Your first project

Fifteen minutes, from an empty folder to a world that makes pictures which actually look like each other. The order below matters: broad strokes before detail, look before subject.

Before anything else

The first time you run Wobu it shows you two documents — the terms of use and the privacy policy — read from the files that came with the app. Agreeing to them is the one thing you cannot skip. The buttons are Quit without agreeing and I agree — continue.

Then there is a short tour: what the four screens are, opening or making a world, your keys, and your first picture. Skip for now ends it whenever you like, and it never nags you again unless you ask for it from the opening screen's Show the introduction button or Settings → Introduction.

Making a world

Wobu opens on the launcher — your recent worlds as cards, plus three buttons: Accept ticket…, Open folder… and New project. There is no library to manage and nothing to sign in to. A world is simply a folder you picked.

1. Choose where it goes. Anywhere: your disk, a network drive, a synced folder. If other people will be working on this world too, put it on the shared drive now rather than moving it later.
2. Give it a name. Wobu makes a self-contained folder there — notes, pictures, records of what you made, all inside it.
3. Wait for the first open. A brand new world opens instantly. An existing one has to be read through once so search works, and it shows you Reading n of m files with a Cancel button. After that it only re-reads what changed.

Where your stuff lives Everything that matters is in the world folder. The search index is not — it sits in Wobu's own application folder, because that sort of file gets corrupted on network drives. Delete it and you lose nothing; the next open just takes a bit longer. Full layout in the reference.

Write the Art Style page first

Two pages exist in every world from the moment you make it, pinned to the top of the list: Art Style and World Canon. They are pinned there because everything you ever make is built on them, and you should never have to go looking.

Open Art Style and write, in the notes column on the left, how your world should look — not what is in it. The medium, the brushwork, the lighting, the colours you allow, and what should never happen:

painterly, heavy brush texture, visible edges
gouache feel not airbrush
strong single key light, deep shadow, rim light on everything
palette stays muted — ash greys, ember orange, one teal accent
never: neon, chrome, lens flare, symmetrical hero poses

This page touches every single picture you will ever make here. Fifteen minutes spent on it is worth more than an hour spent anywhere else.

Then World Canon

Same idea, different question. Not how it looks — what is true. The era, the mood, how advanced things are, whether there is magic, what materials exist, and what must never turn up:

late iron age, post-eruption, forty years after the ash fall
tone: exhausted, resourceful, not grimdark
tech: forge metal, ceramic, rope, sail. no gunpowder.
everything is scavenged, repaired, mismatched
never: firearms, printed cloth, glass windows

Broad strokes before detail

The temptation is to leap straight to your favourite character. Hold off for ten more minutes and add the layers above them first — a character with nothing above them is just a prompt with extra clicking.

1. One species. Shape and build: the things every one of them shares. New entity at the bottom of the list; pick Species and name it.
2. One culture. Clothing, jewellery, symbols, the look of their weapons. Join it to the species it belongs to from the Relations tab.
3. One place. Weather, buildings, light, wear and tear. Places sit inside places — region, city, district — so start at whatever size you actually know something about.
4. Now your character. Give them a species, a culture and a home, and watch the inherits line appear under their name.

By now the panel on the right shows a stack of five or six layers, and the prompt underneath it is already several hundred words you never had to type.

Enhance, then generate

1. Add a key. Settings → Providers and models. Enhance needs a text service; Generate needs an image one. They can be different companies — see Providers and keys.
2. Enhance each page, working downwards. Your rough notes come back as a tidy description — Silhouette, Anatomy, Materials, Palette, Signature details, Never — appearing in the right-hand column as it is written. Nothing is saved until you accept it: you get a section-by-section comparison with Keep current and Use new, then Accept selected or Accept all. Do Art Style first, then World Canon, then the species, then down the tree.
3. Read the prompt in the panel on the right. Turn on Show sources and every phrase is tinted by the page that produced it. If something reads wrong, you now know exactly where to go and fix it.
4. Generate. Pick what sort of sheet you want, pick a shape, glance at the pixel size shown beside it, and press Generate. Results land on the Concepts tab of whoever you generated for.
5. Pin the one that is right. Pinning turns a result into a reference picture on that page — which then feeds into everything below it. That is the flywheel. Your world gets more consistent every time you use it.

About money Everything is billed to your own account. Wobu marks which services are paid before you generate and records what every picture was made with, but it does not meter your spending — your provider's dashboard is the only place that knows. Making pictures on your own machine with ComfyUI costs nothing at a provider; that difference is deliberate.

Habits that pay off

← Overview  ·  The workspace →

This page comes from a file in the source code — the very same one the app shows you in its own built-in guide.