Projects and Worlds

A Project in Trove is one container of writing — one novel, novella, or short story collection. A World is a separate library of Entities (characters, locations, factions, items, lore) that one or more Projects can link to.

The split exists because most writers reuse a setting. The same characters, the same map, the same gods. You don’t want to maintain five copies of the cast across five Projects.

Project

A Project holds:

• One Manuscript (the writable Document tree).
• Zero or more Entities that are local to this book (a one-off cameo, a single-Project location).
• A manifest (manifest.toml) with status, word target, and the link to its World.
• Drafts (snapshots of Documents) under .snapshots/.
• Trash under .trash/.

On disk:

projects/{slug}/
  manifest.toml
  manuscript/
  entities/{type}/        # Project-local entities
  .snapshots/
  .trash/

The manifest.toml is plain TOML:

name = "Bridgepoint"
slug = "bridgepoint"
status = "drafting"        # drafting | outlining | complete | on-hold
wordTarget = 95000
worldPath = "../../worlds/the-riverlands"

World

A World holds Entities and only Entities. No manuscripts, no documents. Just a structured library of the people, places, factions, items, and lore your stories share.

On disk:

worlds/{slug}/
  manifest.toml
  entities/
    character/
      tomas.md
      ariane.md
    location/
      bridgepoint.md
      the-old-mill.md
    faction/
      ...

Worlds are pointed at by Projects via the worldPath field. A Project can link to zero or one World. Two Projects can link to the same World — that’s the whole reason Worlds exist.

Atlas: the entity browser

The Atlas is the in-app view onto your Entities. Open it from the sidebar; you’ll see two sources stacked: Project Entities at the top, World Entities below. Filter by Type, search by name, click in to edit.

trove · Atlas

When to start a World

You don’t need one on day one. A first novel almost always starts as a single Project with its own Entities. Promote to a World when:

• You start a second Project set in the same place.
• The Entity list is large enough that you want to organise it by Type and search across it.
• Multiple of your books reference the same character, location, or piece of history.

Promoting is a copy — move the entities/ folder from the Project into a new World, set worldPath on the Project. There’s no irreversible step.

A note on terminology

This is a frequent source of confusion in writing apps:

• World ≠ setting per se. The setting is what your World models. A World is the structured library of Entities; setting is the broader fiction.
• Project ≠ novel per se. A Project is the container of one continuous Manuscript. A trilogy is usually three Projects, all linked to the same World.
• Manuscript is a structural noun — never the name of a single piece of writing. The single thing is a Document.