How Worldwright works

The internal mechanics wiki — rich, interactive documentation of the live game rules, for visually inspecting that the design makes sense. Every number on these pages comes out of the running simulation, never from hand-transcription.

The loop in one paragraph

Each age is a fresh valley on the same land. You place constructs that cost the age's resources and produce more of them each tick; your population eats the age's staple and grows while housed. Mid-age crises pose dilemmas; the age always ends in an Upheaval that razes the board. What survives it: your people (survivors), your Insight, your Knowledge (nodes you unlocked — construct types known forever), legacy tokens, and a few hardened ruins. Then the next age begins with almost nothing — except everything you know.

Insight — the meta-currency

Insight is earned three ways and spent exactly one way (World.Unlock is the only decrement in the sim):

The two gates

Every construct sits behind two independent gates (GDD §7):

• Unlock — is the construct's type known? Free-starter types always are; the rest need their Knowledge node bought once, then they're known forever, across ages and runs.
• Afford — can the ledger pay its resource cost right now? This one resets with every age's fresh valley.

Early game is therefore “afford what you know”; the meta-game is “know more”.

The ages at a glance

As the arc advances the valley itself civilises: each age grades more of the raw landform toward buildable plains (the Levelling column), while open water and the highest mountains are always left untouched — the coastline never moves. And from the Bronze Age on, streets are laid automatically between your buildings, paved in the age's material (packed gravel → cobblestone → fitted stone → asphalt). Both are deterministic and derived from the sim, not stored state.

Keeping this wiki true

The data layer (data.js) is generated from the sim by Assets/Editor/WikiDataExporter.cs: it reads the live catalogs, boots real worlds for each opening state, and plays a scripted fresh start through the real tick loop for the timelines. The repo rule (.claude/CLAUDE.md): any sim rule change must regenerate the data and update affected wiki prose in the same pass.