Simulate
Simulate plays through your current draft of a storyworld live, inside the editor, against the same runtime that ships in a published .storyworld bundle. It's the everyday way authors and designers test what they're building: storylets get drawn under your current conditions, you pick outcomes, the world state updates, you see what a player would see.
Simulate is built into both the web app and the desktop app. There is nothing to install or publish to use it.
Where to find it
- Storymap > Simulate is the full-screen view. Storymap geography on the left, the current hand on the right.
- The Explore tab gives the same engine in a more compact layout, suitable for quick checks alongside the editor while you're authoring.
What you can do
- Click a site pin on the map to navigate to it and see its current hand (the storylets currently in slot). Navigating costs one turn.
- Click a storylet card to read it, then pick an outcome. The outcome is applied, slots refill across all sites with the updated state, and the turn counter advances.
- Storylets that are eligible but not in the current hand are listed in the right sidebar as Not in hand, with a one-line reason: cooldown remaining, condition not met, or lower priority than another storylet that took the slot. Useful for "why isn't my storylet showing up?" debugging.
Simulation controls
Pinned at the bottom of the right sidebar:
- Turn counter - the current game turn.
- Reset sim (
|ā) - restart the simulation from scratch. - Advance turn (
ā¶) - advance the clock by one turn and reprime all slots, without playing a storylet. - Save state - name and save the current world state as a snapshot; the date and time are prepended automatically.
- Restore state - load a previously saved snapshot.
- Log - expand an inline log of every draw, eviction, and play event, with Copy and Download options (see below).
Action log
The Log button opens the action log overlay, recording every event chronologically:
| Icon colour | Event | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Green | Drew | A storylet was dealt into a site's available hand |
| Grey | Evicted | A storylet was removed because conditions changed |
| Purple/Blue | Played | You resolved a storylet and chose an outcome |
Each row shows the turn number, the site name, the storylet title, and (for plays) the outcome chosen.
From the overlay you can Copy as text (a plain-text summary to the clipboard), Download the log as a .txt file, or Close the overlay.
The log resets whenever you click Reset sim.
When to use Simulate vs the Standalone Player
Simulate is for you as the author: it's the tool you use to test as you build. It runs against your current draft, with no publish step, and gives you save states and the action log inline.
When you want to send a build to a playtester who doesn't have Storylet Studio, the Standalone Player is the right tool: it packages the same runtime as a single HTML file they can open in a browser.