WorldLines

Language: English · 简体中文 · 日本語 · 한국어

YouTube trailer — coming soon.

Status: v0.1.8 stable (2026-04-27) · next: v0.2.0 (planned)

Agents for Role Play. Agents for Game. Agents as a Game. A file-backed, event-sourced engine for living worlds.

Still early — we're building in the open. WorldLines is in active development. Expect a steady drumbeat of new gameplay, new orchestration modes, and new modules. We'd rather ship early and iterate with you than polish in silence.

WorldLines is an Agentic AIRP engine (AI RolePlay engine) co-developed by nikoloside and redoctober, continuously advanced together with Ludic Dynamics. The engine binary is codenamed neonrp; the release brand is WorldLines.

It treats the game world as a versioned, file-backed state machine, so your playthroughs, your edits, and your Agents become reproducible artifacts — not ephemeral chat logs.

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Why WorldLines

Traditional "chat with an AI" interfaces lose everything the moment the context window fills. WorldLines gives you the guarantees of a real engine:

• ⭐ File-persisted memory & world state. Everything — memory, saves, NPCs, Agents — lives on disk as plain JSON and Markdown. No cloud, no database, no hidden state. If you can open the folder, you own the world.
• Auto-indexed context, auto-injected. WorldLines builds a file index and a local vector database automatically, and injects only the relevant game data into each Agent's context per turn. No manual lorebook juggling.
• Event-sourced state. Every turn is an append-only Event; Snapshots make rewind fast.
• Branch / Undo / Redo. Explore narrative forks like git branches.
• Sandbox & Replay. Run experiments in isolation; verify determinism.
• Orchestrator-driven multi-agent. An Orchestrator routes to domain Agents (town / dungeon / combat-referee / world-builder / rules-referee) over one shared state.
• Plan → Diff → Apply. LLMs emit structured file operations you can review before they land.
• Rich TUI. A Claude-Code-style conversational terminal for both play and build.
• Local-first models. GLM, OpenAI, LM Studio, or Ollama.

How WorldLines compares

	Character.AI	SillyTavern	Claude Code	WorldLines
Primary domain	Character chat	Prompt frontend	Code editing	Living game worlds
Your world lives in	Their service	Prompt config + chat logs	Codebase on disk	Plain files + git
Memory & retrieval	Cloud / opaque	Manual lorebook	Codebase retrieval	Auto file index + vector DB
Multi-agent	—	—	Subagents per task	Orchestrator + domain agents
Local-first LLM	No	Bring your own	API-only	GLM / LM Studio / Ollama
Determinism / replay	—	—	—	Sandbox + Replay

If Claude Code is your IDE for code, WorldLines is your IDE for living worlds — with the memory, retrieval, and orchestration baked in.

Full per-tool write-ups live at docs.worldlines.gg/docs/qa (vs Character.AI · vs SillyTavern · vs Claude Code · vs LangGraph · vs OpenClaw).

Note: WorldLines's harness is currently stricter than Claude Code's — it depends on complete context to orchestrate reliably. This is a deliberate tradeoff for higher determinism and easier debugging, not a deficiency.

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Install

One-liner

# macOS / Linux
curl -LsSf https://worldlines.gg/install.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://worldlines.gg/install.ps1 | iex

Installs uv (if missing) then uv tool install worldlines. Verify with neonrp --help or just worldlines.

Double-click launcher

Prefer not to touch a terminal? Download a platform launcher and double-click it. Each opens a terminal window, runs the first-time install (or self-updates on subsequent launches), then hands off to the TUI:

Platform	File	Download
macOS	WorldLines.command	latest
Windows	WorldLines.bat	latest
Linux	WorldLines.sh	latest

After download (macOS / Linux), chmod +x once:

chmod +x ~/Downloads/WorldLines.command   # or WorldLines.sh

Then drag to Desktop / Dock and treat it like any other shortcut.

Users in China

Some mainland networks throttle GitHub Releases and Cloudflare-fronted domains. If curl https://worldlines.gg/install.sh times out:

# Direct GitHub fetch (sometimes faster than the Cloudflare redirect):
curl -LsSf \
  https://github.com/LudicDynamics/WorldLines/releases/latest/download/install.sh \
  | sh

# Or force uv to use a Tsinghua PyPI mirror:
export UV_DEFAULT_INDEX=https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple
uv tool install worldlines

# Or both at once:
CHINA_MIRROR=1 curl -LsSf https://worldlines.gg/install.sh | sh

Auto-update (neonrp self-update) honors UV_DEFAULT_INDEX, so exporting it in your shell profile keeps future upgrades on the mirror.

Developers — editable install

uv tool install -e /path/to/worldlines
neonrp --help

Full install options (wheel, source, alternate mirrors) live at docs.worldlines.gg/docs/guides/launcher.

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Quickstart

# Fresh directory — /init is enough to start in build mode
mkdir my-world && cd my-world
neonrp init

# Or scaffold the stoneford starter for a headline sample
neonrp game new --template stoneford

# Launch the TUI
neonrp tui

Fresh projects expose packaged builtin skills automatically; /game new is optional unless you want the starter world + play-agent scaffold immediately.

First run walks you through API setup. Pick Claude Code (MCP) if you already have it, paste a key for Anthropic / OpenAI / DeepSeek / OpenRouter / GLM free tier, or point to a local server via Ollama / LM Studio. Keys save to ~/.neonrp/config.json; change later via [3] settings / api. Full provider guide →

Type look around and press Enter. That is your first agentic turn.

A 10-minute walkthrough lives at docs.worldlines.gg/docs/getting-started/quickstart.

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Documentation

Full docs are on the website — this repo keeps only the entry points.

Topic	URL
Getting started	docs.worldlines.gg/docs/getting-started
Core concepts	docs.worldlines.gg/docs/core-concepts (worlds · characters & multi-agent · agents & orchestration · engine modes · sessions · memory)
Guides	docs.worldlines.gg/docs/guides (launcher · world lifecycle · SillyTavern import · Discord tutorial)
Q&A / comparisons	docs.worldlines.gg/docs/qa (vs Character.AI · vs SillyTavern · vs Claude Code · vs LangGraph · vs OpenClaw)
Changelog & roadmap	docs.worldlines.gg/docs/changelog

In this repo:

• templates/stoneford-worldlines/ — Sample world & Agents (submodule)
• CONTRIBUTING.md — How to contribute
• SECURITY.md — How to report vulnerabilities
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md — Community expectations
• LICENSE — Proprietary preview terms

Why AGPL · Contributor policy

Our OSS surface (templates/stoneford-worldlines/ etc.) is AGPL-3.0. Anything you create on top of stoneford — new worlds, templates, modules — enters the same open commons, and no one can quietly fork it into a closed-source product. For contributors:

• 🪪 You keep your copyright — no copyright assignment required.
• 🟢 Default in-bound license = AGPL-3.0 — same as the rest of the OSS surface.
• 🛡 No silent re-licensing — maintainers won't merge your code into a closed-source build without asking.

Engine core (neonrp) is a proprietary preview — see CONTRIBUTING.md → License Asymmetry.

Community & Contact

• Web: worldlines.gg · Docs: docs.worldlines.gg
• Discord: discord.gg/HJYWbdqWrE · Patreon: patreon.com/cw/WorldLines
• GitHub: LudicDynamics/WorldLines
• Contact: info@worldlines.gg

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Copyright & Acknowledgements

Copyright © 2026 nikoloside, redoctober. All rights reserved.

WorldLines is a proprietary engine released as preview for evaluation only. No license is granted for reuse, redistribution, or derivative works. See LICENSE for the full terms.

Developed and maintained by nikoloside and redoctober, continuously operated, experimented with, and advanced by the Ludic Dynamics community. Special thanks to the early participants of the llm-rpg-starter predecessor (the Ludic Dynamics community) for their generous, heated discussions, exchanges, collaboration, and support: Amber, 琛琛, Claire.

WorldLines and Ludic Dynamics are trademarks of Ludic Dynamics.