Worlds
A World is the most important product object in Nimi. Worlds are why the platform exists.
What Is A World
A World in Nimi is a persistent place — somewhere characters live and stories continue. It has rules its creator defined, shared state that outlasts any single session, and a growing record of what happened there. Its participants, human and AI alike, are not invented by the world: they arrive with an identity, a social graph, and economic standing that they carry across all worlds.
A world is not:
- A chat room. Chat is a surface inside a world; the world is the environment that gives the chat meaning.
- A campaign. A campaign is a temporary play frame; a world keeps evolving even when no one is playing.
- A level. A level is a designed encounter; a world is a place that has its own rules and history independent of any single visit.
- An app. An app projects part of the platform; the world is the meaning the app projects.
A world is more like a small universe with consistent rules — authored by a creator, populated by participants, durable across time.
Three Things A World Carries
Every world carries three related but distinct ideas. State vs History walks the state-vs-history relationship in detail (with the per-realm pages Truth, World State, World History for each surface).
| Concept | What it answers | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Truth | What is canonically true here, regardless of when written | Realm R-TRUTH-* |
| World State | What this world looks like right now | Realm R-WSTATE-* |
| World History | How this world reached its current state | Realm R-WHIST-* |
A surface that conflates these silently loses information. A world without truth has no rules. A world without state has no present. A world without history has no past.
Adjacent Realm Surfaces
A world also carries other typed surfaces that participate in its meaning:
| Surface | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Chat | Canonical direct human thread, message, read-state, and synchronization truth |
| Social | Friendship admission graph; gates chat preconditions |
| Economy | World creator economy + revenue + settlement |
| Asset / Bundle / Resource / Binding | What the world contains and how those things attach to participants and scenes |
| Transit | The single-hop continuity protocol via OASIS that lets participants move between worlds |
Realm keeps each of them; together they make a world feel like a place rather than a database.
What This Section Contains
- State vs History — when state updates vs history appends, governed by
effectClass. (Truth lives on its own per-realm page: Truth.) - OASIS — the unique system main world.
- Lifecycle — how a world is created, published, bound to apps, suspended, revoked.
For schema-level field definitions, see Reference → World Fields.
Reader Scenario: Walking Into A World
You sign into Nimi and join a world a friend has created.
- Your identity is the same identity you use everywhere else. The world admits you; it does not invent you.
- Your wallet, your friendships, and your asset library are all visible and useful inside this world. They are not duplicated; they are platform truth.
- The world has its own rules — maybe currency is "ticket stubs", maybe time runs at 4× real-time. These local rules apply inside this world. They don't retroactively change your standing outside it.
- Your conversation with the agents in this world is durable. Their memory of you is theirs (with your consent), not the world's. When you leave for another world, that memory travels with the LocalAgent under Runtime's Memory contracts.
- When you leave, you transit through OASIS. Creator worlds cannot peer-transit directly; OASIS is the hub.
Every line of that walkthrough corresponds to an admitted contract. The architecture exists to make this experience consistent across worlds without any single world inventing its own rules of identity.
Reader Scenario: A Creator Publishing A World
You are designing a world. You are not just shipping a level — you are shipping a place.
- You author the world's truth: rules, agents, scenes, projections, release. The truth is creator-governed, versioned, atomic, and auditable.
- You publish via a
WorldRelease— a transactional commit that freezes the truth, the projections, and the package version. If something goes wrong, rollback is a release operation, not an ad hoc rewrite. - Your world has its own internal economy if you want one — but the canonical platform economy stays on the platform. The separation is intentional.
- Once published, your world is a real Nimi destination. Participants can transit to it through OASIS. Their identity, social graph, and economic standing are the same as in any other world.
This is the world creator's compact with the platform: the platform gives you durable identity and cross-world meaning; you give the platform a coherent place that respects the protocol primitives.