Worldwright Documentation

1 · Overview

A map maker for beginners and detail people

Guided mode asks ordinary questions about scale, land, terrain, climate, civilization, detail, style, and wrapping. Studio mode exposes generation stages, layers, brushes, dependencies, masks, and export controls. Both modes edit the same portable .worldwright project.

2 · Install

Windows installation

1. Use the verified Download action on the Aethera Tools page when it reports a published release.
2. Run the per-user installer. A published Windows release is Azure Trusted Signing signed and should show Aethera.TV as its verified publisher. Source-built development packages may be unsigned and must not be redistributed as public releases.
3. Keep projects in Documents or another user folder, not inside the application directory.

macOS and Linux are not advertised until platform artifacts have been produced and tested.

3–4 · First map and guided generation

Choose outcomes, not noise terminology

Select New Guided Map, choose World, Continent, Region, Island, or Archipelago, then pick plain-language land balance, terrain mood, climate, civilization density, detail, scale, style, and optional horizontal wrapping. Generate creates a quick local preview before refinement. Accept it, reroll with the same answers, or keep the current project unchanged. After acceptance, Adjust one aspect previews an individual generation stage. Surprise Me changes the seed and guided answers without requiring a prompt or AI service.

5 · Seeds, rerolls, and locks

Automation without losing good work

The same seed, settings, and project schema produce the same generated result. Lock a feature to keep it through its stage reroll. Paint protection over an area to preserve terrain and biome cells. Studio mode shows what a stage depends on and which later stages may be stale. Preview regeneration before accepting; accepting it creates one undoable history action.

6 · Painting terrain

Paint land, ocean, elevation, and protection

Choose a terrain layer, then set brush size, hardness, and strength. Create Land and Create Ocean move cells across sea level and update the nearby editable coast mask. Drag to raise or lower elevation; Smooth softens sharp transitions. Protect marks cells that a later regeneration must not overwrite. A complete stroke is grouped into one undo step.

7 · Biomes and climate

Generated climate remains paintable

Temperature considers latitude and height. Moisture considers water, seeded variation, prevailing wind, and approximate rain shadows. Paint or flood-fill any built-in biome directly. To return an area to the generated rules, select it, remove protection if appropriate, and preview the Biomes stage there.

8 · Rivers and lakes

Use plausible water or draw impossible water on purpose

Generated rivers follow pit-resolved downhill flow and accumulated drainage. Select the Water tool to draw, select, rename, resize, lock, or delete a river path; redraw it to change its geometry. World Check can find uphill segments and invalid endings. Fantasy rules allow deliberate exceptions without treating them as generation failures.

9 · Settlements and roads

Place civilization where it makes sense

Settlement automation scores fresh water, coasts, terrain, biome, spacing, and density. Roads use terrain-aware costs between places. Use Places to add, move, rename, lock, or delete settlements and points of interest. Use Paths to draw, rename, resize, lock, or delete roads.

10 · Regions and borders

Draw political, cultural, geographic, or campaign areas

Region polygons carry stable IDs, names, colors, visibility, and provenance. Draw vertices, close the region, then rename, change audience visibility, lock, duplicate, or delete it. Generated boundaries favor terrain and nearby settlements. Polygon reshape, merge, and split remain later Studio refinements.

11 · Labels and names

Deterministic local names

Built-in naming presets combine weighted syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and length rules locally. Names are not sent to an LLM. Lock generated names before rerolling or type any Unicode name manually. Label placement avoids obvious collisions and World Check reports remaining overlaps. A custom naming-preset editor is planned after the built-in workflow is hardened.

12 · Layers

Geography, style, and secrets stay separate

Layers have stable IDs, names, type, order, visibility, player visibility, lock state, opacity, generation source, and manual-change state. Hide, reorder, duplicate, or lock a layer from the Layers tab. Style presets change presentation without regenerating geography.

13 · Player and GM maps

Secrets are an export boundary

Mark layers, labels, and points as GM-only. Player export filters those features before rendering and carries no hidden feature metadata. GM export includes them. Review World Check before a player export; it calls out visible-secret configuration rather than relying on color alone.

14 · Import

Trace a sketch or add local assets

Import PNG, JPEG, or WebP as a locked reference underlay. SVG is accepted only after scripts, event handlers, remote URLs, and active content are rejected. Imported files never execute code. Use the land, terrain raise/lower tools to paint over a sketch; automatic coastline tracing is not part of this flow.

15 · Export and printing

Render locally in useful variants

Export PNG, JPEG, WebP, or compatible SVG; choose player, GM, current, unlabeled, physical, political, or transparent overlays where available. Memory estimates and safe dimension checks appear before export. Poster mode renders overlap-safe tiles one at a time in a worker so very large layouts do not require one full-size RGBA canvas. Each tile uses an ordinary confirmed save destination and is released after encoding. Imported image underlays are included in standard export; hide an underlay before choosing poster tiles in this release.

16 · Send to Atlas

Publish only when you ask

1. Use the visible Aethera account control at any time, or choose Send to Atlas and sign in only if needed.
2. Complete the normal Aethera password, Google, verification, or two-factor flow in your browser, then allow its aethera-worldwright: link to return to the installed app. This is the same account used by Atlas and other Aethera tools.
3. Select an Atlas world where you are Owner, GM, or Editor.
4. Choose the rendered variant and optional place pins.
5. Worldwright renders locally, uploads the finished image, and creates or updates the linked Atlas map.

Atlas currently accepts one flat raster per map plus layers and pins. Regions, routes, and labels are baked into that raster. Editable source-project attachment and tile pyramids remain disabled until Atlas exposes validated storage for them. A failed upload never changes the local project.

17 · Custom symbols and content packs

Install data, never executable plugins

Local .wwpack archives can declare styles, symbols, stamps, brushes, textures, names, biomes, presets, templates, or complete projects. Worldwright validates paths, hashes, versions, dependencies, declared capabilities, file types, archive size, and duplicates before installation. Packs cannot run JavaScript, Node modules, shell commands, native binaries, arbitrary shaders, or network requests. Version 0.1 manages and previews package metadata safely; editor activation currently uses the built-in catalog.

18 · Keyboard shortcuts

Common actions

19 · Performance settings

Use the hardware you have

Generation runs in cancellable workers with transferable typed arrays. GPU rendering is preferred and a CPU canvas fallback keeps maps usable after GPU loss. Low-power mode reduces live and generation-preview resolution while keeping saved geography and exports at full quality. Very large export warnings are based on estimated memory, not a marketing claim.

20 · Privacy and offline behavior

Your project stays local

Local creation does not contact Aethera. The optional shared-account session, when used, is encrypted by the operating system in the Electron main process and never enters renderer storage. If secure persistence is unavailable, that session is memory-only. Atlas upload includes only the variant, pins, and metadata selected in the publish dialog. No billing is attached to Worldwright.

21 · Troubleshooting

Start with World Check

• If a river looks wrong, run World Check and inspect uphill or unterminated segments.
• If an embedded custom asset is missing, the project still opens and reports it. In-place relinking is a later hardening item; keep the original asset available and create a repaired copy from a safe import.
• If generation is slow, lower preview detail or enable low-power mode before reducing final export size.
• If Atlas publish fails, keep the local project open, sign in again if requested, then retry. A retry renders locally again; inspect Atlas for a partial remote object if failure happened after upload.
• If the browser does not return after sign-in, reopen the account dialog and use its callback-link recovery controls. Treat that one-time link as private and do not paste it into support messages.

22 · Project recovery

Autosave never replaces your explicit save

Worldwright writes atomic project saves and separate throttled recovery copies. After an abnormal exit, the welcome screen offers the newest validated recovery. Open it, inspect it, and Save As; dismissing a recovery does not overwrite the last project file. A migration backup is kept before changing an older supported project schema.

23 · Marketplace package preparation

Prepare a safe package now; upload later

Package for Aethera Marketplace creates a validated data-only archive and an adjacent report containing the package ID, result, checked-file count, expanded size, warnings, errors, and generation time. The archive manifest carries identity, compatibility, hashes, licensing, previews, dependencies, and declared capabilities. Nothing is uploaded because the Marketplace backend does not exist yet.