Choose between a full starter world or a blank world when creating a project.

Starting Content

Every new project asks what your world should start with. You can begin from a playable example world to learn from and build on, or a blank world where you author everything yourself — and independently choose whether the demo tiles & objects art packs are installed.

Where to Choose It#

Desktop Studio — the New Project dialog (launcher → New Project) shows a Starting Content picker and an Include demo tiles & objects checkbox.
Browser editor (hosted projects) — the New Project modal on your account dashboard shows the same options above the Database Mode picker.

The choice applies when the project's database is first created. It cannot be changed retroactively from the UI — see the gotchas below.

Setup#

Click New Project (desktop launcher or your account dashboard).
Name your project.
Under Starting Content, pick Starter World or Blank World.
Tick or untick Include demo tiles & objects.
Create the project. The world is seeded with your choice on first open.

Options#

Option	What you get
Starter World (default)	The full playable example world: the Meadowlands starter zone with items, skills, abilities, mobs, NPCs, quests, recipes, resource nodes, pets, mounts, achievements and market groups — plus a worked example of every other system (see below). Everything is wired together, so you can playtest immediately and study how content is authored.
Blank World	One empty 25×25 starter zone with a spawn point, plus the engine defaults every project needs: weapon & armor types, skill categories, biomes, vocabulary, balance and server settings. No gameplay content — you author it all.
Include demo tiles & objects (default on)	Paints the starter map's ground with Grassland and installs the engine's built-in art: 600 object sprites across six packs, the painted autotile library (118 blocks), the 20 ground terrains across five biomes, and the shader demo library. Turn it off for a clean project with none of it in your database.

The two choices are independent — a Blank World with the art packs gives you an empty map plus the full built-in art library to build with.

In the editor the art arrives under its own palette names: objects split into Painted Props and Pixel Props, and the built-in tilesets sit in the Starter Terrain section. This is shipped product art, not placeholder scaffolding you are expected to replace before launch.

What a Starter World Fills In#

Every system below arrives with a small, working example rather than an empty editor page. All of it is ordinary seeded data — rename it, retune it, or delete it.

System	Where to find it	What's there
Elements	Database → Elements	Eight elements (Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Ice, Lightning, Light, Shadow), a counter-wheel on the effectiveness matrix, and the status procs that make an element mean something — Fire burns, Ice chills and sometimes freezes, Lightning stuns, Shadow poisons. Fireball is Fire; the Stone Golem is Earth and takes extra damage from Water and Ice.
Rarity & Quality	Database → Items → Rarity	The Common → Mythic rarity ladder and the Normal → Masterpiece craft-quality buckets.
Affixes	Database → Items → Affixes	Six prefix/suffix modifiers. Having any affix rows switches the system on, so gear starts dropping as "Sturdy Iron Sword of Health" without configuring a single item.
Classes & Templates	Database → Classes	Warrior, Mage, Ranger and Cleric, each with a character template — different stat lines, starting gear, spells, element affinities and equip restrictions.
Weapons	Database → Items	A tier‑1 weapon for every starter weapon type — sword, dagger, mace, axe, spear, bow, staff and wand — each craftable and stocked at the forge, so every weapon type and its combat skill is reachable.
Shops & Kits	Database → NPCs → Shops	Hilda's Forge and Mira's Remedies as real shops with stock sets, restock timers, buy‑back and opening hours, plus a Recruit's Kit and Gatherer's Kit sold as bundles.
Crafting stations	Maps → Meadowlands	One station of every type the seeded recipes need, placed around the spawn point.
Locations	Database → Locations	Three discoverable landmarks that fire when a player walks onto the biome they name.
Events	Database → Events	A welcome message and a Rest common event, plus a signpost on the starter map.
World & calendar events	Database → World Events / Calendar	Harvest Bounty, The Wolf Hunt and The Golem Wakes, with a Harvest Festival and The Long Night scheduled on a live calendar.
Treasure	Database → Items → Chest Spawns	A wooden chest, a buried cache, and a rule that scatters caches across the plains — the only place pet eggs are found.
Pets	Database → Pets & Mounts	An egg for every starter pet, and pasture yields so pets left in a pasture actually produce.
Generated NPCs	Database → NPCs → Templates	Villager and Militia templates with name and persona pools and a spawn rule, so the starter map has a population that comes and goes.
Audio	Database → Audio	The mixer skeleton: Master → Music / SFX / Ambience / UI / Voice buses, three parameters, and Combat and Dialogue snapshots.

The starter world also ships twelve biomes (Plains, Forest, Jungle, Savanna, Desert, Swamp, Tundra, Mountain, Volcanic, Beach, Lake and Ocean) so generated maps have a landscape to draw from. The Swamp carries a PvP override as a worked example of biome-level rules.

What a Blank World Still Includes#

A blank world is never broken-empty. You still get a working spawn, the default player controls, the twelve biomes, and the engine's built-in unarmed attack (restored automatically by the game server). Characters spawn with no starting items — set your own loadout under Characters → Starting Inventory once you've authored some items.

Gotchas#

The choice is per-project and applies once — at first seed. Re-opening, re-publishing, or re-provisioning a project keeps whatever you picked.
Desktop projects record the choice in the project's .env as SEED_CONTENT (starter / blank) and SEED_DEMO_CONTENT (1 / 0). To add the starter content to a blank project later, edit those values and run Seed Database from the Studio maintenance scripts — seeding never overwrites content you've already authored.
Turning it off doesn't remove the built-in palette from the editor — the Starter Terrain tilesets stay available to paint with, served from the engine's own content-addressed art store rather than from your project's database. What you don't get is the tile artwork files copied into your project folder, the object and media rows written into your database, or the starter map painted for you.
Starter content is editable, not locked — it's normal seeded data. Many creators start from the Starter World and reshape or delete pieces as they go.

Where to Choose It#

Desktop Studio — the New Project dialog (launcher → New Project) shows a Starting Content picker and an Include demo tiles & objects checkbox.

Browser editor (hosted projects) — the New Project modal on your account dashboard shows the same options above the Database Mode picker.

The choice applies when the project's database is first created. It cannot be changed retroactively from the UI — see the gotchas below.

Options#

Option	What you get
Starter World (default)	The full playable example world: the Meadowlands starter zone with items, skills, abilities, mobs, NPCs, quests, recipes, resource nodes, pets, mounts, achievements and market groups — plus a worked example of every other system (see below). Everything is wired together, so you can playtest immediately and study how content is authored.
Blank World	One empty 25×25 starter zone with a spawn point, plus the engine defaults every project needs: weapon & armor types, skill categories, biomes, vocabulary, balance and server settings. No gameplay content — you author it all.
Include demo tiles & objects (default on)	Paints the starter map's ground with Grassland and installs the engine's built-in art: 600 object sprites across six packs, the painted autotile library (118 blocks), the 20 ground terrains across five biomes, and the shader demo library. Turn it off for a clean project with none of it in your database.

The two choices are independent — a Blank World with the art packs gives you an empty map plus the full built-in art library to build with.

What a Starter World Fills In#

Every system below arrives with a small, working example rather than an empty editor page. All of it is ordinary seeded data — rename it, retune it, or delete it.

System	Where to find it	What's there
Elements	Database → Elements	Eight elements (Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Ice, Lightning, Light, Shadow), a counter-wheel on the effectiveness matrix, and the status procs that make an element mean something — Fire burns, Ice chills and sometimes freezes, Lightning stuns, Shadow poisons. Fireball is Fire; the Stone Golem is Earth and takes extra damage from Water and Ice.
Rarity & Quality	Database → Items → Rarity	The Common → Mythic rarity ladder and the Normal → Masterpiece craft-quality buckets.
Affixes	Database → Items → Affixes	Six prefix/suffix modifiers. Having any affix rows switches the system on, so gear starts dropping as "Sturdy Iron Sword of Health" without configuring a single item.
Classes & Templates	Database → Classes	Warrior, Mage, Ranger and Cleric, each with a character template — different stat lines, starting gear, spells, element affinities and equip restrictions.
Weapons	Database → Items	A tier‑1 weapon for every starter weapon type — sword, dagger, mace, axe, spear, bow, staff and wand — each craftable and stocked at the forge, so every weapon type and its combat skill is reachable.
Shops & Kits	Database → NPCs → Shops	Hilda's Forge and Mira's Remedies as real shops with stock sets, restock timers, buy‑back and opening hours, plus a Recruit's Kit and Gatherer's Kit sold as bundles.
Crafting stations	Maps → Meadowlands	One station of every type the seeded recipes need, placed around the spawn point.
Locations	Database → Locations	Three discoverable landmarks that fire when a player walks onto the biome they name.
Events	Database → Events	A welcome message and a Rest common event, plus a signpost on the starter map.
World & calendar events	Database → World Events / Calendar	Harvest Bounty, The Wolf Hunt and The Golem Wakes, with a Harvest Festival and The Long Night scheduled on a live calendar.
Treasure	Database → Items → Chest Spawns	A wooden chest, a buried cache, and a rule that scatters caches across the plains — the only place pet eggs are found.
Pets	Database → Pets & Mounts	An egg for every starter pet, and pasture yields so pets left in a pasture actually produce.
Generated NPCs	Database → NPCs → Templates	Villager and Militia templates with name and persona pools and a spawn rule, so the starter map has a population that comes and goes.
Audio	Database → Audio	The mixer skeleton: Master → Music / SFX / Ambience / UI / Voice buses, three parameters, and Combat and Dialogue snapshots.

What a Blank World Still Includes#

Gotchas#

The choice is per-project and applies once — at first seed. Re-opening, re-publishing, or re-provisioning a project keeps whatever you picked.

Desktop projects record the choice in the project's .env as SEED_CONTENT (starter / blank) and SEED_DEMO_CONTENT (1 / 0). To add the starter content to a blank project later, edit those values and run Seed Database from the Studio maintenance scripts — seeding never overwrites content you've already authored.

Turning it off doesn't remove the built-in palette from the editor — the Starter Terrain tilesets stay available to paint with, served from the engine's own content-addressed art store rather than from your project's database. What you don't get is the tile artwork files copied into your project folder, the object and media rows written into your database, or the starter map painted for you.

Starter content is editable, not locked — it's normal seeded data. Many creators start from the Starter World and reshape or delete pieces as they go.