Home instance: your own room that drops materials every day

Every character has a home instance, a private area inside the capital of their race. It starts empty and looks pointless. Then resource nodes appear in it and it turns into the daily round that every long-term player runs.

Where it is

Race	City	District
Human	Divinity’s Reach	Salma District
Charr	Black Citadel	Hero’s Canton
Norn	Hoelbrak	Hunter’s Hearth
Asura	Rata Sum	Applied Development Lab
Sylvari	The Grove	Dreamer’s Terrace

The instance belongs to the character’s race, and the nodes belong to the account. Install them once and every character has them, whichever city they live in (about races).

What goes in it

Three kinds of node:

• Ore for mining, from copper and silver and iron up to orichalcum
• Wood for logging
• Plants for harvesting, as garden plots growing specific vegetables and spices

Plus decorative residents: cats that move in after you feed strays across Tyria, along with assorted NPCs and small wildlife.

🔴 Once per day, per account.

The limit that shapes everything: each node and each chest can be gathered once a day, counted on the account.

Ten characters do not give ten harvests. Walk the instance on one and the day is done.

Where nodes come from

The gem store. Basic packs run 800 gems; garden plots are 1,000 gems each.

Black Lion Chests. A rare drop, or bought with Black Lion Statuettes.

Achievements. Several nodes arrive as rewards and cost nothing.

Vendors. For Unbound Magic, Volatile Magic, karma and other currencies (about currencies).

World drops. A few nodes come straight out of the world.

How the round goes

The standard daily routine among long-term players:

1. Enter the instance
2. Walk every node and chest
3. Salvage the surplus with a Copper-Fed
4. Deposit materials into storage with one click

Three minutes, and it is the calmest gold in the game: no risk, no competition over nodes, no dependence on other players (other methods).

The bill nobody counts

Every guide talks about what the instance pays. Almost none mention what it spends, and the number is larger than you would guess.

A full round through a fully furnished home consumes 14 gathering charges, 27 logging charges and 78 mining charges. Garden plots add another 4, 8 or 12 on top depending on how many you own.

That is roughly 120 tool charges a day, every day, forever.

Ordinary tools do not survive that pace, and replacing them eats into the exact gold the instance is supposed to produce. This is why long-term players will tell you to buy unlimited gathering tools from the store before you buy a single node. The node is the fun purchase. The tools are the one that makes the routine sustainable.

Is it profitable

The honest arithmetic: no, if you count in months.

A fully furnished instance yields a few gold of materials a day. Gem-store nodes cost hundreds of gems, which is dozens of gold through the exchange.

Payback is measured in years. So treat the purchase as convenience and a reason to log in daily rather than as an investment.

What does pay off quickly are the nodes that arrive free: from achievements, from drops, from map currencies. Install every one of those you come across.

The cats

Not everything here is arithmetic.

Scattered across Tyria are hungry cats. Feed one and it eventually turns up in your home instance and stays. Asura start with one already living there, which is a small joke at the expense of a race that claims to be above sentiment.

There is no reward attached. No achievement points that matter, no gold, nothing the market will price. People collect them anyway, and a home instance with a dozen cats underfoot is one of the few places in this game that feels lived in rather than farmed.

Advice for a newcomer

Do not spend your first gems on nodes. The store holds far more useful things, and nearly all of them are about inventory rather than resources.

Do install the free nodes the moment they appear. They are permanent and they keep working for years.