How to get your world out of World Anvil

World Anvil is the biggest worldbuilding platform there is, and most people who leave it are not rejecting it. They built a world there, the world grew a story, and now the writing needs to live beside the bible instead of across a browser tab. The good news: your world can come with you, on every World Anvil plan, free accounts included.

The less good news is that the export is not where the documentation says it is, and it is not the tidy archive people expect. We worked this out empirically, with a real world built for the purpose, because our importer had to parse whatever actually comes out. This guide is the map: where the export lives, exactly what the file contains, what never leaves, and how to move the whole thing without copying and pasting a single article.

Where the export lives

Older help articles describe an export archive with your world serialized inside it. What World Anvil actually ships today is simpler and stranger: a page.

1. Open your world and go to its configuration, then find Export.
2. It opens a view that renders your entire world as one long page: header, table of contents, then every article in full.
3. Save that page. Right-click and choose Save as, or press Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on a Mac). Any save format works; "Webpage, Complete" is fine.
4. You now have one .html file, plus a _files folder your browser adds. The single .html file is your world's text, and it is the only file an import needs. The folder is mostly trackers, but if your articles carry images, your browser put copies of them there too, so keep it (more under What never leaves).

That file is the export. There is no zip to wait for and no email to check. There is also a per-article Print/Export button at the bottom of each article's edit page if you only ever need one article, but for a move you want the whole page.

What the saved page contains

More than it looks like, and in better order than a rendered page has any right to be:

• Every article, in full, with your formatting intact: headings, lists, quotes, spoilers, tables. The BBCode you wrote arrives already rendered, so nothing needs to understand World Anvil's markup to read it.
• Each article's template, stated outright in its metadata: Character, Geographic Location, Organization, Item, Species, and so on.
• Sidebar sections as labeled pairs. Every prompt you filled in, a character's motivation, a settlement's type, an organization's leader, is there with its label.
• Mentions with identity. Every @-link between articles carries which article it points at, not just the name.
• Character relationships, with their type. A relationship you set between two characters exports with both parties and the label you chose: sibling, rival, spouse. This surprised us; it is the most structured thing on the page.
• Your timelines. Each timeline renders at the tail of the page with its entries in order: the date ranges, the titles, and which events you marked important. We expected these to be missing, tested for it, and were glad to be wrong.

Drafts export too

We verified this with an article deliberately left as a draft: it exports like any published article, with no draft marking anywhere on the page.

That cuts both ways. As a backup, it means the export is complete, drafts and all. As a fact about the file, it means nothing downstream can tell your drafts from your finished articles, so an import will treat them all the same. If some drafts should not make the trip, delete or finish them before you export.

What never leaves

Less than we feared, but two things still need care before you cancel, and only one of them is truly stuck:

• Maps do not export. Nothing map-shaped appears anywhere in the page. If your maps matter, download the original images from wherever you first uploaded them, while the account is still open. This is the one part of the move with a deadline.
• Images half-leave. The page references your images, and if you saved it as "Webpage, Complete" your browser put copies of them in the _files folder beside the file. Keep that folder: it is your image backup. An import carries your words, not your uploads, so the folder is also where your images live afterwards.

Everything else we tested made the trip, timelines included.

Moving the world

Drop the saved .html file on the PullAtlas import surface. It recognizes a World Anvil export page outright, and nothing is created until you approve the preview.

• Templates map to entry types, shown as groups you can override one by one: Characters become characters, Geographic Locations become locations, Organizations become factions, Items become items, and rarer templates land as notes until you decide what they are.
• Sidebar sections become custom fields, keeping their labels, so "Leader" and "Motivation" are still questions your bible asks.
• Article bodies become each entry's About text, with headings, lists, quote attributions and table text preserved as clean text. Nothing of World Anvil's markup leaks through.
• Relationships become connections that keep their labels. The sibling pair arrives once, labeled Sibling, not twice and not blank.
• Mentions become connections too, behind a toggle with the count shown, because a heavily cross-linked world can arrive as a hairball if you let it.
• Timelines become note entries, dates, titles and importance flags intact, so nothing you scheduled is lost on the way.
• The report tells the truth: entries by type, every renamed duplicate, every link that pointed at something you chose not to import, and the maps and images lines stated plainly.

The import creates a new private project by default, or can merge into a book you already started here, matching by name and alias, filling only what is empty, never overwriting your own writing.

Rebuilding the timeline

Your timelines arrive, dates and all, as note entries in the new bible. Nothing on them is lost. But they arrive as reference, not as machinery, because PullAtlas tracks time differently from World Anvil: not dates on a world calendar, but states anchored to chapters, which chapter the sword broke in, what the reader knows as of chapter 40.

If you are moving because the story now leads, that model is likely the one you wanted, and there are two honest ways to fill it. Record states as you write, with the imported timeline note open beside you as the source of truth, which costs nothing. Or run the AI pass that reads your manuscript against the imported bible and proposes chapter-anchored states for you to accept or reject, with your own AI key, only when you ask.

Your articles, sections, relationships, connections and timeline notes are already in. Placing the dates against chapters is the one translation left, and this time the story and the bible are in the same place while you do it.