wobu

Runs on your computer · Uses your own AI account · Free and open source

Write your world down once.
Every picture remembers it.

Wobu is a desktop app for people building worlds — a campaign setting, a game, a story. Describe your art style, your peoples, their cultures, their places and your characters once. From then on, every picture you make already knows all of it.

Download the beta Read the guide

Still in beta, and the downloads are not signed yet — so your computer will warn you about them. Only ever get Wobu from GitHub Releases.

A world is a family tree, not a pile of prompts

A character comes from a people. That people lives in a world. The whole thing is drawn in one look. Right now all of that sits in your head, and you retype a rough version of it into every prompt — a little differently each time. That is why two people of the same species end up looking unrelated, why the light keeps drifting, and why by the fortieth picture your world has stopped looking like one place.

Style gritty painterly concept art, heavy rim light World ash-choked post-eruption coast, late iron age Species tall narrow-shouldered digitigrade humanoid Culture ember guild kiln-glaze plate, signet at the collarbone Place cinder bay harbour light, salt-bleached timber Subject Kael Vantris, scarred, ex-guild, full body
The prompt Wobu wrote for one character. Each part is labelled and tinted with the page it came from, and you can turn any of them down — or off — for a single picture.

How it works

  1. Write your world down once

    Make a .wobu project and fill in two pages: how your world looks, and what is true in it. Then add your peoples, their cultures, their places and your characters, a page each. They are ordinary text files you could still read if Wobu vanished tomorrow.

  2. Tidy up the messy bits

    Half-finished notes become a proper description, using your own Claude or Gemini account. You get a side-by-side look at what changed and decide what to keep — nothing is saved until you say so.

  3. Make a picture

    Press Generate on anyone in your world and Wobu writes the prompt for you, gathering every layer above them and the reference pictures that belong. Like what comes out? Pin it, and everything below that point starts to look more like it.

What Wobu does

  • Say it once, in the right place

    Your art style belongs to the whole world. Build and anatomy belong to the species. Clothing belongs to the culture. Only what makes someone them belongs on the character. Do that and your hundredth character is quicker to make than your first — and fits in better.

  • Scribbled notes in, proper description out

    Write the way you would in a notebook. Press Enhance and your notes come back as a clear description — shape, build, materials, colours, and a list of things to never draw. You read it and choose what to keep. Your own notes are never touched.

  • Nothing is hidden from you

    The prompt is always on screen, and every phrase in it is colour-coded to show which page it came from. Turn any part of your world down, or off, for one picture without changing anything you have written.

  • Pictures count as description too

    Every reference picture you add gets a job — a shape to keep, a colour palette, a fabric, a pose, or just something for your own eyes. Wobu uses each one the way you meant it, instead of throwing them all in together.

  • Your own graphics card, or a paid service

    Make pictures on your own machine through ComfyUI, or through Google Gemini. Everything you make is kept with the exact settings that made it, so you can compare, try again, or redo it months later.

  • Work with other people, no server

    Put the world on a shared drive and a few of you can work in it at once, without standing on each other's toes. Or send someone a ticket and your two copies keep each other up to date, machine to machine. Nothing passes through us.

It all stays on your computer

A world is just a folder, ending in .wobu. The notes are plain text and the pictures are ordinary image files, so you can open them in anything, back them up, drop them on a USB stick or keep them in version control. Uninstall Wobu and your world is still sitting there, still readable.

We run no servers. There is no account, no tracking, no crash reports and no update check — the app has nowhere to phone home to. Your work leaves your computer only when you press Enhance or Generate, and then it goes straight to the service you chose, on your own account. Your keys are kept in your computer's own password store, never in the world folder.

Read the privacy policy →

What Wobu is not

  • Not a finishing tool. You get concept art and rough 3D shapes to hand to an artist.
  • Not a wiki or a writing app. Notes are here to shape pictures.
  • Not a node graph. ComfyUI already does that beautifully, and Wobu can drive it.
  • Not a service. No account to make, nothing to sign in to, nothing to subscribe to.

Where it is up to

Wobu is in beta and worked on most days. Building your world, sharing it, syncing between two machines, reference pictures, Enhance and the whole picture-making loop all work today — as do Forge, variant grids, teaching a model one character's look, borrowing a style from another world, scenes with several characters in them, and exporting your world as a browsable website. Concept 3D is half there: Wobu can show and export meshes, but it cannot yet start one from a turnaround for you.

See exactly what is finished →

Try it

There are installers for Windows, macOS and Linux. If you would rather build it yourself, the whole thing is on GitHub.

Download Wobu View the source