GodWright v1.1.0: World Templates, Custom Builder, and More
GodWright v1.1.0 is now live!
This is one of GodWright’s largest updates yet. Version 1.1.0 introduces complete world templates, the Custom Builder, direct Steam Workshop publishing, new map shapes, expanded character appearances, authored disaster artwork, a fully interactive tutorial, private in-game bug reporting, and many rendering, compatibility, and interface improvements.
Complete World Templates
Entire simulated worlds can now be saved, shared, reopened, and edited as reusable templates.
Unlike a normal terrain preset, a world template is a complete snapshot of the world at the moment it is saved.
Complete simulation snapshots: Templates preserve terrain, elevation, moisture, buildings, roads, farms, creatures, civilizations, villages, religions, diplomacy, warfare, trade, weather, time of day, the current era, and the camera position.
Local template library: Saved templates appear in a new dedicated browser and remain separate from ordinary save files.
Live previews: Every locally created template receives a generated preview image representing the saved world.
Template metadata: Packages contain their title, description, preview, complete world snapshot, publication information, and SteamCMD metadata.
Safe package naming: Template names are sanitized before being used as folders or package identifiers.
Collision protection: Saving a new template with the same name as an existing package creates a unique package key instead of silently overwriting an unrelated world.
Continue editing: A locally saved template can be reopened in the Custom Builder and updated using the same package.
Workshop editing safety: Editing a subscribed Workshop template creates an editable local copy rather than modifying downloaded Workshop content.
Automatic directories: The local template directory is created automatically on Windows, Linux, and Steam Deck.
Template Browser
The World Generation screen now includes a Templates button that opens the complete local and Steam Workshop template catalog.
Browse locally created templates and installed Steam Workshop templates in one screen.
See whether each entry comes from your local library or Steam Workshop.
View the template title, description, source, publication information, and preview image.
Open a template immediately as a playable sandbox world.
Open a template as an editable copy in the Custom Builder.
Open the selected template’s Steam Workshop page when it has a published item.
Refresh the catalog to detect newly downloaded Workshop subscriptions.
Open the Steam Workshop’s Template category directly from the browser.
Clear empty-state guidance explains how to create local templates and where subscribed templates will appear.
Template Browser controls:
Enter: Open the selected template.
E: Open the selected template as an editable copy.
V: View the selected template’s Steam Workshop item.
R: Refresh local and Workshop templates.
B: Browse world templates in Steam Workshop.
Escape: Return to World Generation.
Custom Builder
The new Custom Builder turns the normal GodWright simulation into a complete world-authoring workspace.
You can generate a starting world, use the existing Land, Life, Build, and Powers tools to shape it, then save the complete result as a reusable package.
Start from World Generation: Choose Custom Builder to generate a new world using the selected size, seed, shape, and world laws.
Edit an existing world: Custom Builder can also be opened from the pause menu while playing.
Edit templates: Local and Workshop templates can be loaded directly into the Builder.
Simulation starts paused: Newly generated Builder worlds begin frozen so terrain, settlements, and creatures do not change before the first edit.
Normal time controls remain available: You can unpause or change simulation speed whenever the template needs a living, evolving population.
Scenario-safe authoring: Builder worlds use the normal sandbox rules rather than automatically activating a challenge scenario.
No tutorial interruption: Template authoring sessions do not launch the first-time tutorial.
No unwanted autosaves: Normal world autosaving is disabled while Builder mode is active, preventing an authoring session from overwriting an unrelated save.
Save Template: Capture the complete current state as a local world-template package.
Publish: Save the latest snapshot and publish it through Steam Workshop.
SteamCMD Export: Generate an item VDF beside the template package for external SteamCMD workflows.
Browse Workshop: Open the Steam Workshop Template category without leaving the authoring workflow.
Finish Editing: Close the Builder panel and continue playing the current world normally.
Clear status feedback: The Builder reports successful saves, failed saves, active uploads, Steam availability, exports, and publication errors directly in the panel.
Steam Workshop World Publishing
World templates can now be created and updated directly through Steam Workshop from inside GodWright.
Create new Workshop items: Publishing an unpublished template creates a new private Steam Workshop item.
Update existing items: Once Steam assigns a published file ID, later publications update the same Workshop item instead of creating duplicates.
Automatic content upload: GodWright submits the template snapshot, metadata, preview image, title, description, and change note.
Automatic tags: Published worlds are tagged as Template, World Template, and Map so they can be separated from gameplay mods.
Upload progress: The publication screen reports processed bytes, total bytes, and percentage progress when Steam provides that information.
Persistent publication identity: A newly assigned Workshop item ID is written into the local template package as soon as it becomes available.
Safer retries: If content upload fails after Steam creates the item, retrying uses the same item instead of generating abandoned duplicates.
Legal-agreement guidance: GodWright reports when Steam requires the Workshop legal agreement to be accepted.
Detailed error states: Separate messages are shown for unavailable Steam services, invalid package data, item-creation failures, upload failures, and offline operation.
Upload locking: Save, export, and publication operations cannot conflict with an upload already in progress.
SteamCMD fallback: Creators can still export a ready-to-use item VDF when Steam is offline or the in-game API is unavailable.
New Workshop items are created privately. You can review their page, accept any required Steam Workshop agreement, and change visibility through Steam before releasing them publicly.
Workshop Templates and Mods Are Now Separate
GodWright now understands the difference between a gameplay mod and a complete world template.
Workshop installations containing a template manifest and world snapshot are classified as world templates.
Workshop installations containing a mod manifest continue to be classified as gameplay mods.
World templates appear in the Template Browser instead of the Mods screen.
Template subscriptions are no longer loaded as ordinary gameplay mods.
Template packages no longer appear as enable or disable entries in the mod list.
The Mods screen now counts and indexes only actual mods when displaying Workshop content.
Local and Workshop mod controls continue to work normally without template items interfering with selection or row navigation.
Four New World Shapes
World Generation now includes four recognizable silhouette-based map presets.
Cat Face: A pointy-eared cat-shaped island with eye and nose lakes carved into the landmass.
Dog Face: A floppy-eared dog-shaped island with facial lakes and a muzzle-shaped coastline.
USA: A stylized continental United States map including Alaska, Hawaii, and inland lake details.
Europe: A stylized European landmass including Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, Mediterranean coastlines, and surrounding islands.
These are not static imported images. Each shape is generated procedurally:
The recognizable outline establishes the main coastline.
Seeded elevation noise changes the coast and interior on every generation.
Biomes, forests, mountains, rivers, lakes, climate, and resources continue to use the normal world-generation systems.
The same preset can therefore create many different playable worlds while retaining its recognizable silhouette.
All four presets are available to normal World Generation, Custom Builder, previews, saves, and automated capture modes.
Expanded Civilized-Race Appearances
Humans, elves, orcs, and dwarves now have significantly more visual variety.
Each civilized race now supports four complete appearances: the original appearance plus three new variants.
There are now 16 civilized-race appearances across humans, elves, orcs, and dwarves.
The update adds 720 new race animation frames.
Every new appearance includes complete directional idle, walking, attacking, and death artwork.
New entities receive an appearance deterministically when they are created.
Player-spawned people, naturally born children, settlers, and other civilized-race creation paths all use the same appearance system.
Appearance selection is stable and does not depend on the current rendering frame.
An entity keeps the same appearance after saving and loading.
Appearance is now part of the persistent entity save record.
Older saves remain supported and load civilized entities using the original appearance.
Save compatibility remains available for previous save versions while new saves use the updated format.
Authored Disaster Artwork
Several of GodWright’s most important powers now use new hand-authored pixel-art animation sequences layered with the existing procedural effects engine. The update adds 43 dedicated effect images, including a new bomb projectile and six seven-frame animated effect families.
Bomb: Standard bombs now fall using a dedicated projectile sprite and detonate into an authored fireball that expands, rises, and fades into smoke.
Meteor: Meteor impacts now use a molten authored explosion aligned to the actual impact point, while debris, shockwaves, and trailing particles continue to render above and around it.
Nuke: Nuclear detonations now form a radioactive green mushroom cloud with a matching pressure wave, central glow, and long-lived authored body.
Tsar Bomba: The largest explosion now receives its own enormous multi-frame mushroom cloud, additive core glow, pressure waves, procedural plume support, and extended lifetime.
Carpet Bomb: Carpet bombing now triggers a staggered chain of seven authored explosions across the target area rather than presenting as one generic particle burst.
Black Hole: Black holes now use animated accretion-disc artwork while preserving the dark central void, suction particles, gravitational behavior, and final collapse.
The procedural effects have not simply been removed:
Authored animation frames are combined with flashes, debris, impact particles, shockwaves, glow, smoke, and camera trauma.
If authored effect artwork cannot be loaded, the existing procedural presentation remains available as a fallback.
Effect textures are loaded safely and released during shutdown.
Off-screen effect bodies are culled before expensive rendering work.
Large sprites use carefully selected ground-contact points so their visible blast remains aligned with the affected world tile.
Transparency and fading preserve the darker smoke and edge detail instead of washing every frame into a white additive flash.
Effect Reliability and Gameplay Safeguards
Gameplay effects are protected from cosmetic saturation: The sustained-effect pool now reserves capacity for tornadoes because their moving effect instance also performs terrain and entity damage.
Important effects can replace older cosmetic instances: Tsar Bomba and Black Hole presentations are prioritized when the visual pool is full.
Old cosmetic effects are evicted before gameplay effects: A screen full of explosions can no longer silently prevent a tornado’s active simulation from running.
Carpet Bomb has dedicated visual metadata: The power-definition system can now request a specific authored presentation independently from its generic particle preset.
Mod overrides are safer: A mod replacing a base power does not accidentally inherit the base power’s special authored visual unless the mod explicitly requests one.
Power definitions remain data driven: Custom and modded powers can continue using generic particles without depending on the renderer.
Shader-Only Roads
All road tiers now render consistently as part of the terrain instead of behaving like ordinary sprite-based buildings.
Dirt roads, paved roads, and highways are colored through the terrain shader.
Every road tier receives the same terrain-aware rendering treatment.
Roads blend with the underlying biome, terrain grain, lighting, and camera filtering.
The building renderer skips all road types so roads are not accidentally drawn as upright structures.
The asset loader refuses to load road PNGs, preventing an old or modded sprite from overriding the shader-only road design.
This removes double-rendering and inconsistent behavior between the original road and later road tiers.
Interactive First-Time Tutorial
The old click-through introduction has been replaced with a playable, action-driven onboarding sequence. The tutorial now follows the complete early-game loop:
Open the Life tab.
Place six humans successfully on the map.
Set simulation speed to 8x.
Watch the settlers organize and found a village.
Open the Powers tab.
Select Meteor.
Cast Meteor into the world.
Continue into normal sandbox play. The tutorial reacts to what the player actually does:
Steps advance only after the requested tab, speed, tool, placement, village, or power action occurs.
Placing an invalid human does not count toward the six-human goal.
The village step watches the real village count rather than using a timer.
The Meteor step confirms both selection and casting.
Contextual coach marks highlight the exact tab, button, speed control, or power icon required by the current step.
World-placement steps show a cursor-adjacent prompt indicating where to click.
Live counters display placement progress and the current tutorial objective.
If village formation takes too long, the tutorial suggests placing additional people close together.
The tutorial card can be dragged out of the way using its title bar.
The card remains clamped inside the game window after resizing.
Gameplay outside the card remains active instead of every key and click being swallowed by a modal overlay.
The tutorial can still be skipped, replayed, or closed.
Completion remains persistent in the existing tutorial configuration.
The full controls reference remains available through H after onboarding ends.
Private In-Game Bug Reporting
Players can now send a private bug report directly from GodWright without opening a browser or joining an external service. The reporter is available from both the main menu and the in-game pause menu.
Choose from Gameplay, Crash, Performance, Interface, Mods, Localization, and Other categories.
Describe what happened in a multiline text field.
Optionally include detailed reproduction steps.
Use mouse or keyboard controls throughout the complete form.
Tab and Shift+Tab move between form controls.
Left and Right change the selected category.
Ctrl+V pastes text while preserving UTF-8 characters.
Backspace removes complete UTF-8 codepoints instead of corrupting multibyte text.
Description and reproduction fields wrap and scroll within the modal.
Reports require a meaningful description of at least ten non-whitespace characters.
Submission status is shown directly in the game.
Successful reports return a unique reference such as GW-YYYYMMDD-XXXXXX.
Network, Steam, rate-limit, size, and server errors receive distinct messages.
Privacy and Security
Reports are sent through Steam’s verified HTTP client.
The private Discord webhook is never distributed inside the game.
Only the report text and the technical details shown in the reporter are submitted.
No save files, screenshots, or personal documents are attached automatically.
The reporter includes the GodWright version and current platform.
A random local installation ID is generated to associate repeated reports and limit spam.
The raw installation ID is not forwarded to the development channel; the service converts it into a short one-way reference.
Report sizes and field values are validated both in the game and on the server.
Reports are rate limited by both network identity and installation reference.
Rate-limit identities are protected using keyed hashes.
Discord mentions and formatting characters are neutralized to prevent abuse.
Webhook URLs are restricted to valid HTTPS Discord webhook hosts.
The report service uses restrictive content-security, referrer, permissions, and no-cache headers.
Delivery failures are reported as failures instead of falsely telling the player the report was received.
Community and Menu Improvements
Added a dedicated Discord community action to the main menu.
Improved the placement and presentation of community links.
Added localized Discord and community text across all supported languages.
The native bug reporter is now available directly from the menu and pause screen.
Template and Custom Builder entry points are integrated into World Generation instead of being hidden behind developer commands.
Windows Presentation
The Windows executable now includes the official GodWright application icon.
The icon is embedded into Windows release builds through the CMake resource pipeline.
Windows builds now use the game icon in Explorer, shortcuts, task switching, and other shell surfaces that read executable resources.
Runtime window-icon handling was improved alongside the embedded executable resource.
Save and Compatibility Improvements
The save system now supports writing and loading complete snapshots at explicit file paths.
Template packages reuse the normal save serializer instead of maintaining a reduced or incompatible world format.
Template snapshots therefore preserve the same simulation systems as normal saves.
New saves persist civilized-race appearance variants.
The save format has advanced to version 13.
Save versions 2 through 12 remain supported.
Older saves load humans, elves, orcs, and dwarves with their original appearance so existing worlds remain visually stable.
Capture and Builder workflows are protected from unintended autosave writes.
Localization
The interactive tutorial has been localized.
All tutorial objectives, coach marks, completion text, counters, and recovery hints are included in the localization catalog.
The complete in-game bug-report interface has been localized.
Bug-report categories, placeholders, validation errors, privacy explanations, sending states, and network errors are included.
Discord community text has been added to supported translations.
Custom Builder buttons, statuses, errors, and completion messages are included in the master localization template.
Template Browser labels, empty states, controls, source labels, publishing progress, and Workshop errors are included.
Cat Face, Dog Face, USA, Europe, and their world-generation descriptions are included.
Localization updates cover German, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Simplified Chinese.
The localization extractor now understands additional data-driven strings that are translated at render time rather than appearing directly inside localization calls.
The master localization catalog now contains 1,120 unique keys.
Additional Technical Improvements
Added cross-platform directory removal support needed by template-package cleanup.
Added deterministic catalog ordering for local and Workshop world templates.
Added a reusable world-preview generation path for template packages.
Added publication status tracking for item creation, upload progress, completion, legal-agreement requirements, and failures.
Added non-Steam fallbacks so normal builds continue to compile and the SteamCMD workflow remains available.
Added a secure report-service health endpoint and automated validation, rate-limit, delivery-failure, and mention-safety tests.
Local generated asset archives and temporary bundles are now ignored by version control.
Rendering and save-system changes were verified against existing deterministic simulation behavior.
Bug Fixes
Fixed later road tiers attempting to render as normal building sprites.
Fixed road visuals being applied only to the original dirt-road ID.
Fixed cosmetic effects being able to consume every sustained-effect slot and prevent gameplay-carrying tornado instances from spawning.
Fixed high-priority disaster presentations disappearing when the effect pool was already occupied.
Fixed modded power overrides accidentally retaining a base power’s special visual presentation.
Fixed race appearances being lost or rerolled after saving and loading.
Fixed older saves requiring knowledge of the new appearance field.
Fixed new Builder sessions potentially colliding with an existing template that shared the same display name.
Fixed Workshop templates being presented and loaded as normal gameplay mods.
Fixed editing subscribed Workshop content as though it were a writable local package.
Fixed Builder sessions participating in normal autosave behavior.
Fixed normal scenarios and first-time onboarding activating inside world-authoring sessions.
Fixed failed Workshop updates encouraging duplicate item creation on retry.
Fixed report submissions being able to claim success after downstream delivery failed.
Fixed bug-report text editing potentially splitting UTF-8 characters.
Fixed tutorial steps advancing from button presses rather than confirmed gameplay actions.
Fixed tutorial input blocking unrelated gameplay controls outside the card.
Fixed tutorial cards becoming obstructive by making the panel movable and window-clamped.
Thank you for playing GodWright, sharing your worlds, reporting problems, and helping shape the simulation’s future. Version 1.1.0 lays the foundation for a growing library of player-made worlds. We cannot wait to see what you create with the Custom Builder and Steam Workshop templates.