Update, Validate, Publish, and Troubleshoot
A living project changes. The goal is to change it without making every update feel like surgery.
Use the right command
Setup builds or adopts a world.
Update brings an installed LWE world forward while preserving creator content.
Migrate handles structural adoption or older/custom architecture.
Re-personalize changes terminology and presentation without rewriting canonical engine identity.
Status reports the current setup or migration checkpoint.
Diagnose investigates a problem without mutating everything around it.
Validate checks the installed world.
Ship Update is for maintaining and releasing LWE itself, not ordinary worldbuilding.
If you are unsure, use Status or Diagnose before trying to “fix” the project.
Health Check is the friendly scan
Use Health Check when you want the practical answer without starting a repair. It is read-only and reports:
- Integrity
- LWE Coverage
- Living World
- Player UX
- Terminology
- Privacy
- Art
- Publish readiness
It can tell you that a recurring NPC has no routine anchors, a Location uses time but has no temporal rhythm, a layout risks exposing GM-only information, or important art is missing. It does not generate images, delete files, change certification, or silently fix the project.
Preserve creator-owned work
Updates and migration should preserve:
- Characters and their identities
- custom content
- paths
- references
- custom fields and enum values
- layouts where compatible
- Game Starts
- Prelude
- Character creation flows
- setting vocabulary
- project presentation
- history and memory
- creator decisions
LWE should wrap compatible infrastructure around an authored world, not erase the world to make the engine easier to install.
Add before replacing
When structure changes, create or extend the new compatible surface before superseding the old one.
Verify counts, references, identities, representative content, and player-facing behavior before cleanup.
For important migrated features, preservation means more than “the JSON survived.” Check that the correct owner is still authoritative, runtime can still reach it, the builder/player can still see it where appropriate, private information stayed private, values/ranges still mean the same thing, world terminology survived, and connected systems still point to one another.
Importing a new version does not prove old structures vanished.
Deletion comes after semantic parity, not before. LWE should not create a permanent Pending Deletion subsystem just to manage cleanup; verified cleanup stays in the existing migration plan/report, and manual deletions should be listed for your approval.
Validation is not one thing
For an ordinary worldbuilder, Validate should answer practical questions:
- Do the enabled file types and records parse?
- Do references resolve?
- Does the starting flow point to real content?
- Does Character creation use valid mechanics?
- Are enabled modules actually connected?
- Are disabled systems absent from runtime surfaces?
- Does time advance correctly if time is enabled?
- Can the world remain quiet when nothing should happen?
- Do recurring NPC routines, opportunities, information, and short physical continuity behave?
- Do layouts remain usable?
You do not need to run LWE's entire release laboratory every time you add a tavern.
The heavy Conformance Case and Evidence Record machinery exists for engine maintenance and high-confidence release work.
The checks that matter most before publishing a world
Run a representative play pass.
Test:
- the actual Game Start
- Character creation if enabled
- one ordinary conversation
- one movement/travel action
- one conflict or uncertain resolution
- one time advance
- one quiet scene
- one NPC being somewhere else
- one active Faction or Pressure consequence
- one Mission state change
- one relationship or memory update if those systems are enabled
- one return to a previously changed place
- mobile readability for the most important layouts
The best test is still experiential:
Does this feel like the world is continuing to exist, or does it feel like content is being spawned in front of the player?
If something feels wrong
Do not start by adding more rules.
Ask what kind of failure you are seeing.
“The GM forgot a fact.”
Check whether the fact has one real owner and whether the relevant runtime projection or retrieval route can reach it.
“Everyone acts like they know everything.”
Check Information and knowledge edges. Visibility to the player is not knowledge for a Character.
“Every scene becomes dramatic.”
Check ambient entropy, protagonist gravity, Pressures, and whether optional opportunities are being treated like mandatory plot.
“The world clock changes but nothing feels different.”
Check Location temporal rhythms, services, population cohorts, recurring routines, and environmental state.
“NPCs are always available.”
Give important recurring Characters real obligations and routine anchors.
“The same consequence happened twice.”
Diagnose the causal root, Signal, queue, and transaction state rather than manually rewriting history.
“The layout is overwhelming.”
Remove engine-facing detail from the primary layout and compile disabled systems out structurally.
“Setup wants to recreate things I already built.”
Stop and route to Update/Migrate. Existing authored architecture should be detected and preserved.
What not to touch casually
Unless you are intentionally maintaining LWE itself, avoid manual edits to:
- Engine Manifest
- Engine Capability
- conformance/evidence records
- Runtime Ledger transaction internals
- computed capsule fields
- engine-owned revision/commit fields
- hidden validation machinery
If you need to change what the world does, there is almost always a world-facing owner for it.
Final rule
Complexity belongs beneath the crown.
A finished world should not feel like an engine demonstration. The player should feel places keeping time, people having lives, factions pursuing goals, information arriving through real channels, physical details persisting, history leaving scars, and consequences growing from causes.
If the machinery is visible, polish it.
If the world answers back, you are done.