When we tell people Storyverse Author is at v3.40 and currently frozen for the website sprint, the natural assumption is that the app must be small. A frozen v3.40 sounds like an early-stage product on a long road.

It’s not.

The version number is conservative. The freeze is by design. And the app behind both is broader and deeper than what most platform-updates posts admit. This post is a tour. If you’ve been wondering what’s actually in there before signing up, this is the answer.

The Lobby

The entry point. After login, every member lands here — recent activity, quick links to the storyverses you’ve been working in, the books in active production, scenes you were last editing, and the current state of any in-progress framework or knowledge base reading. The Lobby is built to get you back to the work in two clicks. If you wrote scene 14 of book three yesterday, you should be staring at scene 14 of book three within ten seconds of logging in. That’s the design goal.

Storyverses, stories, and the production hierarchy

The data model goes deep. At the top is the writer (you, optionally one of multiple pen names). Under each writer are storyverses — top-level fictional universes you’re building. Inside storyverses live series, subseries, standalones, and stories. Inside stories live chapters and scenes. Every level has its own dashboard, its own metadata, its own production view. You can zoom from “everything I’m writing across all my pen names” all the way down to “the third paragraph of scene 4 of chapter 11 of book 2 of series A,” and the navigation makes that feel natural.

The plotting library

Nineteen story structures live in the platform — Save the Cat, Hero’s Journey, Snowflake, Seven-Point, Three Act, Kishōtenketsu, Story Circle, the Heroine’s Journey, and a dozen others. Each one is presented in full, with every beat documented and explained. You can read them side by side, pick one as your primary structure for a project, or tag scenes against multiple structures simultaneously (which is how most working writers actually use them — see The 19 Story Structures Aren’t Competing).

Scene-level methodology tagging

This is the layer most plotting tools skip. Every scene in your manuscript can be tagged with the beat it represents in any of the 19 structures, and the report views show you, at a glance, where each methodology says you’re strong, where you’re light, and where the structures disagree. The disagreement is often where the most useful craft conversation lives.

The character ecosystem

Characters get 22-section templates — appearance, voice, motivation, conflict, development, heritage, education, profession, ideas, plans, possessions, traits, tone, abilities, and more. Most “character templates” out there have five or six fields. Ours have twenty-two because that’s what working writers need to keep characters consistent across a series. You don’t have to fill all of them. They’re there when you need them.

The relationship graph

A live D3-rendered visualization of how every character in a storyverse connects to every other character. Romantic, professional, family, rivalry, mentor — every relationship type is rendered, color-coded, and interactive. You can see at a glance who knows whom, where the network is dense, and where a new relationship would fill a structural gap in your cast.

The Knowledge Base

A built-in reference library. Methodology deep-dives, framework documentation, app guides, craft essays. The KB is searchable, cross-linked, and integrated into the rest of the app — when you’re tagging a scene against Save the Cat and you can’t remember exactly what the All Is Lost beat is, you don’t leave the app to look it up. You hover, and the KB tells you.

The Manuscript Editor

Built on Tiptap — a modern rich-text editor with full chapter and scene navigation, revision history, formatting that exports cleanly, and direct connection to the scene metadata you’ve already entered. Write the scene, see its tags and beats and relationships in the side panel, and stay in the writing flow without context-switching to a separate tracking tool.

Nova Drift — the interactive galaxy map

A full Three.js 3D galaxy. Storyverse canon stars, regions, and planets are rendered as explorable space — zoom in on a system, click into a planet, read the lore. For writers building space-set fiction inside our cosmology (Architect-tier and up can build their own galaxies on top of the canon layer), it’s the difference between a paragraph of worldbuilding notes and a navigable universe.

The Arena — the vertical fantasy map

A different map system, built for vertical layered worlds. The Arena is a dark-fantasy realm with regions stacked above and below each other, each layer with its own ecology and politics. Like Nova Drift, it’s both a canon reference and a buildable platform.

The Theme System

Five visual themes, each calibrated for a different kind of writing session — high-contrast for editing, low-contrast for drafting, dark for late-night work, color-coded for project switching. Theme switching is instant. The app remembers per-page preferences.

The Command Palette

Cmd-K (or Ctrl-K) opens a global command palette. Search any character, location, story, scene, or piece of lore across every storyverse. Jump anywhere in the app. Run any command. It’s the fastest path through the app once you’ve learned a few of the keystrokes, and it scales gracefully as your inventory grows from one storyverse to a dozen.

Notifications, search, timeline, import, export

Less glamorous, all built. Notifications surface what’s changed. Global search returns matches across every entity in your account. The timeline view shows your work over weeks and months. Import and export tools move data in and out cleanly.

Why this matters for the v3.40 freeze

The point of this tour isn’t to brag. It’s to make a specific argument: the work that comes next during beta and beyond isn’t building from scratch. It’s layering on top of all of this.

Custom Structures, when it ships, integrates with everything above — your custom methodology gets the same scene-tagging treatment, the same report views, the same KB documentation hooks. Manuscript export hooks into the editor that’s already there. The mood music library plugs into the writing-session UI that’s already built.

The freeze is real, but it’s a freeze on a substantial app, not a thin one. Once it lifts, every new feature lands on top of an existing structure that’s already broad enough to support them.

If you’ve been waiting to see what Storyverse Author is before deciding whether to wait for beta, this is what it is. Beta opens after the website sprint. The newsletter will announce the application window. The work continues.