Reading a family tree
Settled parentage — you've decided this one
Rumored or disputed — a claim nobody has proved
A union — dashed if it ended
Click a card to read it. Editing is behind the Edit button, so nothing changes while you're just looking. Click the diamond on a union to open the partnership itself — its kind, its dates, and who came of it.
Moving around
Drag the background to pan, scroll to zoom, pinch on a touchscreen. Drag a card to place it by hand — that pins it, and the rest of the tree keeps arranging itself around it. Save layout keeps the arrangement; Restore layout puts everything back to it.
People
A character can belong to more than one house — born to one, married into another — and their card's stripe divides between them. Add a portrait from the panel under Edit; it's cropped and shrunk for you, and appears on their card and in the wiki.
The cast belongs to the world, not to any one tree. Someone can exist on no tree at all — written in the wiki, put on a tree later, or never.
Reading a timeline
Lifespans, births, deaths and unions are drawn from the cast, so changing a date on a tree moves them here. A bar is solid only where the dates are exact — dotted ends mean the date is vague, and the dots span the window it could fall in.
Stacked markers collapse into a numbered dot; click it to zoom into that cluster. The dashed line marked now is the present year, set in Calendar & Eras.
Narrowing what you see
Click an era in the band to light only what happened inside it. Click a track name to show just its events. Click a system to focus one reckoning. Click a person to trace their life and the events they were part of. Click again to clear.
The search box narrows whichever view you're in — names on a tree; names, events and eras on a timeline. It filters within whatever you've already selected rather than replacing it.
Counting years in an era
Any era that numbers its own years can be used to write a date. Choose it beside a year field and type 785 rather than working out what that is in the world's own count. The date is stored in world years either way — an era is a way of saying a year, not a second place to keep it — and both readings show afterwards.
Worlds, trees and timelines
A world holds the cast, the calendar, its houses and its eras. Trees and timelines are views over that world — the same character can appear on several trees, and editing them anywhere corrects them everywhere. Adding someone to one tree never adds them to another.
The wiki
Every character, house, species, era and event has an article, and each one already knows its own facts — dates, kin, where it appears — so only the prose is left to you. Write with the toolbar or the usual keys; what you see is what readers get.
Create wiki article makes a page for anything a family tree can't hold: a place, a faction, a thing, a concept. It can also make a character with no tree, or an event with no date yet — an undated event stays off the timeline until you say when.
Type [[a name]] to link to anything else in the world, or [[a name|other words]] to word it differently. Links to things that don't exist yet show in rose. Each article lists what mentions it.
Continuity
The Continuity button checks the whole world for contradictions — a child born before their parent, someone at an event after they died, a life longer than their species allows. Anything it finds is marked on the canvas in rose, and the panel lists each one; click an entry to go straight there. It re-checks as you edit, and problems disappear from the list as you fix them.
Sharing it
On the paid plan, the three-dot menu on a world, tree or timeline offers a read-only link. Readers explore it without an account, articles and all.
Anything marked Hide from shared links — a character, a partnership, an event, an era — is left out of the reader's copy entirely, not merely hidden from view. Your notes stay private unless you tick Include my notes. Articles always publish, since that's what they're for.
Working with other people
Who can work on this, in a world's three-dot menu, makes an invitation link. Editors change anything in the world, including the wiki; viewers read it and nothing more. Only the owner manages people or deletes the world.
A shared world runs on its owner's plan, so what you can do inside it depends on them, and it never counts against your own allowance. While someone has a world open, others see it read-only for a few minutes — nobody's work is lost to a race.
Lineage