Worldweave Overview

Worldweave is the federated platform layer that ships with Softfire. It provides player identity, session relay, the Living World simulation, cross-game social features, achievements, and ranked matchmaking — without requiring you to build or operate any backend infrastructure.

What the platform provides

Feature	Description
Player identity	Root accounts: one account, all connected games
Session relay	Strands route and cache traffic between clients
Living World	Persistent ecosystem, resource, weather, and faction simulation
Cross-game lobbies	Players from any connected game can play mini-game sessions together
Social layer	Friends lists, presence, messaging
Achievements	Cross-game achievement registry with progression tracking
Ranked matchmaking	Elo-based ranking with skill-band grouping

Infrastructure components

Worldweave is built from four infrastructure pieces:

Root is the canonical authoritative hub. It owns identity, session authority, Living World simulation, and the source of truth for all platform data. Softfire operates the Root. Developers do not operate Roots under the standard tiers — see Root, Strand, and The Loom.

Strands are regional relay and cache nodes. A Strand extends the Root’s reach by sitting geographically closer to players, caching world state, and routing session traffic. The Root federates Strands — they sync from the Root and relay to clients. The Strand layer is what makes the Living World viable at scale: clients talk to their nearest Strand, not to the Root directly.

The Loom is the distributed registry that knows about all Roots. Currently only Softfire’s Root is registered. In a future federated mode, independent Root operators would register with The Loom so players on different Roots can find and interact with each other.

Seed is the deployable package to grow a new Root. It is a complete, self-contained Root implementation. If Softfire ever shuts down, anyone can deploy a Seed to restore the platform — no data or capability is locked to Softfire as an operator.

Platform topology

The Loom (distributed registry)
  └── Root (Softfire-operated, canonical authority)
        ├── Strand EU-West
        │     └── Clients in EU-West
        ├── Strand US-East
        │     └── Clients in US-East
        └── Strand AP-Southeast
              └── Clients in AP-Southeast

Clients connect to their nearest Strand. The Strand handles session relay and serves cached world state. The Root handles identity verification, world-simulation authority, and billing.

Commercial model

Softfire operates the Root. Developers register their games and connect to the platform using an API key. Players authenticate once with a Root account and carry their identity to every connected game.

Billing is per monthly active user (MAU). See the full MAU Tiers and Pricing page. The free Indie tier covers 10,000 MAU, which is enough to take most indie games through launch.

Current federation status

Worldweave currently operates in SingleRoot mode. There is one Root (operated by Softfire), and all connected games share it. The Federated mode — where independent operators can run their own Roots and register them with The Loom — is architecturally complete but not yet publicly enabled. Enterprise customers can discuss self-hosted Root arrangements directly with Softfire.