Forks
Understand how world forking enables safe experimentation, modular testing, and collaborative world building.
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.
Forking preserves ownership
Forking does not transfer ownership or dilute the original creator's work. Forks preserve full attribution to the source world. Every fork clearly displays where it originated, ensuring the original creator always receives credit.
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
Only public and unlisted worlds can be forked.
What happens to forks when a world is deleted or changes visibility
When a source world is deleted or becomes private, its forks will become detached and source attribution will be lost.
Warning
This is an irreversable action. Deleted worlds cannot be restored and changing the world visibility back to public will not restore source attribution.