Campus Manual: Housing, Rooms & Buildings

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Everywhere you go on Multiverse Campus is either a personal space (yours to decorate and control) or a shared space (used by many students at once). This chapter covers both: how you get a dorm desk and eventually a house, how to personalize and decorate your room, how dorm life and dorm elections work, how buildings and their interiors work, and the shared spaces you can use with other people — experience rooms, meeting rooms, project gardens, plants, and the campus aquarium.

Housing on campus is a progression, not a purchase you make on day one. You start with a desk in a shared dorm, and as you complete quests and build relationships with the campus housing agent (Cornelius Cornerstone), you unlock a private dorm room, then a house of your own, and eventually — for the most dedicated — an "exotic" dream home like a castle or a wizard's tower. Because these upgrades are granted through quests and agent conversations rather than a shop menu, you'll often reach the next stage by talking to the agent rather than clicking a "buy" button.

Your housing at a glance

Your home base grows through several stages. Each stage is earned in-game (mostly by completing quests and hitting milestones), and each unlocks more space and more ways to make it yours.

You can always see where you stand: your housing status tracks which milestones you've reached (first desk set up, first item placed, dorm room earned, house earned, exotic building earned).

The dorm: your first home

Every student belongs to a cohort (the intake group you enrolled with), and every cohort has its own dorm building in the Residential Area on the far west side of campus. When you finish the early housing quest, you're automatically given a desk on a floor of your cohort's dorm — you don't have to apply or pick one.

Finding your desk

Where: menu → Go To → My Desk (🏠).

Selecting My Desk walks your avatar straight to your assigned desk inside your dorm. Your desk has a number, a floor, and a wing — you'll see them noted in the dorm's info bar (for example, "Your desk: #4 (The Pioneers, Floor 2)").

How dorm floors are laid out

A dorm can hold a lot of people, so its interior grows as more students move in:

• Each dorm has up to 5 floors.
• Each floor is divided into wings, and each wing holds 10 desks. A floor starts with one wing and adds another once the first is nearly full, so the space physically expands as your cohort grows.
• Every floor also has a small lounge / common area (a table, a beanbag, a reading nook) where people gather. The common area's name changes with your dorm's theme.

Each cohort's dorm has its own look and theme — colors, décor, and named spaces. The earliest cohorts have hand-crafted themes (for example, "The Pioneers" is warm amber with a common area called The Hearth; "The Forge" is molten red and iron; "The Observatory" is cosmic purple with a Star Lounge). Later cohorts get their own procedurally-varied palettes so every dorm feels distinct.

Your desk vs. everyone else's

Your desk is a personal space inside a shared room. You decide what sits on it, and other students can see your decorations when they walk by — but visitors can look but not touch. Empty desks show a randomized "lived-in" look (a monitor, some clutter) rather than sitting bare.

Earning a private dorm room

Spending time together pays off: once you complete the "Making Friends" quest (which involves joining video calls in your dorm's common area), you're granted a private dorm room — described in-game as "a door that locks, a window, and space to breathe." Rooms are numbered and are yours alone.

Decorating your desk (and dorm room)

Where: the placement toolbar appears at the bottom of the screen while you are inside your dorm building.

Your desk is the first thing you can personalize. Décor comes from your housing inventory — items you send over from your main inventory.

To place an item on your desk:

1. Walk into your dorm. A desk info bar appears at the bottom showing your desk number and dorm.
2. Click Place Items [H] (or press the H key) to open the placement toolbar. Press H again (or the ▼ button) to hide it.
3. The toolbar shows every item in your housing inventory. Click an item to select it — a "Placing: [item]" indicator appears.
4. Click your desk to drop the item there.
5. To pick an item back up, click the placed item. It returns to your inventory.

If your toolbar is empty, you have nothing to place yet. Open your main Inventory (press I), find a suitable item, and use Place in Housing to send it to your housing inventory first.

Plants placed on your desk show their live health state (a colored dot), so a thriving plant looks different from a neglected one. See Plants below.

Personal vs. shared: only you can place or remove items at your own desk. Other students see your décor but can't move it.

My Room: your profile space

Where: menu → Things to Do → My Room (🏠).

My Room is the "about me" side of your dorm space — a small profile card that other students can read. It's separate from the physical décor on your desk. Use it to tell people what you're building and where to find you.

In the My Room panel you can fill in:

• About me — a short bio, up to 500 characters.
• Projects — up to 3 links, each with a title and a URL (your portfolio, a repo, a demo).
• Social handles — Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

Each field saves automatically when you click away from it (you'll see a brief "Saved ✓"). There's no separate save button. Filling in these fields also advances the "Setup Your Dorm Room" quest.

If you have a dorm room, a Manage this room section (collapsed by default) shows which dorm, floor, and slot you're in, and offers a Release this room button. Releasing frees your slot so you can pick another later — you'll be asked to confirm first.

Dorm elections: choosing a steward

Once a dorm community is established, its residents can govern themselves through dorm elections. This is a form of direct democracy for the dorm, facilitated by campus agents (you'll typically encounter it by talking to the dorm's resident agents rather than through a dedicated button).

Who can take part: you must have a private dorm room in that dorm (a desk in the common area alone doesn't qualify). A dorm becomes eligible for an election once 10 or more residents have private rooms and there's no sitting steward or active election.

An election runs in two phases:

When voting closes, the candidate with the most votes wins (ties go to whoever was nominated first). The winner becomes the dorm steward for a 30-day term. If no votes are cast, the seat simply stays empty. When a term ends, the dorm becomes eligible for a new election.

The steward is an honorary, community-serving role — in the game's own words, "a steward serves the community, they don't rule it." Each dorm also keeps a history of its recent elections so you can see who has served.

Houses and your neighborhood

As you progress past the dorm, you can earn a house of your own. Houses live in the Elder Forest, a residential district organized into housing zones.

Getting a house

Houses are earned, not claimed from a menu — you unlock one by completing housing milestones, and a campus agent grants it to you. Until then, the housing zones panel will tell you: "You don't have a dwelling yet. Complete housing milestones to claim your place in the Elder Forest!" When your house is granted, it's automatically placed in an appropriate zone for you.

Housing zones and moving

Where: menu → Go To → My Neighborhood (🏘️), available once you have a house.

The Elder Forest Housing Zones panel lists every zone, sorted with faculty zones first, then by cohort. Zones come in three kinds:

• Student Cohort zones (tied to a specific intake month)
• Faculty zones (faculty and admin only)
• Overflow zones (spare capacity)

Each zone card shows a capacity bar (for example, 18/40). Your current zone is marked Your Zone.

To relocate your house:

1. Open My Neighborhood.
2. Find a zone that isn't full and isn't your current one.
3. Click Move Here. Your house teleports to that zone.

Two rules apply to moving:

• Cooldown: you can only move once every 24 hours ("Dimensional relocation on cooldown").
• Faculty zones are role-gated: faculty members must stay in faculty zones, and students can't move into them.

Housing upgrades (paid)

Your first house is a free Cottage (with a Main Room, a Bedroom, and a Garden). Beyond that, the housing system defines larger, nameable tiers you can upgrade to:

Upgrading preserves your furniture layout, and Manor and Estate tiers (and community halls) can be given a custom name. There are also community halls — a property type meant as a shared gathering place for others.

Note: these paid tiers and community halls are arranged through the campus housing system rather than a self-serve shop screen, so if you're interested in upgrading, talk to the housing agent. A dedicated purchase/management panel may not be visible in the app yet.

Exotic buildings: dream homes

The rarest housing is an exotic building — a fantastical dream home earned as a special reward (not purchased). When you unlock the reward, you choose which one you want (this choice is made with the campus housing agent rather than from a menu), and your home is placed in its own themed zone. Each is a multi-room interior with special features and a secret room that unlocks when you meet a hidden condition.

Secret rooms unlock through play — for example, the castle's Forgotten Study appears after you place 30 items, and the underwater pod's Deep Current Lab appears after a 14-day streak.

Lights and glowing décor

Some inventory items are light sources. When you open a light item in your Inventory, it shows a Place Light (💡) button that arms it for placement in the world. Each light item carries its own color, brightness, glow radius, and animation built in — you don't tune these in a menu; different light items simply glow differently. Animations include steady, pulse (a gentle breathing glow), flicker, rainbow (cycling hues), strobe, and dance (a slow color shift).

Once placed, a light glows for everyone nearby in real time, only its owner (or an admin granted access) can remove it, and some lights are temporary and fade on their own. Placing a light consumes it from your inventory; there's no currency cost.

Note: the light-placement flow is still being built out — the Place Light button exists on light items, but the step that drops the armed light at a spot in the world may not be fully wired up in the current app. If you arm a light and can't complete the placement, that's expected for now.

How buildings and interiors work

Campus is a walkable pixel-art city of districts and named streets. Scattered through it are buildings — dorms, the library, classrooms, social spaces, novelty rooms, and more. Here's what to expect when you go inside one.

Entering a building

Just walk your avatar into a building's footprint. What happens next depends on the building:

• Most buildings load an interior — the outdoor map is replaced with an inside view (rooms, desks, tables, décor). Interiors are shared, live spaces: everyone inside the same building (and same floor) sees the same room and the same people in real time. They are not private instances.
• Some buildings are just doorways to a chat room — walking up opens the linked room directly instead of loading an interior.
• Secret buildings are disguised as ordinary scenery (they look like a tree or plant on the map). Only members of that building's chat room can enter; to everyone else they're just decoration, hidden away in the "Campus Forest" ring and never shown on the minimap.

Leaving and moving between floors

• To exit, walk to the marked exit tile near the bottom of the interior. When you're close, an [E] prompt appears — press it to step back outside.
• Multi-floor buildings (like dorms) have stairs on one side and, once there are two or more floors, an elevator on the other. Walk into them to change floors. Each floor shows its label at the top (for example, "The Forge — Floor 2").

Living interiors that grow

Some interiors physically grow and get more ornate over time based on community activity. The library, for instance, expands as more approved resources are added to it — gaining new wings, landmarks, and decorations. Dorm floors add wings as more residents move in. You'll notice these spaces looking bigger and richer the more the community contributes.

Building access: who can go where

There's no "find the key" mechanic on campus. A building's access is really about membership in its chat room:

• Open buildings can be entered by anyone.
• Locked / secret buildings can only be entered by members of the underlying chat room. Non-members can't interact with them at all (they appear as scenery).
• Class-linked rooms: a single building can host several rooms inside it — some open to everyone, and some tied to a specific class. You'll only see the class rooms for classes you're enrolled in. This affects which chat channels you can open inside the building, not whether you can walk in.

Faculty and admins have their own faculty housing zones in the Elder Forest, separate from student zones.

Editing a building's interior (moderators & admins)

Requires: admin, or moderator power in the building's linked chat room. Where: press M near an editable building's entrance on the campus map.

Building interiors themselves can be re-authored by people who moderate them — this is the Room Mod Editor, a building tile-layout tool, not a personal décor feature. If you have permission for a building, its entrance shows an M to Edit prompt alongside the usual E to Enter. (If you don't have edit rights, pressing M just toggles the campus map overlay instead.)

The editor opens a modal titled Edit Building: [name] where a moderator can:

• Edit the building's description (up to 500 characters).
• Repaint the tile layout using a palette of tile categories (Walls/Roofs, Wall Details, Items, Neon/Signs, Interior, Buildings, Storefronts), with Erase and Clear tools, a paint grid you can resize (1–16 tiles per side), and Preview, Export JSON, and Import options.
• Save with Save Building.

Only the description and tile layout are changed — a building's position and size on the map aren't editable here. This is a power-user tool for the people who run a space, not part of everyday student housing.

Experience rooms: watch parties, DJ sets, and more

Where: inside a building that has them — the Experience Rooms panel appears when you enter.

Experience rooms are special activity rooms that a building owner creates by installing an "enchanted artifact." They turn a room into a shared hangout for watching, listening, and playing together. New rooms hold up to 20 people and start open to everyone.

The five room types

Joining a room

From the room list, each card shows the room's occupancy and status (active, empty, session in progress, or "artifact expiring soon"). Click Enter to join, and Leave to step out.

Creating one (building owners)

If you own the building, you can install an artifact to make a room:

1. Click Install Artifact (or + Install).
2. Choose an artifact from your inventory. Artifacts are earned from campus agents — build relationships with agents like Luna, praxis, hive, chorus, bell hooks, Baba Yaga, or atlas.
3. Choose a room type. Each artifact powers specific room types (for example, a Synchrony Crystal can make a Watch Party or a DJ Audio Room; a Dreamweaver Lens makes a Movie Night; a Prismatic Eye makes a Studio; a Voidwalker Shard makes a VR Lounge).
4. Confirm. Installing consumes the artifact.

A building can only have one room of each type at a time. Temporary artifacts expire after 7 days (the room shows an "expiring soon" warning); permanent artifacts last indefinitely.

As the owner, a ⚙ Settings menu lets you set who can enter — Open to All, Friends Only, Invite Only, or Class Members — and Remove Artifact to shut the room down.

Cost: no currency — the cost is the artifact itself, and you must own the building to install one.

Meeting rooms: book a themed space

Where: the meeting room panel appears when you interact with one of the novelty meeting-room buildings (each has a playful theme — duck 🦆, teapot 🫖, whale 🐋, donut 🍩, basket 🧺, or standard 🏛️).

Meeting rooms are shared, bookable spaces for getting a group together. Any signed-in student can use one — there's no role restriction and no cost. The panel shows the room's capacity and current status.

Two ways to use a room

Walk in (first come, first served):

• If the room is free, click Walk In Now to start an ad-hoc session immediately.
• If someone is already holding an open session, click Join Open Session to hop in.

Schedule a reservation ahead of time:

1. Click Schedule a Reservation Instead.
2. Enter a meeting title (required).
3. Pick a start time (anywhere from a minute out to 7 days ahead; it defaults to the next 30-minute slot).
4. Choose a duration: 15, 30, or 45 minutes, or 1, 1.5, or 2 hours.
5. Click Confirm Reservation.

You can invite others when you reserve (up to 20 people), and the system won't let you overbook past the room's capacity or double-book a slot.

Arriving and locking

When a scheduled meeting goes live, invited participants get an I'm Here button to check in. The participant list shows everyone's status: ✅ arrived, 🟡 accepted, ❌ declined, ⏳ pending. Once everyone expected has arrived, the room auto-locks — after that, only invited participants can enter, and everyone else sees "🔒 Meeting in Progress (Locked)."

Managing your meeting: only the organizer can cancel a reservation, and only while it's upcoming or active. If you're in a walk-in session and you're the last to leave, the session ends automatically.

Suggesting a new room

There's also a suggestion board where you can propose new meeting-room themes: submit a name, a description, and an optional reference link, then vote (toggle) on other people's ideas. You can delete your own suggestions. This is just for requesting new room styles — it doesn't book anything.

Note: meeting rooms rely on the campus proximity voice/video system rather than a separate video screen. See Proximity Video Chat & Calls.

Project gardens: turning your work into living plants

Where: menu → Go To → Projects (🌱), or the Projects button in the top bar. Opens the Project Gardens panel.

Project gardens are a way to celebrate the real projects you build — repos, hosted apps, experiments, group collaborations, and learning exercises. When you finish a project, a campus agent (such as Praxis, Chorus, or Hive) can award you a project plant that represents it. There's no "create a garden" button — you get project plants and gardens by talking to these agents.

Your project plants

Each project plant card shows the plant species, its project type (Repository, Hosted App, Experiment, Group Project, or Learning Exercise), its maintenance tier, its verification status, and its health. Click a card to see the details, including the project URL and when it was last verified.

The clever part: watering a project plant also checks that your real project is still alive. How often you need to tend it depends on its maintenance tier:

Click Water & Verify to care for the plant and run its check at the same time. A successful check can occasionally drop a seed (chance rises with tier: roughly 10% at Low, 20% at Medium, 30% at High, with a 24-hour cooldown per plant). Recent verification results are listed on the plant's detail view.

Group gardens and conservatory zones

Group projects get a shared project garden — a collaborative space placed in a Conservatory Zone on campus (each zone has a limited capacity). Multiple students can be members of a garden, each with a labeled contribution area (like "backend" or "UI"). Faculty can sponsor gardens and mark them as recruiting so students can join.

The panel's Conservatory Zones section lists zones and how full they are (gardens per zone). Expand a zone to see its gardens, their members, and whether a member has been released (delivered) or is agent-maintained ([auto]). When you're released from a group garden, the agents keep your plant watered for you, and you can later transplant it into your own personal space to keep.

Vacation mode

Going away for a while? An agent can put you on a short vacation (up to 3 weeks), during which your project plants are auto-watered so they don't die while you're gone. Professors and admins can grant an extended vacation with no auto-expiry. The panel shows a banner when a vacation is active, and affected plants are marked AUTO.

Plants: growing your own

Where: the Plants panel, which organizes everything with four tabs — My Plants, Items (harvested consumables), Garden (your outdoor plots), and Catalog. A season badge (Spring / Summer / Autumn / Winter) shows in the corner, because season affects growth.

Plants are a relaxed, personal side of campus life. You collect species, care for them, and harvest what they produce.

Getting plants

• Forage in the wild. Certain biomes — Park, Garden, Forest, and Wilds — have wild plants you can gather. Walk up to one and click it (you must be close enough) to forage it; you get a seed-stage plant. Foraged spots show as depleted to everyone until they regrow.
• Gifts from agents. You'll get starter plants for joining a program, milestone plants for keeping care streaks (at 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days), and personalized gifts once you've built a strong relationship with an agent.
• Cross-pollination. Combine two of your flowering or fruiting plants to breed a new one. Some known pairings produce special hybrids, and traits (growth rate, hardiness, rare colors, even quirks like bioluminescence) pass down with a chance of mutation.

Caring for a plant

Select a plant to see its detail view, then use the action buttons:

• Water — the core of plant care. Watering on the same day won't double-count, and hitting a care-streak milestone pops a celebration.
• Harvest — appears only when a plant reaches the fruiting stage and produces a fruit. There's a 24-hour cooldown per plant. Harvesting yields a consumable item (seeds, herbs, and the like); some are themselves plantable.
• Compost — clears a dead plant to free up space.

Care tiers determine how forgiving a plant is, from Neglect-Proof (water every 30 days) up to Extreme (daily attention). Health runs from thriving → healthy → okay → wilting → dying → dead. Growth stages run seed → sprout → juvenile → mature → flowering → fruiting; growth stalls if a plant is wilting or worse. Planting a species in its preferred season speeds growth and boosts yield; the wrong season slows it and can stop it blooming.

The Catalog tab is your reference: filter species by care tier and see each one's growth time, what it produces, its best season, and its special ability.

Garden plots (planting outdoors)

The Garden tab manages outdoor plots you claim in the world.

• You can hold up to 6 plots. Claim one by clicking forageable biome ground (Park, Garden, Forest, or Wilds); plots must be spaced apart.
• Each plot shows its biome and coordinates. Use Plant to put one of your unplaced plants into an empty plot, Uproot to return a plant to your inventory, or Abandon to give up the plot entirely.
• Where you can plant: you can plant freely in your own personal spaces (like garden plots and your desk). Only staff/faculty can plant seeds in public campus areas — a rule enforced both in the world and noted right in the panel.

Personal vs. shared: wild plants in biomes are shared with everyone (their depleted/regrown state is the same for all players). Your own plants and garden plots are personal — others can see them, but they're yours to tend.

Items you harvest live in the Items tab. Buff and special items have a Use button that applies a timed effect.

The aquarium (the Phishing Tank)

Despite the name, the campus aquarium isn't a pet-fish feature — it's a fun security-awareness display. It's a fixed fish tank in a specific building, and the "fish" swimming around inside are real, sanitized examples of phishing scams the community has flagged.

Each scam becomes a "scammer fish" (a crab, octopus, pufferfish, or shark) that drifts around the tank and occasionally shows a thought bubble with the scrubbed text of an actual phishing attempt — so you can learn to recognize the tricks scammers use. New examples swim in live as they're reported.

It's a passive, shared exhibit: everyone sees the same tank, there's nothing to buy, and there's no way (or need) to add or feed fish yourself. Just wander over and watch what the scammers try.

A note on "Same Room" audio

If you and a friend are physically in the same real-world room and both join the same campus call, you may hear echo. Campus can handle this with a Same Room control that appears during calls — but because it's about call audio rather than housing, it's documented with the rest of the video features. See Proximity Video Chat & Calls.

Related chapters

• Getting Started
• Proximity Video Chat & Calls

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