to your bank, your mailbox or the GTN in your stronghold then travel back to exactly where you were. However the “Return” option will only bring you back to the correct planet (NOT the correct location) if you log out in between. You can also exit to the planet the stronghold is located on, and subscribers can exit to the Fleet or to their Starship.

How to Unlock Decorations

If you have completed the initial stronghold quest, the first time you travel to your stronghold you should receive a bundle of starter decorations. To make them useable in you stronghold, you need to right-click those items in your inventory.

Be careful – once you use them you can no longer sell them or give them away, so think before you right-click any decorations you get! Once you have right-clicked a decoration item from your inventory, it will be added to your decorations list. That decoration will now be accessible by all your characters on your server in any of your strongholds. If you haven’t already, right-click and use all the free decorations you got from the strongholds quest.

Once you place a decoration down, it will subtract 1 of those decorations from your available decorations. However you can pick it back up again and put it down somewhere else. You can have multiples of the same decoration as long as you acquire multiples of the item and use them. For example, you can have 4 Basic Metal Chairs as long as you buy four from the vendor, and you will be able to place a total of four down across all your strongholds.

To view all your decorations, open the Stronghold Panel. On the left sidebar, click the ‘Personal’ button with a score under it. You can then sort to show by All, Unlocked and Available. This panel is just for checking which decorations you have – you do not decorate from here.

How to Decorate

Whenever you are in your own stronghold, you can use the green “Edit Mode” button to decorate your stronghold.

You can usually find it near the bottom of your User Interface.

When you are done decorating, you can press the “Hide Hooks” button in the same place to exit the decorating mode.

Once you are in Edit Mode, you will see a bunch of glowing squares appear around the room.

These are called Hooks. You can only place decorations on hooks, you can not put them wherever you would like. Decorations only fit onto certain types of hooks – for example, you can’t put a ceiling light on the floor, a large decoration might only fit on a centerpiece hook, and rugs will only fit on a rug hook.

To place a decoration, right-click a glowing hook, which will open up the Decorations panel for decorating. By default, the Decorations list will show you decorations you have unlocked and fit in to that hook. If the number beside the decoration is green, that means you can put the decoration down by clicking “Place” under the preview of the decoration. If the number is red, it means you have the decoration available, but you’ve already put it down somewhere. If you want to see which decorations you actually have on hand to use, you can change the dropdown on the Decorations list from “Show Unlocked” to “Show Available”. If you have a lot of decorations, there’s also useful Category and subcategory dropdowns you can filters your decorations with, and the Search bar will search for decoration names if you want to place a specific decoration. The decoration list is a bit finicky – if you are trying to find a deco on the list, and it’s not showing up, you may need to erase the search, reset the categories and reset the dropdown to “Show All”.

For your first decoration, I recommend placing down a Mailbox in one of the small green hooks on the floor, then using the “Hide Hooks” button to exit decorating, and look at your newest mail, as it contains another free decoration!  This free decoration is called “Felusio Static (Basic Decoration)” and she actually acts as a vendor you can buy more decorations from, or sell junk items to. Make sure to claim her from your mail, and use her item from your inventory, as you won’t be able to place her decoration down until after you right-click the item in your inventory.

If you need help figuring out which hooks your new decorations fit on, you can roll over the item before you use it, or you can open your “Personal” decorations list using the “chair without an arrow” icon near your “Edit Mode” button, finding the item, then hovering your mouse over the decoration you want to learn about. In Felusio’s case, she’ll fit in a Floor Small hook or Floor Medium Narrow hook… but she won’t fit in any of the larger hooks.

The second decoration you should place down is the Legacy Stronghold Storage decoration you also got for free from the quest into a different green hook, as it’s really handy for storing unbound or legacy-bound items when you aren’t in decorating mode.

Adjusting Decorations

Once you have placed a decoration, you can nudge it around using the X and Y Offset sliders under its preview. You can also spin it around with the Rotation slider. Unfortunately there’s no way to affect the height of the decoration, so there’s no way to stack or layer decorations. You don’t actually need to use the Apply Changes button, but if you want to reset all your offset and rotation, the Reset Changes button is useful to put the decoration back on the hook the way it started.

You can easily pick up decorations and move or remove them by right-clicking the hook they are on and clicking “Pick Up” under the preview. Placing down a decoration is never permanent. There is a common bug where you will right-click a hook with a decoration on it and the decoration adjustments panel just won’t show up – try either clearing out your search and categories, or try right-clicking and different type of empty hook and then right-click the hook you wanted to edit again.

There is also a button near the Edit Mode button called “Reset Decorations in Room” that looks like a chair with a golden up arrow. This is a very dangerous button – it may also pick up any and all decorations in any nearby rooms as well. Do not click this button unless you are 100% sure what it will be picking up, or you’ll be sad that you accidentally lost all your decorating work you did in a nearby room.

Each stronghold has a different number of decorations you can place in it. To see how many decorations you can put down in the stronghold your are currently in, hover over the percentage bar near the Edit Mode button and it will tell you how many total decorations you can put down and how many you have put down so far.

Hook Layouts

You can also sometimes change the layout of the hooks – for example, you could change one large blue square hook to four smaller green ones, if you wanted to place down four little decorations instead of a single medium sized one. To find out what layouts are available for a hook, right-click the hook and click the “Layouts” tab in the Decorations panel. You can click through the different hook options to see a preview of their layout. If you see one you like, select it, and click Apply Layout – just keep in mind it will reset and pickup any decorations that were on those hooks and you’ll need to re-place them.

Unlocking More of Your Stronghold

Many strongholds, including the starter strongholds, only allow you to walk through and decorate certain parts of the stronghold to start. You can walk up to the various doors in the stronghold, and it will tell you how many credits it costs to unlock more of the stronghold. The unlocks can often be very expensive! You might want to check a guide before spending credits on unlocking a Stronghold or its additional rooms so you know what you are paying for and decide if it’s worth it to you.

Unlocking More Strongholds

You aren’t limited to a single stronghold. You can actually buy and decorate one of every available type of stronghold – the strongholds are quite different, and many players often purchase more than one. You can purchase more strongholds at the Stronghold Directory area on the Fleet, and some strongholds are found and unlocked through other areas of the game.

Conquest: One major reason to purchase and unlock multiple strongholds is to get a Conquest boost. Fully unlocking 6 strongholds and all their rooms will get you a 150% bonus to your conquest points, and you’ll get a partial bonus for every room you have unlocked. Your strongholds don’t have to be decorated, just unlocked, to get the bonus.

There are all kinds of strongholds available, some are very big and some are very small. Some are expensive and others can only be earned, not bought. Stronghold Comparison Guide

How to Invite Friends to Your Stronghold

Want to share your stronghold with a friend? There are three ways to invite someone you know to your stronghold:

1) If they are in your group or nearby, you can right click their name and invite them.

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2) You can open your stronghold panel and click “Invite” under your stronghold. Or, you can invite your whole group!

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3) You can give your friend a ‘key’.

stronghold-key A bronze key will allow them to visit whenever they want.

stronghold-key-silver A silver key will allow them visit whenever they want and to invite others.

Only you can have a gold key to your stronghold which allows you to decorate. Sadly, you can not let friends decorate your personal stronghold.

How to Show Off Your Stronghold

Have you made your stronghold awesome? Decorated every room? Have more than just basic decorations? It’s time to show off!

One way to show off your stronghold is to post in general chat on the fleet that you are giving a tour, then invite people. Make sure your house is well decorated and you are ready for strangers to come in – many people will comment or criticize on your stronghold if you are there. Be prepared to deal with strange people – if they annoy you, you can kick them out of your stronghold by entering their name in the Strongholds panel Bans button and type /ignore [theirname] so they can’t talk to you.

Publicly List Your Stronghold

You can list your stronghold so people can visit it without you inviting them.

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When you publicly list your stronghold, others can go to the stronghold terminals and find your stronghold on a list of public strongholds. This allows others to come visit your stronghold as long as you are online – you do not need to be in your stronghold for them to come visit.

Be warned – they don’t have to leave once they have entered. If you do not want strangers in your house, do not list your stronghold publicly.

To publicly list your stronghold click the key symbol in the stronghold panel beside your stronghold. The symbols that appear below it will denote which faction can visit it. For some reason, although there is a button to allow the opposite faction to visit, it often doesn’t work and the stronghold will not show up in the opposite faction’s listings.

Public Listings

Want to get inspired and see how other players have decorated their strongholds? Players who have decorated their strongholds often list them on the public directory, which you can browse in the same spot you purchased your stronghold at. The public listings are vaguely sorted by how highly decorated the strongholds in the listings are – so start at the top and work your way down!

How far up the list your stronghold is listed is based on your Prestige score. Prestige Guide

How to Get Decorations

There are over 2,800 Decorations in the game – some are crafted, some are purchased from vendors, some are dropped from enemies and some are earned from achievements. Browse the entire collection of decorations or use the guides below to find some easier-to-get-decorations!

The Most Useful Decorations

The most useful decorations to get are the ones you can use! I highly recommend placing down your legacy bank and mailbox first, which you get from your intial quest. You should also get a personal bank (green one), a guild bank (purple one, if you are in a guild), a GTN, and an augment kit station if you are max-level. You can view all the “useful” decorations here.

To get a personal bank, you can either craft one, buy one from the GTN, buy one from the Cartel market, or get one from the Security Key vendor.

To get a GTN, you can craft one, buy one from the GTN, or buy one from the Cartel Market. There’s two versions, a big one and a small one. They’re the same thing, they just look different.

You should also get a vendor of some kind you can sell junk items to – choose one here or use the Felusia Stato decoration you get from the initial quest!

Legacy Stronghold Storage
Cargo Bay
Guild Bank
Mailbox
Galactic Trade Network (Wall)
Item Modification Station

 

Have a suggestion or correction? Go to the Swtorista Website Discord and post your report in the #decorations channel. You will need to make a free Discord account.