Your first project

Fifteen minutes from an empty folder to a world tree that produces consistent images. The order below is deliberate: breadth before depth, style before subject.

Before anything else

On first run Wobu shows two documents — the terms of use and the privacy policy — read from the same files the installer put beside the application. Agreeing to them is the one thing in Wobu you cannot skip; the buttons are Quit without agreeing and I agree — continue.

After that comes a short introduction: what the four modes are, opening or creating a project, your keys, and your first concept. Skip for now ends it at any point, and it never asks again unless you run it from the launcher's Show the introduction button or from Settings → Introduction.

Creating a project

Wobu opens on the launcher — recent projects as cards, plus three actions: Accept ticket…, Open folder… and New project. There is no global library and no sign-in; a project is just a directory you choose.

1. Pick a location. Anywhere you like — a local disk, a NAS, a synced folder. If several people will work on this world, put it on the share now rather than moving it later.
2. Name it. Wobu creates a self-contained folder at that location: notes, images, generation receipts, all of it inside.
3. Wait for the first open. A brand new project opens instantly. Opening an existing world for the first time reads every file to build the local search index, showing Reading n of m files and a Cancel button. Subsequent opens re-read only what changed.

Where things live Everything canonical is in the project folder. The search index is not — it lives in your local application data, keyed by project ID, because SQLite over SMB or NFS corrupts. Delete the search index and nothing is lost; the next open just takes a little longer. Full layout in the reference.

Write the Art Style entity first

Two entities exist in every project from the moment it is created, pinned to the top of the navigator above the rule: Art Style and World Canon. They are pinned because they are the roots of every influence stack and you should never have to hunt for them.

Open Art Style and write, in the raw notes column, how your world should look — not what is in it. Medium, rendering, line quality, lighting, palette discipline, and what to never do:

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 is the layer that touches every single image you will ever make in this project. Fifteen minutes here is worth more than an hour anywhere else.

Then World Canon

Same idea, different axis: era, tone, technology and magic level, the materials that exist, and the things that must never appear. Where Art Style governs rendering, World Canon governs fact.

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

Build breadth before depth

The instinct is to jump straight to your favourite character. Resist it for ten more minutes. Add the layers above that character first, because a character entity with nothing above it is just a prompt with extra steps.

1. One species. Silhouette and anatomy — the things every member shares. New entity at the bottom of the navigator opens the sheet; pick Species and name it.
2. One culture. Costume, ornament, iconography, weapon language. Link it to the species it belongs to from the Relations tab.
3. One setting. Climate, architecture, ambient light, wear. Settings nest — region, city, district — so start at whatever scale you actually know.
4. Now your character. Give it a species, a culture and a home, and watch the inherits line appear under the name.

By this point the inspector on the right shows a stack of five or six layers, and the compiled prompt beneath 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 provider; Generate needs an image provider. They can be different vendors — see Providers and keys.
2. Enhance each entity from the top down. Your rough notes become a structured description — Silhouette, Anatomy, Materials, Palette, Signature details, Never — streaming into the right-hand column. Nothing is written until you accept it: you get a section-by-section review with Keep current and Use new, then Accept selected or Accept all. Enhance the Art Style entity first, then World Canon, then the species, then down the tree.
3. Check the compiled prompt in the inspector. Turn on Show sources and every fragment is tinted by the layer that produced it. If something reads wrong, you now know exactly which entity to go and fix.
4. Generate. Pick an output preset and one of the aspects the selected provider offers, check the negotiated pixel dimensions beside the control, and press Generate. Results land on the Concepts tab of the entity you generated for.
5. Pin the one that is right. Pinning promotes a generation to a reference image on that entity — which then influences everything downstream of it. That is the flywheel; the world gets more consistent every time you use it.

A note on cost Everything is billed to your own provider account, so the Generate button shows an estimated cost before a paid batch runs, and a project can carry a spend ceiling with a hard stop. A local ComfyUI provider shows no cost at all — that asymmetry is intentional.

Habits that pay off

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This page is rendered from its source in the repository — the same file the application reads for its built-in guide.