Foundry is the next major version of Architect. It ships late August, the closed beta is open now, and the change it makes is larger than any feature list conveys: Architect was built as a pipeline, and Foundry is built as a narrative design tool.
What that actually means
Architect takes lore you have already written and converts it into engine-ready data. Documents go in one end, and structured entities, mapped relationships and engine exports come out the other. It does that job well, and for a team that already has a finished bible and needs it in Unreal by Friday, it is still the fastest route there.
The limitation is structural rather than technical. A pipeline sits at the end of the process, so by the time a world reaches it the design is already finished. The work of inventing that world, deciding how it holds together, and working out what a player actually does inside it all happened somewhere else, spread across documents, wiki pages, a spreadsheet of quest states, and a whiteboard photo somebody took in March.
Foundry moves that work into the tool. Writers build out characters, factions, locations and the relationships between them, while designers build the arcs, beats, branching and state that turn a world into something a player can move through, and both of those happen against the same underlying model instead of in two separate documents that quietly drift apart over a production. Export still works exactly as it does today, and it is simply no longer the reason you open the application.
Foundry is a version, not a separate product
Foundry names Architect's next major version, the way an operating system release gets a name rather than only a number. It is still Architect, your projects and schema and exports come with you, and the pipeline you already know still runs end to end. We are naming versions from here because "v2" tells you nothing about what changed, and this change deserves a word.
You can start from a premise
Because the design happens inside Foundry, it no longer needs you to arrive with the writing finished. Foundry generates content within your world rather than only extracting it from documents, covering field values, behaviours, relationships, and whole characters and arcs, and everything it proposes is anchored to what your world already establishes instead of being invented in isolation.
The rule that governed Architect still governs Foundry without exception. Nothing is authored unless you ask for it, everything arrives as a draft you accept or reject before it becomes real, and a draft you throw away costs you nothing.
Your lore can stay where it already lives
Most worlds are not sitting in a tidy folder of Word documents. They live in a team wiki, a Notion database, or a shared drive that three people have write access to and nobody has read end to end.
Foundry connects to Confluence, Notion and Google Drive directly, so you can browse and import from where your material already sits instead of exporting it, uploading it, and doing that again every time somebody edits a page. The connector layer is built so that adding a source is a small piece of work rather than a release, which is the honest reason to expect more of them over time rather than a promise about which ones.
Characters who sound like themselves
Foundry builds a speech model for each character covering their register, the vocabulary they reach for, the words they would never use, their verbal tics, and the boundary of what they actually know. It then drafts dialogue against that model and flags the lines that fall outside it, which matters most on the long projects where a character has been written by four people across two years.
There is also a rehearsal room, where two characters can improvise a scene either autonomously or with you in the conversation until a voice feels right. Nothing said in rehearsal is canon, and the only thing that survives is a line you deliberately promote.
Gameplay you can check before you build it
This is the capability that proves the category actually changed, because a pipeline cannot do it at all.
Actions in Foundry carry a short script, closer to a screenplay than to a programming language, describing who does what, under which conditions, and what they say while doing it, and Foundry turns that into structured data your engine can act on directly. Because the gameplay is authored in the same place as the world, Foundry can then reason about both together.
The validator reads your world and reports what is broken, covering references that point nowhere, commands that do not exist, scripts that need recompiling, locations nothing connects to, and cast members orphaned from their scenes. It grades findings by severity and never blocks your export, because it is your world and you decide what ships.
The simulator asks the harder question of whether a player can actually finish the thing. It walks your story from the opening, applies the effect of every step as it goes, and reports whether the ending is still reachable along with the exact path it took to get there, so a quest that cannot be completed because the key sits behind the door it opens surfaces during authoring instead of in a bug report six months after launch. Both the validator and the simulator are deterministic, neither calls a model, and neither costs anything to run.
It can be driven by a person or an agent
Foundry is built to be operated by people and by AI agents on equal terms. There is a command-line interface, so a coding agent on your team can run the pipeline as part of your build instead of a person clicking through it, and there is a Narrator inside the product, an assistant that operates Foundry on your behalf so you can ask for something in plain language and watch it happen. Wherever a convenience for humans conflicted with a stable contract a machine could rely on, we chose the contract, and that decision is why both surfaces exist.
What this means if you use Architect today
Nothing breaks and nothing is asked of you.
Your projects transfer automatically, with no export step, no migration weekend, and no version of this where you rebuild your world by hand. Both versions run in parallel first, so Foundry does not arrive by taking Architect away, and it only becomes the default once it has proven itself on real work. The credit model stays exactly as it is for now, and we say "for now" rather than "forever" because we would rather revisit it openly one day than make a promise today that we quietly walk back later.
The closed beta is running now, and the way in is our Discord.
Honest status
Foundry ships late August. That is a target rather than a contract, and if it moves we will say so here instead of letting the date quietly rot.
Some of what is described above is finished and some is still in development. What you can use today, with no waiting list and no beta key, is Architect v0.9.0, which is free, works, and is catalogued down to the last capability.
The short version
Architect converts a finished world into engine data. Foundry is where you build the world and the gameplay in the first place, which is why it can generate inside your world, hold your characters to their own voices, and tell you whether a player can reach the ending. It is the next version of Architect rather than a different product, your projects come with you, and the credit model is unchanged. It ships late August, and the closed beta is open now through our Discord.