Know What You Touch, and What You Leave Alone
LWE has a lot of file types because different kinds of truth age differently. You do not need to memorize all forty-seven. You do need to know which family you are working in.
Think in intent, not fields.
The files you will use all the time
These are ordinary worldbuilding tools.
| File type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Character | A person who matters as an individual |
| Location | A place with identity, connections, services, population, or play value |
| Faction | An organized group with goals, resources, capacity, territory, or influence |
| Mission | An accepted or available objective with concrete stakes |
| Pressure | A problem or force that can worsen, mutate, or create consequences if ignored |
| Ability | A capability granted by origin, training, power, tool, mutation, pact, or similar source |
| Technique | A learned method, form, discipline, or specialized application |
| Equipment | A persistent item with gameplay or world significance |
| Vehicle | A persistent vehicle that deserves its own state |
| Creature | A species, monster, animal, construct, or repeatable non-person entity |
| Power System | The setting rules behind extraordinary or specialized capability |
| Mechanic Package | A reusable bundle of mechanics, grants, resources, or hooks |
| Resource | A material, service, supply, commodity, strategic asset, or tracked flow |
| Lore | Setting knowledge that matters but is not current mutable state |
Most of your day-to-day building happens here.
Files Setup usually handles for you
These are foundational system owners. You may customize their world-facing settings, but you normally do not rebuild their structure by hand.
World Ruleset defines universal resolution and world invariants.
Calendar Definition defines the world's structural time.
World Clock owns current time, date, weather process, deadlines, and broad region.
World State owns broad present-world truth.
Campaign State coordinates the active scene and compiles the small runtime view the GM needs.
Runtime Ledger handles queue, signals, transaction recovery, and causal bookkeeping.
Campaign Ledger indexes long-running objective history.
Setup Profile records how this world was installed, configured, migrated, and validated.
Lexicon controls setting vocabulary and presentation terms.
GM Instructions hold runtime behavior that should not become world lore.
Game Start defines a playable entry point into the world.
You can absolutely author Game Starts and tune the Ruleset. The rule is simply that these types participate in engine architecture, so change them deliberately rather than treating them like freeform notes.
Files for history, inheritance, and long campaigns
These are for worlds that accumulate real history.
Scene Log captures bounded objective scene history.
Chronicle groups completed scene history into larger arcs.
Event records an objective occurrence that deserves independent evidence.
Era describes a historical age or phase.
Legacy records a consequence that outlives the immediate event.
Historical Burden tracks unresolved weight inherited from the past.
Inherited World represents present conditions received from prior history.
Descendant Line tracks meaningful lineage across generations.
Successor Hook marks a possible inheritance or continuation.
Successor Record tracks the realized inheritor or successor state.
You do not need these for every campaign. They exist so a dynasty game, immortal campaign, political saga, or centuries-long world can grow without flattening history into one summary paragraph.
Files you generally do not touch
These are engine maintenance and proof surfaces:
Engine Manifest
Engine Capability
Engine Module
Conformance Case
Evidence Record
They describe what LWE is, what the platform has proven, what modules are installed, and how the engine validates itself. Unless you are maintaining LWE itself or intentionally authoring an engine module, leave them alone.
Where Things Live
The world stays up front. Characters, Locations, Factions, Missions, Pressures, Game Start, Systems, Storybook, and the rest of your world content remain the creator-facing surface of the project — that is where you build, and that is where your work should be found.
Underneath the world sits one permanent folder: /Living World Engine/. It holds the engine machinery — Runtime, OMEGA, QA, Documentation, and Builder Tools. You normally do not edit Runtime, OMEGA, or QA by hand; the engine owns those rooms. The actual first-time Setup procedures live together in the top-level /Setup/ folder so run /Setup/ has one clear entrypoint and one complete procedure tree. The Builder Tools that remain under /Living World Engine/ are written for you, though: Update, migration, Health Check and validation, layout standards, and assisted worldbuilding references all live there when you need them.
Example and template cards stay inside their world-facing authoring folders on purpose. They show you what belongs there and make sure the full LWE worldbuilding structure ships with the package instead of disappearing because a folder is empty. During Setup, these examples can be personalized, replaced, or retired as the real world takes their place. Until then, they are useful scaffolding, not engine clutter.
What can I delete?
Keep /Living World Engine/ — it is the engine, and it does not have a spare. Keep .craft and your actual world content, always.
Top-level /Setup/ is different. It is the one-time installation toolkit — the actual Setup procedures — not part of runtime. Once Setup has succeeded and validation is complete, you may keep it for reference or delete it. Deleting /Setup/ does not uninstall the engine and does not disable runtime, Update, Migration, or validation — everything the engine and its maintenance need lives in /Living World Engine/. It does remove the one-time Setup procedures themselves, so do not expect run /Setup/ to work after that.
The ownership rule
When you add something, ask:
What kind of truth is this?
A present fact belongs on the record that owns that fact. A relationship change belongs to the relationship owner, not a duplicated Character note. A current market condition belongs to the relevant Resource market state, not three Locations repeating the same number. A place remembering a fire belongs to Location Memory, while the objective fire itself may be an Event.
References connect truth. They do not clone it.
You do not have to think like a database engineer to use this rule. Just avoid telling the same mutable fact in five places.
One world. One present truth. Many useful views.