Settlements and buildings
A settlement is a named area with buildings, roads, and NPCs living/working in them. Most NPCs live in a settlement — if you wander away from them, they go about their day on their own schedule.
Zoom in on a settlement to see its layout — streets, buildings, and NPC tooltips showing who's where right now.
Settlement profiles
Each settlement has a profile — a set of fields that define its identity and feed into NPC conversations and world events. Fields are genre-specific, but typically include:
- Government — who rules and how (monarchy, council, guild-run, etc.)
- Laws & Customs — key laws, punishments, restrictions
- Religion — dominant faiths, temples, devotion level
- Economy — major industries, trade goods, wealth
- Architecture — building style, materials, visual character
- Culture & Mood — social norms, outsider treatment
- Current Tensions — active problems, conflicts, threats
- History — what residents would actually reference in conversation
- Factions — guilds, families, organizations with power
You can fill these out manually or use the Quick Start feature — type a one-liner like "corrupt mining town run by a greedy baron" and the LLM fills in all the fields for you (no credit cost — this is part of your unlimited chats). You can also generate a settlement exterior image for 1 credit.
The profile is compressed into an NPC Briefing — a short summary that every NPC in the settlement carries. It shapes how they talk about the world around them. If you feel the briefing doesn't emphasize the right parts, you can edit it directly in the Atlas Settlement tab.
Edit settlement profiles from the Atlas Settlement tab.
Buildings
Buildings have:
- A name (e.g., "The Burning Stag")
- A type (tavern, shop, smithy, residence — depends on genre)
- An owner NPC
- An interior image (generated when the building is created — 1 credit)
- Optional music tracks to set the mood when you enter
- Optional NPCs living or working there
Hover over a building to see a quick tooltip showing current NPC presence. Click a building to enter it.
When you enter a building, the view becomes a visual-novel-style scene: the interior image fills the background and the NPCs present appear as portraits in front of it. Chat happens from there.
You can edit a building from the Atlas Buildings tab — name, type, description, music, interior prompt, map icon, and color. See Creating content for the editing details.