How World Seed discovery surfaces new content
What discovery is
A World Seed is a published setting that an Author has built and that players can start campaigns from. Discovery is the part of the platform that lets people find those settings. Its design is deliberately plain: it is a catalog, not a recommendation engine. This article walks through what the catalog shows, what keeps unreviewed or restricted content out of it, and where its limits are.
Only approved Seeds appear
When an Author asks to publish a World Seed, it does not go straight into the catalog. The publish request puts the Seed into a pending state and queues it for the same asynchronous safety scan that other user-generated content goes through. Only Seeds that reach an approved state are listed for anyone other than their owner.
If the scan fails or times out, the design says the Seed stays pending. It never becomes approved by default. Seeds that are pending or quarantined are visible only to their own Author.
Editing matters too. If an Author changes the name or the tone description of an approved Seed, it goes back to pending and is scanned again, so a Seed cannot be approved and then quietly rewritten.
How the list is ordered
The catalog is ordered newest published first. That ordering uses a dedicated publication timestamp, set when the Seed is approved, rather than the last edit time. A small edit to an old Seed therefore does not push it back to the top. This is how new content surfaces: a Seed appears near the top when it is approved, and drifts down as newer ones arrive.
The catalog is paginated, so you can keep going back through older Seeds. There is no engagement ranking. The one exception to newest-first order is an operator-set featured flag, which can put a small number of Seeds at the front; everything else follows in publication order.
The honest limit is that a first version of this surface has no search, filtering or alternative sorting. The specification calls this out as a deliberate choice for a catalog that is still small, to be revisited if the number of Seeds makes newest-first hard to use. If you are looking for something specific, you will browse rather than query.
Who can see it
Anyone can browse the catalog without signing in, and open a Seed's detail page to see its name, thumbnail, advisory tags and author name. Signing in is required only when you want to start a campaign from it. If an anonymous visitor tries, they are sent to sign up or log in and then returned to the Seed they chose.
How mature content is kept out
Authors tag each Seed with advisories for gore and violence, graphic horror and romantic or sexual content. A Seed carrying any of those tags is hidden from two groups: anonymous visitors, and signed-in accounts that have not completed age verification. The hiding applies to the landing page preview, the full catalog and a direct link to the Seed.
Two details matter for trust. First, the check happens on the server, in the same request that returns the list. It is not a filter applied in your browser after the data arrives, which would still send restricted listings across the network. Second, a hidden Seed looks the same as one that does not exist. A direct link to it returns the same not found response as a made-up address, so the response does not reveal what is being withheld.
Once an account completes verification, previously hidden Seeds become visible on its next request. Nothing needs to be republished.
What the author label shows
Each listing carries an author name. An account can set a public display name, which goes through moderation before it is shown. If none is set, the listing shows a generic anonymous label.
What starting a campaign does
Starting a campaign from a Seed copies its content into a new campaign owned by you. Your play does not write back to the original Seed, and later edits to the Seed do not alter campaigns already cloned from it. The server rechecks that the Seed is still approved at the moment you start, so a Seed pulled after you loaded the page cannot be cloned.
Free accounts can hold a limited number of active campaigns started from Seeds at once, and deleting one frees a slot. The rejection message is meant to name the limit rather than fail with a generic error.
A kill switch
The whole discovery feature sits behind its own switch that an operator can turn off. If it is off, the catalog page shows a notice that it is temporarily unavailable instead of a broken list.
Where to look next
You can see the catalog on the Discover page of the site, without an account. The specification for this feature, the World Seed Discovery and Cloning document, sets out each of the rules described above, and the publishing document covers the approval states that decide what gets listed.