World — the Domain as a place you can wander

Status: direction; working concept contract, not an implementation contract.

This specification owns what is currently stable about World and what remains open. Current runtime truth remains in the code and generated MCP manual. The human experience contract owns how Scenario and Episode develop the stories from which Worlds may later be deployed.

Founder roadmap: World, Factory, and latent-character roadmap 🔒.

The working identity

A World is the third medium: a Domain's state rendered as a place, held at a chosen moment, and explored freeform. Where a Scenario is decided and an Experience is read, a World is wandered — the reader moves a cursor over the map rather than advancing through an authored order, enters the locations the story built, and speaks with the characters who were there.

It is a static artifact of world state with a live interaction layer, not a clock that advances merely because someone entered it. The world is pinned to a coordinate on a branch, and the tip of that branch is only its most recent coordinate, not its only one. Traversal and conversation may generate while a visitor wanders, but they do not change the selected moment or source branch. That branch supplies the ontology, history, characters, places, artifacts, institutions, rules, relationships, information, resources, open Fate, and reusable audiovisual assets already established through Scenario and Episode play. Bounded generation may fill gaps, but it must extend that inherited ontology rather than invent an unrelated setting.

A World may initially be toured, observed, or revisited. A richer World may later support situated human and agent activity, financial and informational economies, social organization, and MMO-like presence. Replay, reset, comparison, and continuous simulation remain possible configurations, not the settled centre of the concept. World is deliberately subordinate to the useful Domain and the Scenario/Episode play loop: Meridians does not need a persistent World or MMO economy to deliver value.

Domain defines. Branch preserves. Scenario resolves. Episode embodies. World inherits and lives.

You decide in a Scenario, read an Experience, and wander a World.

The cost shape is the opposite of an Experience

An Experience is capital: generated once during production, then served, so cost per reader is hosting. A World inverts that — the map and its assets are prepared, but conversation and traversal generate at the moment of interaction, so cost scales with how long and how widely a visitor wanders. The "a prepared world does not generate while you read it" property in Positioning belongs to Experience and must never be restated for World. World spend is an ordinary metered lane and is bounded by the same instance ceilings as every other paid call.

The moment cursor

A World's defining control is its clock. Entering a World selects a moment — an asOf coordinate on a branch — and the world is composed at that moment: who was where, what had already happened, which artifacts existed and who held them, which threads were still open, and what each character could know. Moving the cursor is time travel through the same place, not a different World.

This is not a new primitive. It is the same as-of vantage a Reading already uses to cut a fan of futures without hindsight (Reading.contextScope: "asof" with asOfEntryId). One clock serves both: the Reading uses it so the future is fair, the World uses it so the past is inhabitable.

Presence is derived, not stored

Where a character was at a moment is already recoverable from canon and should not become a second stored register. Canonical Scene records carry locationId and participantIds, and scenes are ordered, so folding scenes up to the cursor yields each character's last known place, each location's cast, and the traffic between them. The spatial signal derivation in src/lib/core/graph/spatial-coherence.ts already counts presence at every containing level from exactly these fields.

The honest limits of that derivation, which the interface must respect rather than paper over:

• It yields last known position, not a trajectory. Between two scenes a character's whereabouts is an inference, and the World should present it as such rather than animating a walk that canon never recorded.
• Travel is implicit. A character appearing in a new location is a fact; the route they took is not.
• Off-screen characters have no position at all until the story places them. Absence of record is not presence at the last place seen, and the interface should be able to say "not recorded here".

If a stored movement register is ever added, it must arrive as a typed scene delta on the canonical write path — never as state the World writes for itself.

The map is already an artifact

The explorable surface has a shipped substrate. A Board is a Replicate-rendered image of one location cluster plus the snapshot of the cluster it was generated from, with MapLabel entries placing each child location at normalized [0..1] coordinates over that image — resolution-independent hit targets for a cursor. LocationTopology supplies containment and portals, so which places adjoin which is a graph rather than an art decision, and cluster drift is already detectable through the board's signature.

What is missing is the traversal layer over it: selecting a location, descending into a cluster, populating a place with the cast present at the cursor's moment, and entering conversation from there.

Factory supplies the visible world

The visual map is not a second asset system. World draws from the same production library as Experience: approved location plates and variants, character sprites and appearance sets, artifacts, maps, effects, sound, motion, and interface material. The directional Factory workspace in visual-novel production owns the coverage, lineage, approval, and repair of that library. The existing Media Drive remains the file and lightweight generation/gallery seam; Factory is the production control surface that says which entity or moment an asset belongs to, what reference and style produced it, where it is valid, and what is still missing.

World consumes an exact asset package at deployment. A later asset regeneration does not silently recast an already deployed World: it creates a new asset revision that a new World origin or explicit update may select.

Situated roleplay

Conversation inside a World is Domain chat with two boundaries added: where and when. A character spoken to at a moment answers from what that character knew then — their location, their memory, their information position, the threads open to them — and not from canon at the branch tip. The information boundary is the same authorization contract that Scenario seats already enforce; the World applies it to a place and a time rather than to a seat at a table.

Situated roleplay consumes Acting context. When an entity has an Entity Interpretation Graph, it resolves the branch-and-moment State and Dynamics bindings active at that coordinate. It composes those provisional models with the character's available knowledge, relationships, present state, constraints, and tools to produce a Behaviour Reading. The reading supplies competing tendencies, expressions, and micro-movements; it does not reveal a true interior or choose an action. See Acting and Entity Interpretation.

This makes character change legible without making it magical or fixed. New accepted history may become evidence, but a new interpretation does not require evidence divergence: several supported graphs may read the same record differently. An explicit refresh creates a new graph snapshot; a later branch coordinate may bind it. The visible change can be gradual or a step change, including a new expression or appearance coverage request to Factory. Earlier moments retain the model and assets they used. Different branches may therefore carry different evidence-grounded interpretations of the same continuing entity without either interpretation becoming canonical psychology.

A visitor may also take a character's part and move as them. Two invariants hold regardless:

• Roleplay never writes canon. A conversation inside a World is a projection, exactly as a playthrough of an Experience is. If a session produces something worth keeping, it is promoted through Scenario or a Stream on the ordinary governed path — never merged because it was said.
• The moment does not advance because someone spoke. A World visit leaves the branch where it found it.

Story cultivation before deployment

Scenario and Episode develop the main story or several divergent stories at active branch heads:

direct Scenario play → governed branch move → optional Episode rendition

live Episode framing → wrapped Scenario decision/resolution → branch move → staged continuation

Direct Scenario exposes the abstract card and rapid-simulation grammar. A live Episode wraps a bounded Scenario instance in Stageplay, roleplay, situated information, and consequential choices, so a player can participate without knowingly entering a card game. A catch-up Episode embodies already accepted history.

These paths are interoperable, not rival writers. Both accumulate the story facts and production material that make a later World coherent.

Origin, branch, and canon

A deployed World pins an exact origin:

Domain id + source branch id + preserved revision + World configuration + asset lineage

The origin is immutable even if activity within the World later changes. A World may originate from an official canon branch or a preserved alternate timeline. Several Worlds may therefore embody different branches of the same fictional Domain, and many Worlds may share one origin with different configurations.

Creating or inhabiting a World never silently advances or rewrites its source branch. Any World event proposed back into story canon requires an explicit governed action and preserved provenance. Whether a Domain designates exactly one official canon branch, and how that designation can change, remain open policy—not an inference from branch order or popularity. Founding a new Domain from a scene of this one (a seed) is that governed action made concrete, and consequence then flows down lineage only (world-tree).

Inherited and completed space

A World should inherit what the story has genuinely earned:

• named characters, Units, locations, artifacts, institutions, and their identities;
• System rules, permissions, clocks, economies, and tool affordances;
• relationships, ownership, obligations, Frames, Control, and resource positions;
• information distribution, memory, belief, secrecy, and discoverability;
• history, unresolved Fate, tensions, opportunities, and consequences;
• reusable actor, location, prop, effect, sound, motion, map, and interface assets;
• branch-and-moment Acting bindings used for behaviour and expression, with the evidence and interpretation lineage kept distinct from canonical entity facts;
• exact source, branch, revision, configuration, and adaptation provenance.

Episodes will develop some places deeply while leaving connective or ordinary areas unstaged. Generated completion may fill those gaps only through an explicit World-building operation constrained by inherited ontology, style, geography, history, and rights. Generated completion is attributable derived material, not retroactive evidence that the source story established it.

Asset reuse across branches must preserve semantic identity and revision lineage. Shared assets may descend from a common ancestor; branch-specific changes must not silently overwrite one another. The precise asset alignment and merge model remains open.

Presence, seats, and activity

A playable seat may bind to a character, location, artifact, institution, or another Domain-authorized entity. Each seat receives context bounded by its graph position, memory, information, resources, permissions, and tools. Canonical truth is not common knowledge.

A World may support, in increasing order of commitment:

• a tour or guided traversal of story-developed places;
• perspective-shaped observation of preserved history;
• bounded roleplay, quests, work, trade, or social activity;
• persistent human and agent seats;
• financial or informational economies and organizing systems;
• lobby-based or MMO-scale participation.

No item in that sequence is mandatory, and it is not yet a promotion ladder. A tourable World may be a complete and valuable form.

The five forces, interpretation, and Will

A World inherits the pentad of its origin Domain — five peer forces, three stored and two derived:

• World embodies — people, places, artifacts, resources, relationships, information, and state. Stored.
• System constrains — rules, institutions, clocks, economies, permissions, and tools. Stored.
• Fate remains open — unresolved possibility, pressure, and bearing. Stored.
• Theme recurs — meaning read across the record; never a writer. Derived.
• Causality connects — what can lead to what, traced as Flags: turning points that signal Causality into action. A Thread closure is a Flag that also settles a Fate thread; it is a derived projection. Derived.
• Will makes the move — a human or agent chooses through the canonical action boundary. Not a force.

Acting is a first-class entity-scale interpretive capability and a post-hoc interpretation of System; an Entity Interpretation Graph is its selectable State or Dynamics context artifact. First-class does not make Acting a force or canonical interior truth. Will is never stored as a force. It is attributable authority exercised when a human or agent creates, revises, or selects an interpretation and when it makes a move. Acting reads may recur as the World changes, but generation and binding remain manually initiated; a World does not reinterpret its actors on its own. Presentation, including Stageplay, never resolves an action merely by depicting it.

Information, tools, and economies

Information propagation is foundational: reach, delay, fidelity, credibility, secrecy, distortion, and decay may all matter. A World's tool ecology declares which capabilities exist, who may use them, what they cost, and how they compose.

Information, artifacts, access, time, money, credit, reputation, ownership, labour, and tool capability may support trade, finance, coalition, institution, and organizing mechanics where the Domain has earned them. These systems are a plausible route from a toured story artifact to a livable MMO-like society. They are not promised for every World, and fictional economies do not become real financial claims.

Projection and Stageplay

World state and history are canonical; cameras, Stories, dashboards, scores, and Stageplays are projections. A World may be experienced through a side-scrolling stage, map, ledger, graph, dossier, spectator account, tour, or another Domain-specific instrument.

The World may reuse production assets accumulated through Episodes. It is not itself a long Episode, and Stageplay does not become its state owner. Conversely, activity inside a World may later be rendered as an Episode if authority and provenance permit.

Roadmap — scout, make, read, wander, learn

The roadmap is one production loop over one Domain, not separate VN and World pipelines. It is grounded in the current VN experiment audit 🔒: the lab already has a deterministic catch-up reader, several VN-first fixed-video proofs, wrapped Scenario routes, and candidate CG sequences. It is still rehearsal-ready, with no held-out trials and substantial approval, cast-continuity, acting, audio, and audience-review gaps. Those experiments are evidence for what to integrate next; they are not shipped product state.

Fate Exploration scouts branch terrain (MWS grows the tree between readings)
→ promoted candidates declare production coverage
→ Factory builds and approves reusable entity/place/moment assets
→ Experience freezes route + latent-model + asset bindings for reading
→ World freezes moment + latent-model + asset bindings for wandering
→ governed consequence creates new evidence
→ explicit latent reinterpretation and Factory repair prepare the next coordinate

Three workstreams can advance without pretending they are independent products:

• production spine: Factory → prepared Experience → static World tour → situated interaction;
• discovery spine: Fate Exploration → promoted route → Factory coverage demand;
• character spine: evidence profile → Entity Interpretation Graph → Behaviour Reading → expression demand.

The gates below determine integration order. Research may run ahead of a gate, but a later surface may not claim the capability until its dependency passes.

What the gates are for — three forms, one substrate

The roadmap is not an ontology programme. Its purpose is to make worlds worth experiencing, being inside, and growing from — the same kept world entered three ways. Each gate below exists because it moves one of the three forms toward its evidence; a gate that does not is research, not roadmap. The first released unit is the training world: an hour-long original Experience with a canonical good route, divert and rejoin, and a reading given back afterwards. The forms, their evidence, and where they sit in the strategy:

Read across the rows, the same gates appear under more than one form: that is the point. Factory lineage (1) and latent interpretation (5) are what make a world consistent enough to be re-entered, which is at once what a returning reader, a policy under test, and a second player all require. Situated interaction (7) is a static tour with a seat that can commit — the first configuration in which a human wanders, an agent is tested, and a second Will arrives, all through the same governed hand-off. Held-out production (8) is the first honest proof for all three that the world holds up under circumstances it was not prepared for.

Two loops run beside the gates and are owned elsewhere. Meridians World Search (MWS) (branch refinement) grows the branch tree every form is cut from; under the pocket dimension it becomes a shared tree with a value per seat, pricing joint futures and choosing for none. Latent traits (spec) keeps each person's record across every world they play and steers the next hour toward them; inside a populated World that record stays the person's own — other seats see acts and consequences, never a reading.

The order is deliberate: Experience first, because it is the cheapest form to prove and the one whose record starts soonest; training worlds for agents beside it, because a run is a Scenario with the log kept; the pocket dimension last, because it is the most expensive and least evidenced form, and because it is populated by people who practised in training worlds first.

Read as priorities (specs map): the causal simulator — a kept world whose pathways MWS has grown and priced, entered through the VN and, as direction, built from a person's own situation by interview — is the value and what Meridians monopolises; gates 0–5 build it. Micro sonic analysis (sonic) is the value-add on its felt grain. The VNMMO is the stretch goal on a separate roadmap: a persistent universe that relies on the same simulator and runs it more automated — MWS as a shared tree, worlds constructed and kept without a hand on each fork — and it is built beside the simulator, never instead of it. Gates 6–8 and the open list are its road; nothing in them is allowed to slow gates 0–5.

Gate 0 — consolidate the existing VN proof

Freeze Episode 006's twelve-moment reader passage and the strongest VN-first cuts from Episodes 008, 009, 011, and 013. Review them at phone scale with sound on and off. Add the exact editorial clock, restrained audio, and only the two motivated transitions already named by dailies; do not create more CGs first. The gate passes when the reader contract and editorial grammar survive human review without weakening their presentation-only authority or digest-pinned lineage.

Gate 1 — Factory as production memory and asset lineage

Establish the reusable supply before either new medium depends on it: protected identity references, versioned sprite and appearance sets, expressions, plates and variants, style/model/reference stamps, branch-and-time applicability, coverage gaps, estimates, and explicit approval. Fate Exploration may create draft thumbnails and a coverage manifest; it may not autonomously promote expensive assets.

The first increment is a rebuildable semantic projection over the lab's existing catalogs, asset usage, dependency closure, receipts, dailies, approval, cost, demand, and readiness records. It is not a new byte store or a gallery-first tab. The gate passes when one character across two branches reports reusable, missing, incompatible, stale, and orphaned coverage and freezes an exact approved package without silently changing any dependency. Serialize the shared paid-generation budget writer before Factory schedules concurrent acquisition.

Gate 2 — prepared Experience MVP

Produce one small branching visual novel from a promoted fan. Every passage pins its Script versions, seat projection, active latent-model snapshots, and exact asset revisions. Branch-specific behaviour and expression may differ where evidence or an explicit evidence-grounded interpretation differs, while the reader remains a projection and writes nothing to canon.

Promote the proven reader controls and VN grammar through the permanent Stageplay and export seams rather than copying the lab renderer. Start catch-up only; the composed decision remains inert until a governed live Scenario hand-off exists. The gate passes when a prepared route can be rebuilt from its package, read outside the authoring surface, and audited back to source, consequence, character interpretation, and asset receipts.

Gate 3 — CG lane

Treat Episode 006's three CGs as candidate sequence evidence, not an approved family. Give CGs a moment-scoped lineage, reference roles, approval, cost, and orphan report; spend them at irreversible deltas or Director-approved bottlenecks. Prove contextual identity continuity, two motivated transitions, sound on/off comprehension, and gallery unlocking before widening the provider or image count. A beautiful isolated frame does not pass this gate.

Gate 4 — Fate Exploration to Factory hand-off

Run the scout structurally and cheaply over a fixed budget. Promote only delta-gated, sufficiently orthogonal futures; then emit entities, places, moments, Behaviour Reading needs, reusable coverage, gaps, and estimated production cost to Factory. The gate passes when one promoted fan reaches the prepared Experience without the scout generating or approving protected production assets.

Gate 5 — latent character interpretation

Begin offline and in parallel with Gates 1–4: build evidence profiles at an as-of coordinate and generate Entity Interpretation Graph candidates. Prepared Experience and World work pin the selected graph and binding per branch and moment directly; Behaviour Reading activation and held-out comparison are an unscheduled extension, not a prerequisite. If activation is ever built, it may request semantic expression coverage from Factory but never choose an action or rewrite evidence. The extension earns runtime authority only when one entity expresses coherently across two divergent branches and a later, independent evidence cluster earns an explicit new snapshot rather than mutating history.

Gate 6 — static World tour

Open one preserved branch coordinate through the existing Board and topology: move the cursor, descend into locations, inspect the cast and artifacts present at the selected moment, and reuse the same Factory assets. No live character generation is required to prove the spatial memory palace.

The gate passes when the tour reconstructs presence from canonical scenes, preserves the exact moment, latent-model, and asset bindings, and introduces no stored position register or second world authority.

Gate 7 — situated interaction

Add bounded conversation and observation at the selected location and moment. Context is seat-, place-, time-, and latent-model-shaped; generation is metered; the session neither advances the moment nor writes canon. A worthwhile outcome can be proposed back through Scenario or a Stream on the governed path.

Gate 8 — held-out production and learning

After accepted consequences create sufficiently independent evidence, refresh rather than mutate the entity's latent model. Compare the old and new Behaviour Readings, preserve contradictions, select the new snapshot from an explicit effective coordinate, and let Factory report any newly required expression, appearance, voice, or motion coverage. This is the first honest proof of an emergent character: continuity is preserved while the proxy used to simulate expression becomes more adequate.

In parallel, freeze unseen Experience briefs before asset resolution and measure plan, technical, semantic, human, audience, repair, time, and cost gates. Iteratively repaired Episodes remain valuable hill climbs but do not count as on-demand proof. Expand from a small calibration set toward the Stage Kit's ten held-out-trial hypothesis only after the end-to-end seam is stable.

Fate Exploration is the scout across this sequence, not its producer. It maps causal terrain, identifies which entities, places, moments, and behavioural states a promoted route would require, and sends that demand to Factory. Factory makes coverage; Experience and World consume it.

Deliberately open

• whether touring, inhabitation, social activity, or economy is the first lead use;
• whether World activity is ephemeral, persistent, forkable, resettable, replayable, or continuous;
• what “mature enough” means for a branch and who authorizes deployment;
• how one official canon branch is designated among alternate timelines;
• asset inheritance, divergence, and alignment across branches;
• the exact Factory collection schema and whether its first implementation is desktop-only;
• the boundary between inherited world material and generated gap completion;
• cadence, action resolution, delegation, lifecycle, and persistence;
• how World history relates to its source branch and whether it may propose canon;
• scoring, discovery, migration, upgrades, hosting, sharding, and MMO scale;
• how a repeatable training loop joins Program orientation, Episode immersion, Scenario commitment, consequence, debrief, and player progression without reducing ability to generic XP;
• real-value economies, licensing, moderation, and integrity design.

The first World proof should not assume replay or character autonomy is the point. It should take one story-developed branch coordinate, inherit a small location and cast with exact model and asset lineage, fill one clearly labelled gap, and prove a static tour before adding bounded interaction without changing the source branch.