The Timekeeper's Journal

Feature Spotlight: Timekeeper Mode and True Campaign Exporting

A closer look at Timekeeper Mode: rewriting a world mid-game, keeping custody of your full game state, and how we solved the "locked world" problem.

The Timekeeper · 2026-10-05

We introduced these changes back in August, but I thought it was a good time to explain exactly what our editing mode can do.

If you've ever tried to build a complex world or a custom AI text adventure, you know that managing the data quickly becomes a nightmare. You're either wrestling with huge, fragile files or trying to cram a whole universe's lore into one prompt box and hoping the AI doesn't forget it.

Worse, when a creator finally fixes a bug or updates a world, games already in progress usually miss out, because their save is welded to the old version of the world.

"He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past." — George Orwell

We completely replaced that static approach. Here's a look behind the curtain at Timekeeper Mode, and how we solved the "locked world" problem.

Rewriting reality mid-game

Every player can direct scenes and rewind time. Switching on Timekeeper Mode goes further, letting you rewrite the simulation itself mid-game. Blueprint editing has three layers:

  • Character & Story: your identity, home, biography, objectives, ambition, skills, flaws and secret.
  • World & Setting: the world's name, time period, location, premise and factions.
  • System & Narrative Rules: the hidden AI instructions and cultural and social context driving the engine.

If you're just playing, you can edit all three for your own game. If you created the world, you can push your changes, along with newly logged characters and places, back to the original, so every future game gets them. You can even rewrite the narrator's latest reply to set the story on a particular course.

Saving the state, not just the words

In most AI adventures, downloading your story gets you a transcript: a dead text file. Everything the game knew is gone: the inventory you gathered, the injuries you survived, exactly how much your companions trust you, the things you hid around the world. You don't get your game back; you get a souvenir.

Our save files give you custody of the actual game state. Instead of treating your adventure as a chat log, they package the whole Ledger:

  • Your physical state: injuries, inventory and goals, as live game data rather than vague narrative hints.
  • Relationships and factions: the exact trust, fear and intimacy of everyone you've met.
  • The world: places you've discovered, changed exits and everything you've hidden.

And if the AI ever drifts off course, you don't have to keep regenerating or abandon the game. Timekeeper Mode lets you operate on the simulation directly: edit the narrator's last reply, add new people and places on the fly, or adjust the hidden rules to steer the engine back on track.

Data custody and the locked world

We strongly believe your campaigns should never be trapped with us. You can download your entire story as a text file for offline reading at any time.

More importantly, we introduced true round-trip save files (.lttsave) and V2 character cards. A V2 card carries not just the character, but the full context of the world they come from.

Because you can export your exact running game, you can get around the genre's biggest limitation, the locked world. Export your campaign, adjust the world, and re-import your timeline into the updated version, picking up all the creator's latest fixes without losing any progress.

As a creator, what's the most frustrating part of organising a campaign's lore and data? Tell us on Discord.

In the manual: Timekeeper Mode · Exporting Your Stories & Characters

Thanks for reading. See you in the past…

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