This manual is for the person building the world, not the engine underneath it. You do not need to understand transaction journals, context capsules, recovery gates, or validation internals to make a great LWE world. That machinery exists so you can spend your attention on the realm itself.
The basic rule is simple: build the truth of your world clearly, and let LWE handle the machinery that keeps it alive.
What you are actually building
A strong LWE world has three layers.
- The world itself: characters, places, factions, cultures, abilities, creatures, equipment, resources, history, and whatever makes the setting yours.
- The living substrate: time, routines, services, routes, pressures, information, weather, relationships, memory, and consequences that let the world keep moving.
- The engine beneath the legend: Campaign State, Runtime Ledger, compiled context, startup safety, recovery, and validation. Setup wires this layer for you. You usually leave it alone.
If you remember nothing else, remember that split. Most creators live in layers one and two. Layer three is why the first two can survive long campaigns without becoming a pile of contradictory notes.
Start with Setup
For a new world, open Orbit with subagents turned on (I recommend GLM Flash as both the main model and the subagents), type Setup, and choose the depth that fits how much you already know.
| Path | Best when | What happens |
|---|
| Express | You have a strong pitch and want to get playable fast | Setup infers reversible details, asks only the decisions it should not guess, then shows you an Assumption Review |
| Guided | You want to shape the important parts with help | Setup walks through the world in practical sections, records your choices, skips what does not apply, and compiles as it goes |
| Deep | You want the culture and ordinary life to feel authored from the roots | Guided Setup plus World DNA: authority, kinship, obligation, taboo, material culture, spirituality, social assumptions, everyday life, inspirations, and exclusions |
Setup depth is separate from the engine profile. You can do a Deep setup with a Lite engine, or an Express setup with a Full engine. Depth controls how the world is discovered. The module profile controls how much machinery the world actually needs.
Existing projects should not be rebuilt from scratch. Update handles an LWE world that already exists and is updating to a new version. Migrate handles adoption or structural change. Validate checks the installed world. Status tells you where an unfinished workflow stopped. Diagnose investigates a problem without trying to rebuild the realm around it.
What Setup should do for you
A healthy Setup should establish or adopt the playable spine, connect the active Ruleset, Calendar and Clock, establish current World State, wire the runtime owners, preserve or build the launch flow, compile only the enabled systems, and give the world enough lived structure to function.
That last part matters. A Clock alone does not make a world feel alive. If the setting uses time, important places should know how they change through the day, recurring people should have enough routine to be absent when they have somewhere else to be, services should have sensible availability, and weather or travel should matter only where the setting says they matter.
Setup should not invent distinctions the world does not have. A timeless realm does not need weekdays. A space station might care about shifts instead of sunrise. A magical city may use bells, moons, tides, or ritual cycles. LWE is the frame, not the setting.
What you still own
Setup is allowed to help, infer, organize, and compile. It is not supposed to replace you.
You own the creative calls: what the world is about, what belongs in it, what does not, the tone, the cultures, the power ceiling, the ordinary reality, the social rules, the shape of the map, the people worth knowing, and the kind of play you want to make possible.
When Setup makes a reversible assumption, it should show it to you. If it guesses wrong, correct it. If you do not care, let it decide and keep moving.
The Builder's Guild rule
Do not measure a world by file count.
A hundred empty records do less than ten connected ones. Build clean, build grand. Give the engine causes, relationships, routes, obligations, and current tensions. Let content earn persistence when play reaches it.
The goal is not a folder full of lore.
The goal is a world that answers back.
