Forks

In software and game modding communities, innovation thrives when creators can build upon existing foundations rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Building a rich, immersive world takes dozens of hours. Forks enable the community to collaborate and build worlds together.

What is a fork?

A fork is a world that starts out as an exact copy of another world, called the source world. You can then make changes to this copy without affecting the original. When you are happy with the result, you can open a request to merge these changes back into the original world.

Difference between forks and collaborators

Both collaborators role and world forks allow contributing to a world together, but they serve different purposes.

A collaborator has permissions to edit the original world directly, while forks allow the owner to review requests before merging them into the original world.

Unlike community wikis, a world should not be editable by everyone in a community. Forks provide a way for everyone in the community to contribute, experiment and suggest changes, without directly affecting the source world.

Why forking matters

• Avoid Reinventing the Wheel: Recreating dozens of characters, groups, and world lore just to test a single original character or alternate-universe scenario takes hours of repetitive setup.
• Safe Behavior Sandboxing: When testing complex or experimental Behaviors (e.g., dynamic inventory, mini-games, battle mechanics), you should never risk breaking your live, public world.
• Collaborative Scaling: As worlds grow larger, a single creator cannot author every scenario. Forking provides a staging environment for contributors to prototype additions.

Which worlds can be forked

All worlds can be forked, subject to the following restrictions:

• Public and Unlisted Worlds: Anyone can fork.
• Private Worlds: Only owners and collaborators with access can fork private worlds. Forking a private world requires an active Plus subscription.
• Inherited Private Visibility: Any fork of a private world must also be private.

Changing visibility of forks and source worlds

• Forks of private worlds cannot be made public: As long as the source world remains private, its forks must remain private and cannot be changed. This ensures private content is never unintentionally exposed.
• When a private world is deleted or becomes public: Existing private forks remain private; fork owners can now change their fork's visibility to public.
• When a public world is deleted or becomes private: All existing forks are permanently detached from the source world, and source attribution is removed.