Creating your first world
After signing up and choosing a plan, you land on the dashboard. Click + New World to start.
You'll be walked through a few choices:
- Genre. Pick the setting:
- Medieval Fantasy — low-fantasy villages, swords, supply shortages, local feuds.
- Modern Day — present-day towns, normal jobs, contemporary tech.
- Neon Future — dense neon-noir cityscapes, augments, drone traffic.
- Sci-Fi Colony — frontier outposts on alien worlds, fragile life support, salvage and exploration.
- Art style. This decides how everyone and everything looks in image
generations:
- Oil Painting, Modern Anime, Retro Anime, Comic Book, Adult Animation.
- Biome. Pick the biome for your starting hex:
- Green Plains, Dry Plains, Desert, Frozen Tundra, Jungle, Wasteland, Volcanic.
- The biome shapes how NPCs dress, how they talk about their surroundings, and what buildings the Location Wizard generates. Enemies are placed by you — the biome doesn't decide what lives there.
- Name. Pick a name for the world.
When you confirm, the world is created empty — no buildings, no NPCs, no enemies. You'll start by creating your player character (name, appearance, backstory), and then you're dropped onto the map at your starting hex. From here, you build the world yourself: generate settlements, populate them with NPCs, and explore outward. See Creating content for how to add things to the world.
Art model
By default, worlds use the standard image generation model. Hero subscribers can switch to BuddyMix (illustrated SDXL style, 2 credits) or GPT Image (OpenAI's GPT-Image-2, 2 credits with content restrictions) from Atlas → Settings after creating the world.
Each model has its own set of compatible art styles. See Account & Billing for credit details.
Tip. Don't agonize over choices — art style can be changed later. Genre, starting biome, and world name are permanent, but everything else is flexible.