World & Locations
Your world is organized as a hierarchy. Each layer adds context that shapes how NPCs talk, what they know, and how they relate to their surroundings.
World → Region → Settlement → District → Building / Landmark
The hierarchy
World
The top level. Your world has a profile with fields for era, geography, powers, conflicts, economy, and more. This is managed from the Atlas World tab and gives every NPC a baseline understanding of the setting.
Regions
Large areas that contain settlements — a mountain range, a coastal province, a frontier territory. Each region has a profile that shapes how NPCs within it talk about their surroundings. Draw region boundaries using the Settlement tool in build mode and choose Region as the boundary type.
See Organizing Your World for details.
Settlements
Named areas with buildings, roads, and NPCs. Most NPCs live in a settlement — if you wander away, they go about their day on their own schedule. Zoom in on a settlement to see its layout with streets, buildings, and NPC tooltips showing who's where.
A settlement can span several hexes — one hex is about a mid-sized village, so a proper city usually claims more. However many hexes it covers, it lives as one place: people go about their day across all of it, and someone can live on one side of town and work on the other. See Organizing Your World for drawing multi-hex boundaries.
Districts
Zones within a settlement — a market quarter, a noble ward, a harbor district. Districts have their own profiles and provide additional context to NPC conversations. Draw district boundaries inside a settlement using the Settlement tool and choose District as the boundary type.
See Organizing Your World for details.
Buildings & Landmarks
Buildings are interior locations NPCs can live and work in. Landmarks are outdoor points of interest that NPCs can visit as social destinations. Both appear on the map and are managed from the Atlas Locations tab.
Buildings can also have insides of their own — floors, apartments, back rooms — nested up to three levels deep. See Rooms & Floors below.
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 AI fills in all the fields (no credit cost). 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 the briefing doesn't emphasize the right parts, you can edit it directly in the Atlas World 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.
Edit buildings from the Atlas Locations tab — name, type, description, music, interior prompt, map icon, and color.
Building shapes
When placing buildings in build mode, choose from 7 shape presets (Rectangle, L-Shape, T-Shape, U-Shape, Cross, Octagon, Round) and 5 roof types (Peaked, Hip, Pyramid, Shed, Dome). Buildings can be independently stretched in width and height, rotated, and copied as blueprints for quick placement.
See Creating Content for the full build toolbar guide.
Rooms & Floors (Sub-locations)
Buildings have insides. In the Atlas Locations tab, every building has a Sub-locations section — use + Add sub-location to add floors, apartments, back rooms, or offices, nested up to three levels deep: "Meridian Tower › 2nd Floor › Apartment 3B". A single building can hold up to 100 rooms across all its levels.
Every room is a real place. Rooms go through the same Location Wizard as buildings — describe one, generate its details and interior art, and use the Generate characters at this location checkbox to decide whether anyone lives there. Name it "Tonya's room" and you get Tonya's room.
Walk between rooms in chat. Inside a building, the Rooms button in the avatar strip slides up the room list. Pick a room and the scene fades into it — its own art, its own music, its own people.
Bring your conversation along. Mid-chat, each room in the list shows the avatar of the character you're talking to — click it (Go with) and you move together, the conversation carrying on in the new space.
Residents live their lives. People assigned to a room come downstairs for work in the morning and head back up at night.
Assign anyone to a room from the building's Residents panel in the Atlas — residents are grouped by room, each with a Move to room dropdown. Deleting a room moves its NPCs up to the parent location.
Every room is also a full location in its own right — open one from the Sub-locations list and it gets the same editor as a building: its own description, interior art, music tracks, residents, and even sub-locations of its own.
