World Editor Locations

🗺️ World Editor: Locations

🛠️ Part of the World Editor guide.

Locations are the places where your story happens. The player is always in one location. That location decides what the AI reads about the scene: the description, who's present, and where the story can go next.

Why it exists

Without a fixed place, the narrator loses track of the scene. The tavern becomes a street, then a forest. A location is sent to the AI again on every turn, so the scene stays where you put it.

How to Add a Location

1. Open the Locations tab.
2. Type the location's name in the Filter Locations box.
3. Select the + button (Add to Locations). The new location opens in the panel.
4. On the Details tab, write the AI-Facing Description.
5. Select Save.

💡 With the box empty, the new location is named "New Location". Rename it in Name.

How to Nest a Location

In the list:

1. Select List beside the filter box.
2. Drag the location by its handle onto the row above it.
3. Move it to the right while you drag. The indent shows that it is now a sub-location.

On the canvas:

1. Select Canvas beside the filter box.
2. Drag the location's box into the box of its new parent. To nest into a location that has no sub-locations yet, hold the drag over it for a moment.
3. To move a location back to the top level, drop it on Top Level.

How to Connect Two Locations

In the panel:

1. Select one of the two locations, then open its Presence tab.
2. Under Connections, pick the other location in Connect to….
3. Select the + button (Add Connection). The new Connection is Two-Way.
4. To make it one-way, pick Outgoing or Incoming on its row.
5. Optional: write a Travel Hint.

On the canvas: drag from the handle on the right edge of one box (Drag To Connect) onto the other box.

How to Set a Starting Location

1. Select the location, then open its Details tab.
2. Check Starting Location.
3. Check it on more locations to let the player pick one. See Starting Location.

How to Pin a Placeholder to a Location

Advanced mode only.

1. Select the location, then open its Pins tab.
2. Select Add Placeholder Pin.
3. In the new row, select Select placeholder and pick the placeholder.
4. Type the value in Pinned value. The box suggests the placeholder's own values, and it also takes any text.

While the player is at this location, the placeholder reads the pinned value. See Placeholder Pins.

Nesting is the AI's map, not the player's

💡 The player can always travel anywhere. The in-game location list and the in-game map offer every location in your world. Nesting never limits the player, and no arrangement can trap them.

Nesting decides where the story can take the player. When the AI reads an action as movement, it considers only the places connected to the current one:

From	The story can move the player
A top-level location	Down into its sub-locations
A sub-location	Down into its children, up to its parent, and sideways to its siblings

A Connection between two places replaces these rules for that pair.

By default the story offers the move. The player sees a small Move to X? prompt with Go and Dismiss.

Two results to know:

• A flat list of top-level locations gives the AI nothing to connect, so it never offers a move. The player then does all the travel. This is a valid design when you choose it on purpose.
• A location with no connected place gets no move step.

When the AI's answer doesn't match a connected place, the game discards it and offers nothing. The story can never send the player to an unconnected place.

List and Canvas

The Locations tab has two views. Switch between them with the List and Canvas icon buttons to the right of the filter box.

View	Use it to
List	Edit a location's fields. Drag a location under another to nest it.
Canvas	See how the world connects. Drag to nest, draw Connections, set their direction and Travel Hint, and arrange the layout. It marks a location that no starting location can reach.

Edit Full Screen opens the canvas at full size, with undo and redo, search and a minimap. Right-click a box and select Edit Location to open its panel.

Nothing on the canvas moves until you move it or ask for a layout. With nothing selected, Auto Arrange All in the toolbar lays out every box. With a box selected, the button reads Auto Arrange and lays out only its group. Right-click a location with sub-locations and select Auto Arrange to lay out only its children. The in-game map uses your canvas layout.

The panel

Select a location in the list to open its panel. The tab you pick stays open when you select another location.

Tab	Holds	Mode
Details	Name, Starting Location and the descriptions	Simple and Advanced
Presence	Entities and Connections	Simple and Advanced
Media	Background Image. In Advanced mode, also Image Tags and Ambient Sound.	Simple and Advanced
Pins	Placeholder Pins	Advanced only
Openings	The location's own openings, drawn when a game starts here	Advanced only

Simple mode also hides AI-Facing Summary.

Media

Field	What it does
Background Image	The image behind the story while the player is here. Upload a file, or paste an address into Or paste an image URL. See Upload or link. Generate with AI makes one when image generation is on in Settings.
Image Tags	Advanced mode only. Booru tags for AI image generation
Ambient Sound	Advanced mode only. A sound that plays while the player is here. Select Add Sound to pick a file.

What reaches the AI

Field	Sent?
Name	Always
AI-Facing Description	Yes. This is the main text the AI uses.
AI-Facing Summary	Only in prompt slots that ask for the short form
Player-Facing Description	Never
Background image, Image Tags, ambient sound, the starting checkbox, nesting	Never

The default prompt gives the narrator the current location in full. It gives the sub-locations and reachable places as summaries.

⚠️ Only the narrator gets the full description. The other steps get the summary of the current location: the choice writer, the continuity planner and the location router. Text that is only in the full description reaches the narrator and no other step. This matters for a random-event list or a rule about the place. With a blank summary, those steps use the full text.

💡 The player reads only the Player-Facing Description, and the AI reads only the AI-Facing fields. Put a secret in the AI-Facing Description.

The ✨ toolbar beside AI-Facing Summary can write a draft from your AI-Facing Description. A blank summary is fine. The game uses the full description in its place.

Entities

The Entities picker on the Presence tab lists who's at this location. Each entity stores its own locations, so an edit here changes the entity's Locations field. It's the same link, and you can set it from either side.

Connections

Nesting gives travel for free, and it always goes both ways. A Connection is a link you make between any two locations, at any place in the tree.

The Connections section lists every link this location is part of, from this location's point of view:

Direction	Means
Two-Way	The story can move the player in both directions. A new Connection starts as this.
Outgoing	The story can leave here for the other place. It can never bring the player back.
Incoming	The story can arrive here from the other place. It can't go the other way.

Pick a place in Connect to…, then select the + button (Add Connection).

Travel Hints

A Travel Hint is optional, and it goes to the AI: through the shimmering portal, down the rope ladder. It tells the story how the player makes the trip.

Each direction has its own hint. The AI gets the hint for the direction the player travels. A direction with no hint gets none. The AI never uses the other direction's words.

Connection	Hint boxes
Two-Way	Two boxes, one for each direction. A link toggle sits to the right of both.
Outgoing or Incoming	One box. There is no toggle.

On a location's panel, the boxes read To place and From place. On the Canvas, each box shows an arrow and the place it leads to.

The link toggle joins the two boxes:

• 🔗 Linked. The first hint applies to both directions. The second box is read-only and shows the first box's text.
• 💔 Unlinked. Both boxes are editable and hold separate hints.

A new two-way Connection starts linked. One hint covers both directions until you unlink.

• Select Unlink Travel Hints to write a different hint for the return trip. The second box gets back the text it held before you linked.
• Select Link Travel Hints to copy the first hint into the second direction.
• Two boxes with the same text open linked. Two boxes with different text open unlinked.

💡 The editor doesn't save the link state. It reads the state from the hints each time you open the panel. The text the second box held before you linked is lost when you close the panel.

Change a Connection to one-way, and it keeps the hint for the direction that remains. Change it back to two-way, and the new direction starts with a copy of that hint.

On the Canvas, each arrow shows its own hint as a label. Two arrows with the same hint share one label. Select an arrow to edit that direction's hint. Undo and redo cover the toggle and every hint edit.

⚠️ A Connection replaces the free travel those two places had. This is what makes a one-way link truly one-way, even between two sub-locations of the same place. The story is never offered the trip back.

One Connection is one link, so it shows on both locations' panels. Change it or delete it from either side.

💡 Connections limit the story only, the same as nesting. The player's own location list still shows every location.

Placeholder Pins

Advanced mode only. A pin on the Pins tab keeps a placeholder at one value while the player is here. For example, the Fen pins Weather to fog. When the player leaves, the playthrough's own roll shows again. A sub-location doesn't get its parent's pins.

Starting Location

The Starting Location checkbox marks a place where a new game can start:

Checked on	Result
No location	The game starts at a random location, any of them. You rarely want this.
One	Every game starts there
Several	The player picks one before they start, or the game picks one at random

Delete a location

• Its sub-locations move up to its parent. They aren't deleted.
• Its Connections are deleted.
• Nothing asks you to confirm.
• Each entity that was there loses this location. See the warning on the Entities page.