Sharing & publishing

Publishing turns a cartridge into something other people can find and play with. When you publish, Alcove gives your world a public landing page at alcove.fi/c/<slug> — a page anyone can read without an account, with your premise, cast, and tone, plus a button to start writing.

Share the cartridge. Everyone writes their own save file.

The person who arrives doesn't read your story. They get their own blank timeline in your world and write from there. That's the whole idea: one world, many separate stories.

What gets shared

A public cartridge page shows the reusable world, not your playthrough of it:

• The title, premise, and genre
• The tone, pacing, and style the world is tuned for
• Your Cast Board as the world's starting characters
• The world's starter routes — its opening directions
• A short preview and creator attribution
• A Start a Save File button so visitors can begin their own timeline (they can also duplicate the cartridge to make it their own)

That's the cartridge — the engine and the canvas. See Cartridges for what lives inside one.

What is never shared

Your actual writing stays yours. Publishing a cartridge never exposes:

• Your save file — your private timeline and everything in it
• Any chapters or scenes you've written or generated
• Your private notes and Story Codex entries
• Raw source material you imported to build the cartridge

Your save file is private. The cartridge is what you choose to share.

Spoilers stay sealed, too. Hidden route turns — both in your timeline and in the world's own planned routes — are kept out of public view; visitors see the world's surface, not where any story is headed.

Publishing is always your choice

Alcove never makes private work public on its own. A cartridge is private until you deliberately publish it, and you can unpublish at any time.

Create here, publish anywhere.

When you're ready, open the cartridge's settings and choose to publish. Alcove generates the public page and a shareable link. Prefer to hand someone the world as a file instead of a link? You can export a cartridge — see Import & export. The public link is usually the easier path.

Starting from someone else's cartridge

When you open a public page and start writing, you get a fresh save file in that world. Your timeline is yours alone — the original creator can't see it, and your chapters never appear on their page.

The app proposes; the writer steers.

One cartridge, shared widely, becomes as many distinct stories as there are writers. That's how a world travels.