—Discover02

Installation

Goal — Launch World Generator and check that it works.

Duration — 2 minutes.

Prerequisites — Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.

World Generator ships as a self-contained ZIP. No installer, no registry entry, nothing to uninstall.

Prerequisites

Item	Detail
Operating system	Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
Graphics	OpenGL 3.3 — effectively anything since 2010
Memory	4 GB for a 1080p world; see the memory budget for larger ones
Disk	~5 MB for the application, plus your exports

Nothing else. The Visual C++ and OpenMP runtimes are in the archive, so a machine that has never seen Visual Studio still starts the application.

1. Extract the archive

Unzip ArchwayWorldGenerator-<version>-win64.zip into a folder you can write to — a folder in Documents, a project directory, a USB stick.

ArchwayWorldGenerator/
├── ArchwayWorldGenerator.exe    ← run this
├── msvcp140.dll                 ← Visual C++ runtime
├── vcruntime140.dll
├── vcruntime140_1.dll
├── vcomp140.dll                 ← OpenMP runtime, for parallel generation
├── concrt140.dll
└── resources/

Do not extract into C:\Program Files

The application writes its saves, exports and preferences next to its executable, and that folder is read-only for a normal user. Everything will fail.

2. Run it

Double-click ArchwayWorldGenerator.exe. The window opens immediately and the first world generates in the background — you see a progress bar, not a black window.

3. Set the interface size

On a high-density display the application follows the system scaling. If the interface is too large or too small, open Settings → Interface size and pick a preset, or press Ctrl + / Ctrl -.

Settings → Interface size — cliquer pour agrandirFig. 2.1

The choice is saved to ui_scale.cfg and restored at the next start.

Verifying the installation

Four points, if you want to be sure before trusting a copy with real work:

1. The title bar is dark and blends into the toolbar below it — the window reads as one surface, with no white strip on top.
2. No console window appears behind it.
3. The map finishes generating within a few seconds and fills the view.
4. F12 drops a screenshot_001.png next to the executable.

If any of these fail, see Troubleshooting.

Where files go

Everything the application writes lands next to the executable:

Path	Contents
saves/*.wgen	Your saved worlds
Export/	Everything Export all maps writes
Export/Masks/	Everything Export all masks writes
seeds.txt	Your seed shelf — plain text, editable by hand
ui_scale.cfg	The chosen interface size
debug_log.txt	Appended on every run; the first thing to attach to a bug report
screenshot_*.png	Written by F12

None of these exist before they are needed, and deleting any of them is safe — you lose that data, not the application.

Memory budget

Map resolution is independent of window size. The generator needs roughly 25 bytes per pixel, and the Resolution group in the Terrain panel shows the figure for the size you chose.

Resolution	Approximate memory
1920 × 1080 (1080p preset)	~50 MB
3840 × 2160 (4K preset)	~200 MB
8129 × 4065 (Archway preset)	~790 MB
16384 × 16384	~6.3 GB

Above 2 GB the application asks for confirmation before generating: that is the point where it stops being something you start by accident.

If a generation cannot allocate what it needs, it fails cleanly and leaves the world you had open intact.

Uninstalling

Delete the folder. That is the whole procedure.

Next

• Preparing your first world