Housing dyes temporarily become Warbound ahead of WoW patch 12.1 launch — but it’s for good reasons

If you’ve been making dyes to color the furniture in your World of Warcraft character’s house, you might be caught off guard by an upcoming change — but don’t worry, it’s just a lead in to a really good update for the dye system. Blizzard announced that on August 4 at 1pm pacific / 4pm eastern, you’ll find that dyes have temporarily gone from being something you can freely put on the auction house to being Warbound. Dyes that are already on the auction house can be purchased, but no more can be listed, with the goal being that all dyes are off the market during the deployment of WoW patch 12.1, Curse of Ula’tek, on August 11.

The reason Blizzard is doing this is around an upcoming dye conversion. The dye conversion stems from a bug that was accidentally introduced in 12.0, then fixed in 12.0.5, but in the process threw off a lot of characters’ feng shui; essentially due to a bug with how light interacted with dyed objects, furniture and objects dyed three specific colors — Obsidium Black, Mesquite Brown, and Mahogany Brown — started out Midnight looking a lot more dark and intensely colored than they were intended. In patch 12.0.5, Blizzard fixed this bug, but this resulted in a flood of player complaints, because not only did their furniture change colors to not match their intended color schemes, but now there was no way to even get the older color. There weren’t any dyes that dark! So in 12.1, one of the changes is that we’re getting three new dyes: Dark Obsidium, Dark Mahogany, and Dark Mesquite. That wasn’t all, either: fifteen entirely new colors were added, because the Housing team loves options.

That’s a lot of dyes; is it time for a “dye squish?”

In short: yes.

As anyone who’s enthusiastic about coloring their house knows, every single dye type — seventy-seven in all once the fifteen new ones are added, plus ten pigments — takes up a bag slot. With the impending release of Blueprints in patch 12.1, you’d even need to match specific exact shades of color in order to fully import them with the correct colors. With the patch 12.1 due out next week, dye consolidation drops the number of items to color your world down to nine, and they all stack very high.

When you log in during patch 12.1 for the first time, if you previously had dye, you’ll see that you have mail. For every different dye or pigment you had before, you’ll get an in-game mail that converts your dyes to the new consolidated dye. For example, if you had five Alliance Blues, six Horde Reds, and two White Dye Pigments, you’ll now have five Blue Housing Dyes, six Red Housing Dyes, and three White Housing Dyes. Each of these can be used to dye any color in their range — for example, Purple Housing Dye will let you dye an item Void Violet, Netherstorm Fuchsia, or any other shade of purple; you don’t need to carry a separate kind of dye for each separate color anymore! There’s a little more consolidation going on too, specifically around teal: every dye color that was made with Teal Pigment is rolled into either Blue or Green Housing Dye, and Teal Dye Pigment will become Blue Housing Dye. That combination is how the dye types dropped from ten to nine.

And lastly, for folks who enjoy making dye, whether for themselves or to sell, that process is getting simpler too; as you may have been able to put together from the above, the intermediary pigment-crafting step is gone now. Alchemists and Scribes can now simply turn herbs directly into dye.