Worldwright Documentation

1 · Overview

A map maker for beginners and detail people

After the required shared-account sign-in, New Guided Map organizes ordinary questions into Shape, World, Style, and Review. The same editor then exposes generation stages, layers, brushes, dependencies, masks, and export controls through focused tabs. There is no separate or incompatible project mode: every map uses the same portable .worldwright project, and all map processing remains on the user's computer.

Plans

Lite is the complete baseline; Pro adds professional depth

One signed Worldwright application contains both tiers. Worldwright Lite keeps guided seeded generation, hands-on editing, layers, project saving and recovery, ordinary exports, player/GM separation, content packs, and Atlas publishing. Pro adds optional professional workflows and libraries; it does not make Lite slower, less secure, harder to use, or unable to open work created with Pro.

Worldwright Pro is included while the same account has Aethera Premium. Standalone checkout is not currently available.

Standalone Worldwright Pro checkout is not currently available, so there is no standalone charge to cancel or refund. Worldwright Pro is included with an active Aethera Premium plan.

See the Lite vs Pro comparison for the capability boundary, downgrade behavior and release-status policy. The Worldwright Pro guide explains every implemented Pro workflow and current limit; Aethera Premium inclusion explains how Premium access appears in Worldwright.

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 signed through Azure Artifact Signing (formerly Trusted Signing) and should show Aethera.TV as its verified publisher. Source-built development packages may be unsigned and must not be redistributed as public releases. Self-signed, local, or test-certificate builds are never Worldwright public releases.
3. Keep projects in Documents or another user folder, not inside the application directory.

A valid new installer can still show a Microsoft Defender SmartScreen “unrecognized app” warning while that exact file builds reputation; signing does not guarantee an immediate warning-free download. Verify the Publisher is Aethera.TV and compare the SHA-256 with /api/downloads/worldwright/latest. See Microsoft’s SmartScreen reputation guidance. macOS and Linux are not advertised until platform artifacts have been produced and tested.

Automatic desktop updates

Worldwright checks Aethera's official production update feed after launch and every six hours while it is running. A newer Azure-signed version downloads in the background, then a persistent notice lets you choose Restart to update when convenient. Worldwright does not install an update during an ordinary quit and does not force a restart while you are editing.

Before restarting, Worldwright blocks new edits and verifies a fresh local recovery copy. Projects, autosaves, settings, and content packs stay outside the application installation directory. Older Worldwright installations may require one manual update before later signed updates can install from inside the app.

3–4 · First map and guided generation

Choose outcomes, not noise terminology

Select New Guided Map and move through four named steps: Shape chooses World, Continent, Region, Island, or Archipelago; World covers land balance, terrain, climate, civilization, detail, scale, and optional horizontal wrapping; Style chooses the map's presentation; Review shows every answer before generation. Persistent Back and Next controls—and the clickable step list—make it obvious how to inspect or change an earlier answer. Generate creates a quick local preview before refinement, and Back to guided choices returns to Review without losing those answers. Accept the preview, 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.

The seven built-in presets are Classic fantasy parchment, Ink and paper, Clean modern atlas, Political map, Physical relief, Dark fantasy, and Printer-friendly monochrome. They restyle the same geography; only Political opts into the otherwise-hidden territory colors by default.

Worldwright Pro's Style Designer adds editable perceptual or screen-RGB elevation and ocean-depth ramps. Its contour controls cover interval, index lines, smoothing, labels, land/water masks, and independent preview, standard, poster, and Atlas targets. Customization creates a style-owned copy; shipped natural, colorblind-safe, ocean, and monochrome ramps remain unchanged.

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. The Generate workspace 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.

Worldwright Pro's Transform Studio adds exact selection position, rotation, scale, path width, and path-node coordinates plus align, distribute, mirror, and bounded array-copy tools. Every operation is previewed against the current project revision before it can be accepted as one undoable action. Locks and map bounds are enforced by the project model; original stable IDs remain unchanged and copied labels are relinked to matching copied features.

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. A selected river's Flow rules can mark a deliberate magical path or inland basin without disabling physical checks for every other river.

Worldwright Pro adds a local Hydrology Lab under Generate. Its optional river model controls ordered river hierarchy and width, perennial and seasonal channel limits, deterministic delta distributaries, marsh-outlet tags, editable waterfall points, and marked inland basins. Saving the model marks dependent stages stale but never repaints the accepted map before preview and acceptance.

The same lab can highlight drainage basins, apply an interactive visible-river threshold, calculate river order, and inspect flow accumulation, outlets, and downhill drop at a coordinate without editing the map. Analysis is cancellable, runs on the user's hardware, and includes a text equivalent for its colored preview.

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. The colored shapes sometimes used for political or cultural ownership are this Regions layer, not mandatory terrain. Draw vertices, close the region, then rename, change audience visibility, lock, duplicate, or delete it. Generated boundaries favor terrain and nearby settlements. Territory colors are optional and start hidden on ordinary new maps; use the eye beside Regions in Layers to show them. Choosing the Political style or a political export opts in explicitly.

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.

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.

Versions also keeps durable local named snapshots. Cleanup is explicit: select snapshots, review estimated space and dependency blockers, then separately opt in for pinned milestones or automatic recovery points. Worldwright quarantines exact payloads, atomically saves the descriptor-free project, and only then purges bytes. A canceled or interrupted save keeps them recoverable; no snapshot is deleted automatically.

Main revalidates the exact reviewed revision and catalog before a native confirmation. Cleanup hashing and quarantine moves can be canceled, including safe rollback after a partial move. Canceling Save As or encountering a save error restores the original snapshot, dirty/save, and undo/redo state.

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. Standard and poster exports include validated visible image underlays and embedded project raster art after player/GM filtering. The separate print-ready PDF renderer currently warns and omits imported underlays and embedded pack raster art; use standard or poster export when those images must appear.

16 · Send to Atlas

Publish only when you ask

1. Use the shared Aethera account that Worldwright required before opening the project browser.
2. If that session expires, Worldwright returns to its account gate. 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.
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. Compatible installed styles, symbols, stamps, generation presets, naming presets, and biome data activate through a read-only validated catalog. Packs cannot run JavaScript, Node modules, shell commands, native binaries, arbitrary shaders, or network requests.

18 · Shortcuts and workspaces

A complete Lite keyboard route, with Pro profiles

The read-only Worldwright default profile remains available in Lite and supplies the shortcut labels shown beside tools. Worldwright Pro or Aethera Premium can duplicate it, capture replacement shortcuts, resolve conflicts explicitly, and import or export a bounded versioned .wwshortcuts data file. Reserved operating-system combinations are rejected, one gesture cannot silently trigger two commands, and existing custom profiles are not deleted after downgrade. Export and reset remain available.

Six Pro/Premium presets prepare Generation, Drawing, Labeling, Styling, Print, or Atlas publication by selecting the relevant tool, inspector, grid/minimap state, and surface without changing geography. The same local settings choose a 1.8–60 second autosave delay, a 3–50 snapshot cleanup suggestion, and an application-wide Low power, Balanced, Quality preview, or Export priority default. Reset always restores the shipped profile, no focused preset, 1.8-second autosave, a 12-snapshot cleanup suggestion, and Balanced performance. The suggestion only helps select older unpinned entries for review.

Worldwright stores these versioned preferences atomically with a recovery copy. They contain no project content. Panel docking, macros, repeat-last automation, and per-project performance profiles are not claimed in this release.

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. The selected performance default is application-wide rather than a per-project setting.

20 · Privacy and local processing

Your project stays local

A shared Aethera account is required before entering Worldwright. Generation, rendering, editing, project files, and export stay on this device. Atlas receives only the map version, pins, and details selected in the publish dialog. Premium checkout and account billing open in the system browser. Payment and access checks contain account and plan status, never map pixels, project files, names, lore, notes, assets, or generation settings.

21 · Troubleshooting

Start with World Check

The Pro troubleshooting guide covers Seed Lab, generation labs, exact catalog pins, snapshot cleanup, professional export, and rich Atlas reconciliation without asking for private project content.

• If a river looks wrong, run World Check and inspect uphill or unterminated segments.
• If a project image is missing, the rest of the project still opens. Choose Repair missing asset and select the original file. Worldwright accepts it only when detected media type, byte length, and SHA-256 exactly match the saved descriptor, then re-embeds it in the current project for the next save. A rejected candidate leaves the project unchanged.
• If generation is slow, lower preview detail or enable low-power mode before reducing final export size.
• If a content pack is missing or changed, review its ID, version, dependencies, and validation result in the Content Pack manager. Reinstall its original validated archive. Same-ID replacement is atomic only after validation; Safe uninstall does not rewrite projects, and embedded placed art stays with them. Never bypass a hash, dependency, media, or archive-safety failure.
• If export fails, keep the project saved, check available destination space and write access, then retry from the current project. Standard and professional writes are atomic: failed writes remove temporary files, canceled rendering releases temporary data, and earlier successful queue outputs remain untouched. Do not use an output Worldwright did not confirm as complete.
• Atlas rendering, upload, and pre-commit work can be canceled. Once the map commit starts, cancellation is temporarily disabled because a lost response cannot prove whether Atlas committed it. For an unknown outcome, inspect Atlas before deciding whether to retry; do not assume cancellation or success. Atlas options remain capability-discovered, so unavailable source attachment, tile-pyramid, reconciliation, or cleanup actions are not promised by the desktop app.
• If Windows opens a browser without the Aethera profile you use, choose Copy secure sign-in link and paste that same unexpired attempt into Chrome or your preferred browser. If sign-in finishes but the browser does not reopen Worldwright, use the separate callback recovery control. Treat both one-time links as private and do not paste them into support messages.
• If Pro access does not refresh after checkout or a Premium change, open the account panel and choose Refresh access. Worldwright distinguishes a temporarily unavailable check from a confirmed inactive access and never deletes project content during either state. Confirm the displayed account first; for an account mismatch, choose Disconnect Worldwright and sign in with the intended shared Aethera account. For a clock error, correct the operating-system date, time, and time zone, then refresh. If a cache or clock problem continues while online, choose Repair local access check, review its scope, and confirm Clear cache and check online. The in-app repair keeps the sign-in, projects, recent projects, recovery copies, settings, content, and exports; it reports offline or still-invalid clock state honestly. Offline Pro access ends at the earlier of 30 days after the last valid online check or seven days after the paid-through date shown by Aethera. A newer account update or revocation can end access sooner. Use the exact deadline shown in Account and do not edit secure cache or vault files by hand.
• If access still fails, contact support with the non-secret Support reference shown in Account, plan source, Worldwright version, and approximate UTC refresh time. Do not send a callback, token, cookie, cache, vault, payment record, or project.

Safe support boundary

Your map is not a diagnostic attachment

Worldwright is local-first. Aethera support cannot inspect private desktop content automatically and will never ask you to send access or session tokens, browser cookies, a sign-in callback/custom-protocol link, vault or access-cache files, payment data, a private project or map, autosaves, recovery archives, underlays, stamps, private packs, raw logs, or local filesystem paths. Never disable signature, access, image, archive, or pack validation for troubleshooting.

Safe evidence is the application version/channel, operating-system version, action and approximate UTC time, a sanitized user-facing error, the non-secret Support reference, displayed plan source, output format/dimensions/phase, or a public pack's ID/version/hash. Use a blank or bundled sample project for a visual reproduction. Submit those details through the official Aethera support page. If that evidence is insufficient, the product needs a narrower redacted diagnostic—not your private map or account secrets.

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. Pro/Premium users can configure autosave cadence and a 3–50 unpinned-snapshot cleanup suggestion. Pinned and restore-recovery snapshots require explicit cleanup overrides, and nothing is removed merely because the suggestion count is exceeded.

23 · Marketplace package preparation

Export a Marketplace-ready package

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. The export stays on this device until you choose how to publish or share it.