Setting Up a World

The Player's Handbook covers the two ways in and which chat each one belongs to. This chapter is what a builder needs on top of that: what the installer actually does to the project, and the three answers that are structural rather than cosmetic.

The invocation

Open @Missing file in the Orbit chat and say, exactly:

Initialize Realm Flow Setup Kit

That string is the entry point. Nothing shorter works, and there is no install command — if you have seen that written anywhere, it is wrong and it will simply produce a confused assistant.

Having the file open matters: Orbit reads the open document, so it starts holding the whole procedure rather than reconstructing it from a title.

Before it asks you anything

It installs its own Assistant Instruction blocks into the project — @Missing file is the source, and it is six blocks: two always-active, four conditional. Then it reads them back and counts them out loud.

Let it. That is what makes Orbit hold this engine instead of guessing at it, and it does not survive a clone, so every fresh copy needs it done again. If it ever cannot install them, it hands you the blocks and the panel and waits rather than proceeding. That refusal is deliberate — an Orbit that has not read the engine builds a world that is competent, generic and impossible to diagnose afterwards, because nothing will look broken.

Two always-active blocks and four conditional is the shape, and it is the same discipline as the pinned set in play, for the same reason. A seventh block means an area of work genuinely has no home, not that a topic deserves its own.

The three gates you cannot add later

Almost everything here is adjustable mid-campaign. Three things are not. They are worth ten minutes of thought at the start rather than a rebuild afterwards, and the installer asks all three explicitly because none of them can be safely inferred.

1 · Limits

hardLimits and softLimits on @Missing file. Recorded verbatim, never summarised — a limit paraphrased is a limit half-kept, and the paraphrase is the version that drifts.

They can be widened or narrowed at any moment, in one OOC line, with no ceremony. What cannot be retrofitted is the trust that comes from having been asked properly at the start. This is also the one inference that can actually hurt somebody, which is why it is never inferred.

2 · The control gates

controlMode on Scene State says who the human is at this table.

Single       they are one character. The default, and most tables.
Squad        they direct several. Time HOLDS until the cycle closes.
Storyteller  the roles invert. They author; the GM plays someone inside it.

Squad and Storyteller are installed, not chosen — they exist only if controlModel.multiUnitEnabled or storytellerEnabled is true on the Genre Overlay, set once at installation. Within what was installed, the mode is the human's to set and never yours to switch for them. @Missing file is the authority.

Retrofitting a gate means rewriting the scenes that already exist, because they were composed for a different relationship between player and world. A Squad world threads positions, orders and a held clock through everything generated; a Storyteller world carries two separate knowledge boundaries. Neither can be bolted on.

A fourth install switch sits beside these and is deliberately not a control mode. controlModel.offScreenViewing lets the player watch scenes their character is not in. It changes what they see, never who they are — and the firewall rule travels with it: what the player saw is not what their character knows. Do not document it as a mode, do not put it in the same list, and do not let a card imply that switching it changes the control gate.

3 · Dice direction

Not whether dice exist — that can change, and the whole resolution ladder is a data edit on one file. Which way they point.

Roll Under inverts every band in the system. Set it one way, narrate it the other, and the world reads as relentless bad luck; the tell is subtle and it takes most tables weeks to identify, by which point the campaign has a mood nobody chose. @Missing file holds the rule that resolves it: when a table's printed direction and the world's direction disagree, the world wins.

The one that decides everything else

Fill @Missing file before generating content.

It holds your world's actual nouns. Generate a population against an empty Lexicon and every one of them comes out of training data — and the drift compounds across the whole install, so you are not fixing one file afterwards, you are fixing forty.

Everything else can be adjusted later. This one you pay for.

Everything else is fair game

Tone, darkness, magic depth, technology level, realism clusters, voice pool, maturity register, interruption rate — all adjustable, all sensibly defaulted, none of them worth agonising over up front. Change them when the world tells you to.