Creating your first world
After signing up and choosing a plan, you land on the dashboard. Click + New World to start.
The creator is a step-by-step experience: the dashboard blurs away, the title fades in, and you move through four steps — name, setting, art, and starting biome. Each choice is presented as full art cards, and you can click the progress dots at the top to jump back to an earlier step. Press Enter to advance, Esc to cancel.
World Name. Pick a name for the world (up to 50 characters).
Setting. Pick the era and genre. Each card shows its world up front, with a short scene-setting blurb and a live Map Style Preview that follows your selection:
- Medieval Fantasy — low-fantasy villages, swords, supply shortages, local feuds.
- Victorian — gas lamps and fog, steam trains stitching industrial cities to frontier boomtowns. Drawing rooms, dusty main streets, and everything the railroad connects between them.
- 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 Model & Art Style. Pick the image model, then one of its styles from the full-size preview carousel. This decides how everyone and everything looks in image generations. See Art models below.
Starting 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.
When you click Create World, 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 models
Four models are available, each with its own set of art styles:
- Default — 1 credit per image. Styles: Oil Painting, Modern Anime, Retro Anime (80s/90s), Adult Animation, Comic Book.
- BuddyMix (Hero) — 2 credits per image. Illustrated SDXL model with its own Stylized Anime look.
- Krea 2 (Hero) — 2 credits per image. Eight styles: Adult Animation, Art Book, Dark Fantasy, Graphic Novel, Open Air, Retro Anime, Shonen Manga, Shoujo Manga.
- GPT Image (Hero) — 2 credits per image. OpenAI's GPT-Image-2, with content restrictions. Styles: Oil Painting, Graphic Novel, Adult Animation, Modern Anime, Retro Anime (80s/90s).
Hero-exclusive models can be previewed by anyone in the carousel — a Hero exclusive badge marks them until you upgrade.
You're not locked in: switch an existing world's model or style any time in Atlas → Settings. See Account & Billing for credit details.
Tip. Don't agonize over choices — art model and style can be changed later. Setting, starting biome, and world name are permanent, but everything else is flexible.