If you search for worldbuilding software for writers, you get lists. Twelve tools, a star rating each, a paragraph that could describe any of them. This is not that. I built Lokee, I turned my own novel Medalion into a Lokee vault, and I would rather tell you plainly what each part of it does for worldbuilding, where it stops, and when you do not need it at all.
The short version: Lokee is a vault of things in your world, connected to each other and placed in time, with a manuscript editor, maps and an AI reading assistant attached to the same vault. Its strongest idea is that it keeps three questions apart that most tools blur: what is true, when it became true in your world, and when your reader finds out. Everything below hangs off that.
When a notebook is enough
Honestly: for a short standalone novel with a dozen characters in one city over a few weeks, a notebook is enough. A page per character, a page for the city, a timeline on one sheet. You will not lose track of twelve people, and a tool adds overhead you do not need.
Structure starts paying for itself when one of these becomes true: more than a few dozen named things; a story that spans years, so facts change and you need to know what was true when; more than one book, so what readers already know matters; a map that has to agree with the text; or a second person working on it. At that point the notebook turns into a pile, and how to organize worldbuilding notes is the guide to read before any tool. If you have not started building at all, how to start worldbuilding for a novel argues for starting from the story's questions rather than an encyclopedia, which is also the right way to start a vault.
What a vault is: local or cloud, desktop, web or Android
A vault is one world, or one series. Everything below lives inside it.
A local vault is a folder on your computer, opened by the desktop app for Windows and macOS. It is free, needs no account, works offline and has no limit on entities. Your own AI keys and local models work only here. Signing in on the desktop is optional; it adds cloud vaults and sync to the same app, and a local vault never requires it.
A cloud vault lives on Lokee's side, behind an account, and opens in the browser, in the desktop app when signed in, and in the Android app. It is how you share a world with a co-author and how the same vault follows you between devices. There is a free cloud vault with limits; paid plans lift them and include AI credits. The details change, so /pricing is the only place I will quote them. Nothing about time, history, events or the consistency check is tied to a plan; managed AI is.
The vault setup help section covers creating one. From here on, I will say when something behaves differently in a local or cloud vault.
Entities, types and folders: the catalogue
An entity is a thing in your world with a type, fields, a description and relationships. The demo vault, The Ashen Circle, uses three types: Character, Location and Faction. You define types and their fields under Settings → Structure → Entity types; a field can be Text, Number, Yes/No, Date, List, Story date (in a calendar you invented) or Place (a link to a place entity). That last kind is what lets maps and the consistency check know where someone is. Relationship types are defined the same way, each with a direction, a line style, an optional family-tree role and an optional map role.
Around the catalogue: one folder path per entity, shown as a tree in the sidebar; tags in type:value form; aliases, which search, @ mentions and AI extraction all read; and Statistics for counts and the list of isolated entities.
What it leaves to you: the schema. Lokee ships no fixed character template with eye colour and star sign. You decide which facts deserve a field, and setting up a story bible that scales is the guide for deciding well, because it is cheap at twenty entities and expensive at three hundred. An entity has exactly one type, so role-shaped types (Villain, Mentor) go wrong when roles change; keep roles in fields or relationships. The entities and relationships help section has the buttons.
The relationship graph and the family tree
The Graph draws every entity with its type's colour and shape and every relationship as a line. Click a node to focus it, with a depth of one to three hops and a Collapse option that removes the rest rather than dimming it; filter by type chips and the legend; mark a relationship type as a Cluster relationship so members pull together; switch to 3D. With the Viewing control you can show the graph as it stood at a past moment of your world.
What the graph is for, in worldbuilding terms, is noticing: an isolated character whose connections exist only in prose, a faction with no rivals, two clusters with a single bridge that your plot depends on. Reading your relationship graph to find plot holes is about that reading.
The Family Tree is built entirely from relationship types with a family-tree role (Parent, Child, Partner, Sibling). Each link carries a certainty: Confirmed, Alleged, Unknown or Disputed, drawn differently, which is how a saga keeps a rumoured parentage visibly distinct from a proven one. It warns about impossible lineages. Family sagas and succession covers inheritance over time as well as the tree.
What it leaves to you: a graph has no opinion. It will show you a hairball if you make every walk-on an entity, and it exports the family tree as a picture only. The graph and family tree help sections cover the controls.
Time: what is true, when it happened, when the reader learns it
This is the part that makes Lokee different from a wiki, so it gets the most space.
Every value on a card is Current: what you typed, which nothing changes behind your back. Beside each field, Record a change… lets you say what the value was at a world point, a moment in your world's chronology, instead of overwriting it. The card keeps its current value; the history keeps the rest; the Viewing control on entity, graph, timeline and map pages shows the vault as it stood at any world point, or at a chapter, or compares two moments side by side with Compare…. Three kinds of "when" explains the model; record changes instead of overwriting them is the daily habit.
The Timeline holds the world points in order, with a Sequence view and a Calendar view. Order is what counts; dates are optional annotations, in real dates or in a calendar you define as a name plus ordered units such as Era, Year, Day. When a date disagrees with your order, Lokee flags it and changes nothing, because a flashback and a mistake look identical from outside. Building a calendar and timeline for an invented world goes through it. Timelines can branch from a world point, with a Canonical tick on the line you consider real, which is how alternate histories and branching timelines are explored without touching canon.
Story Events are plot: a raid, a coronation, a betrayal. An event sits at a world point or spans a period, has participants, and carries Effects, which are changes recorded in the entities it touches and tagged with the event, so deleting the event tells you what it changed. Plan your plot with story events shows the planning order and the chronology side by side.
The third "when" is the reader's. In the Writer's Narrative order view you mark where the reader is in each chapter; a change recorded there shows in chapter order rather than world order, which is the difference between a continuity error and a reveal. Keeping a mystery fair is built on that distinction.
What it leaves to you: every judgement. Lokee never reorders your world to fit a date, never decides which branch is canon, never resolves a change it cannot place. Calendars are names and units; it does not know how long a month is or what the months are called. And the history only exists for values you recorded; the habit is yours to keep. The time help section, with its walkthrough, is the reference.
Maps: drawn by hand, read from an image, changing over time
Maps in Lokee are drawn rather than uploaded as pictures: a preset to start from, shapes, a lasso and a paint bucket for terrain, layers, stamps for towns and symbols, labels in your choice of fonts, and an Inked style if you like the hand-drawn look. A map can have child maps, so a city sits inside a region inside a continent. Any shape can be linked to a place entity.
If you already have a sketch, From an image… reads it. Outline detection is free; having the AI read labels and regions uses credits in a cloud vault, or your own key or a local model in a local vault. You review the detected areas, name them and merge what the detector split. From a sketch to an editable atlas is the walkthrough.
Two things make maps part of worldbuilding rather than decoration. First, people. A character whose Place field points at a place appears on every map where that place is drawn; Moved here at this moment records a move at a world point, and the map shows trails between moments and lets you Find who is where. The Writer's map panel follows the chapter you are editing. Following characters across the map covers it. Second, time. A border can Change from here at a moment or End here; a territory is Held by a holder through a belonging relationship and drawn in the holder's colour; the Viewing control replays the map moment by moment. Mapping a world that changes shows borders, rulers and a war done this way.
What it leaves to you: there is no army or front-line tool. A war map is a recipe: fronts drawn as walls, armies as entities with a Place field, ownership through Held by. The map is only as time-aware as the moments you have recorded. The maps and maps over time sections list the tools.
The Writer, Capture and import: drafting that feeds the world
The Writer is a manuscript editor inside the vault: books, parts and acts as containers, chapters inside them, a status per chapter, a per-chapter word count, a Focus mode, and Export to .docx, PDF, EPUB or Markdown. It is not where Lokee is trying hardest; its job is to sit next to the vault. Type @ and a character's name to link a mention; select text and Link entity to link or create one; Extract selection, Extract this chapter or Extract whole book to have the AI propose what the text introduced, always through a review step. Views beside the text show the graph, a board, the timeline, the map for the current chapter and the narrative order. Worldbuilding while you write is the guide to drafting this way, answering the world's questions as scenes raise them instead of first.
Capture is the microphone button on every vault page. Record or type a thought, see the cost, and get entities, relationships or a note proposed for review. In a local vault you can use your own transcription provider or a local model; in a cloud vault it uses credits.
Import is for text that already exists. The Import page takes a .txt, .docx, .md, .epub or .pdf up to 50 MB and proposes entities and relationships, optionally with changes over time and dated events, in a review screen with Pre-approved, Pending, Done and All tabs. You accept, discard, retype or reassign candidates to existing entities, then Commit. Every AI-made card carries an AI Extracted banner until you dismiss it; Import history keeps every session and lets you restore skipped items; a restore point is saved before each commit. Turning an existing draft into a living story bible is the full route, including the one I used for Medalion: letting my own coding agent, Claude Code, read the book and write the vault, which needs no Lokee AI at all.
What it leaves to you: the review. The AI proposes and never commits. It takes dates only from what the text states and offers vaguer hints for you to place. It will produce duplicates from inconsistent naming, and merging them is yours (helped by Merge duplicates in local vaults, by aliases everywhere). And the Writer counts words per chapter, not per manuscript; if you live by a daily total, keep your other tool for that. See writer, import and capture in the help.
The consistency check: what it catches and what it cannot
Consistency Check reads the whole vault and lists findings in three groups. Problems: two values for one field at the same point, someone in two places at once, a relationship that ends before it begins, a change whose entity is gone. Worth a look: a date that disagrees with the order, a change recorded outside a value's history. Just so you know: a change not placed at any point, or something readers do not know yet. Run deterministic check (free) costs nothing and runs on everything; an optional AI pass can be scoped. Each check can be switched off per vault.
It flags; it never fixes. Accepting or rejecting a finding dismisses it for the session, and the fix is yours to make on the card. Run a continuity check before every draft explains each finding and the usual cause.
What it leaves to you: everything it cannot see. It knows nothing about tone, motive or whether the magic system is coherent. It only compares what you recorded, so a vault with no recorded history and no Place fields passes with nothing to say. The two-places-at-once check needs a Place field or a text field marked Says where someone is; a relationship with a map role does not count. The check is hidden for reviewers and on phones. The consistency help section lists each rule.
Notes, boards and other people
Notes are free writing: ideas, research, plans. They have folders and plain tags, link to entities, boards, chapters and maps, can be recorded by voice, bulk-imported from .md, .txt and .docx, and exported as a zip of Markdown with folders preserved. Boards are canvases of sticky notes and grouped sections for planning a plot visually, with links to entities.
Other people: a cloud vault can be shared per vault as Co-author, who can change everything, or Reviewer, who reads, comments on the manuscript, resolves their own threads and exports, but changes nothing. Comments exist on the manuscript only. Restore Points are saved automatically before imports, merges and bulk edits, and by hand whenever you like; a local vault can also be exported as a zip from the desktop app and imported as a new vault elsewhere. Working with co-authors, editors and beta readers covers the roles, the comment threads and the backup habits; the notes, board and backup and restore sections have the details.
What it leaves to you: sharing needs a paid plan, and editorial workflow beyond comments (track changes, approvals) is not here.
What Lokee doesn't do, and what it costs
To save you reading the rest of the internet, the list of things people ask for that Lokee does not do:
- Write anything. No generated lore, no generated prose. The AI reads and proposes; you decide.
- Pretend to understand your world. The consistency check compares recorded values. It has no model of your magic or your politics.
- Fix things for you. Flags, proposals and review screens everywhere; silent edits nowhere.
- Real calendars for invented worlds. A calendar is a name plus ordered units with integer values. No month names, no leap years, no conversion between calendars.
- Scenes. The Writer has containers and chapters; there is no scene unit below a chapter, and no manuscript-wide word count or daily target.
- A desktop app for every system. Windows and macOS only; the browser version works anywhere.
- Everything in every vault. Health and Merge duplicates exist in local vaults only; your own AI keys and local models work in local vaults only; sharing works in cloud vaults only.
- Comments outside the manuscript, a cause-and-effect chain view for events, or a reciprocal relationship editor.
As for money: the desktop app with local vaults is free and stays free. Cloud vaults, sync, sharing and managed AI are where the paid plans are, and /pricing has the current terms; I would rather you read them there than in an article that will go stale.
If the tour has made you curious, the desktop app is at /download and opens a local vault without an account. Start with the five decisions in how to start worldbuilding for a novel, build the vault with setting up a story bible that scales, and let the rest of the guides fill in as your world raises the questions.