WorldArchitect

WorldArchitect is a local-first fiction worldbuilding app for writers, game masters, and narrative designers. It helps you grow a fictional world into a structured encyclopedia: articles, categories, timelines, version history, snapshots, exportable Markdown, and optional AI-assisted expansion.

The app is fully usable without an LLM. When you do connect a provider, WorldArchitect adds a multi-agent creative system that can propose ideas, expand articles, check continuity, create child entries, and help maintain a coherent World Bible while keeping you in control of what gets accepted.

Why WorldArchitect?

• Own your world locally. Your encyclopedia is stored in a local SQLite database. No account, cloud sync, or hosted backend required.
• Write with structure. Build a browsable wiki with categories, article hierarchy, cross-links, chronology, and snapshots.
• Use AI without surrendering control. Agent drafts are reviewed before they are committed, and the app works normally with AI disabled.
• Grow worlds deliberately. Spark creates and expands articles, Solidify cleans them up, Forge can recursively expand a subtree, and World Tools help audit the larger graph.
• Keep long projects durable. Version history, crash recovery, World Bible summaries, issue checks, call logs, and ZIP export are built in.

Features

• Local world database powered by SQLite
• World creation wizard with configurable categories and style settings
• Wikipedia-style article browser with sidebar search
• Article layers for introduction, description, subjects, and chronology
• Graph view for navigating article hierarchy and references
• Manual editing with TipTap and Markdown-oriented article content
• Version history, non-destructive reverts, and named world snapshots
• Timeline view for temporally anchored articles
• World Bible summaries used for continuity and context
• Optional multi-agent system for proposals, expansion, cleanup, auditing, naming, and publishing
• Provider support for Anthropic, OpenAI-compatible APIs, Groq, and Ollama
• Cost controls, call logs, daily caps, and provider settings
• ZIP export of the world as Markdown files

Screenshots

Quick Start

Requirements:

• Node.js 20+
• npm

Install dependencies and start both the local API server and web client:

npm install
npm run dev

The server runs on http://localhost:3001. The client runs on http://localhost:5173.

You can start creating and editing worlds immediately with no LLM configured.

Optional LLM Setup

WorldArchitect works with provider = none by default. To enable AI tools, open the app and configure a provider in Settings -> Provider.

You can also configure a provider through the local API:

curl -X PATCH http://localhost:3001/api/settings \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"provider":"anthropic","apiKey":"sk-ant-..."}'

API keys are stored locally and are never returned unmasked to the client.

How The App Is Organized

WorldArchitect has two local processes:

• client/ - React, TypeScript, Vite, Zustand, TipTap, Tailwind
• server/ - Node.js, Express, TypeScript, SQLite, Zod, LLM provider adapters

The browser talks only to the local server. The server owns the database, export system, provider settings, agent calls, and versioning.

Documentation

Public, reader-friendly docs live in docs/:

• How WorldArchitect Works
• Multi-Agent System Overview
• Local-First Data And Privacy

Developer notes and older design documents are kept locally in dev-docs/ and are intentionally ignored by Git.

Development Commands

npm run dev              # server :3001 + client :5173
npm run dev:server       # server only
npm run dev:client       # client only
npm run build -w server
npm run build -w client
npm test -w server
npm test -w client

License

MIT License. See LICENSE.