Settings Reference

Every option in the game, what it does, and which ones are worth changing first.

Settings live behind the ☰ button in the top-left corner. It opens a small game menu, and the game menu leads to a full-screen settings workspace.

On beta the main menu has Settings too. Its Settings button — at the foot of the menu's rail on a wide screen — opens the same workspace straight away, holding what applies to every game. A game's own choices — its player focus, its pick of map — stay in that game's ☰ menu.

The game menu

The game menu's Settings tab — the four tiles open the settings workspace at that section.

Press ☰ and you get the game menu with four tabs — Game, Tools, Settings and Help. Game holds the current campaign and Game Management (switch, duplicate, import or manage campaigns). Tools puts cheats, the events timeline and the AI debug console one click away. Help has the wiki, bug reporting, the privacy policy and the community links.

Choosing one of the four Settings tiles opens the full-screen workspace with that section selected:

On beta there is a fifth tile, ♫ Sound, for the music and the sound effects (see Sound below), and Help also has Check for updates, which asks the installed app for a newer build there and then.

Where things are

On beta: the music and its volume are in ☰ → Settings → Sound; the switch between the Political and Diplomatic map is in ☰ → Settings → Map, and also at the bottom right of the screen, under the advisor's button.

AI

The only part you must set up. Covered in full in connecting an AI provider and AI providers and models.

Models and connections

The AI section opens on a list headed Models. Each entry is a model on a connection:

Several entries can share one connection, and the list is tried from the top: when one model runs out or cannot answer, the next one takes over. See backup models. + Add a backup adds an entry, Fill… builds the list from every model you type on every connection you tick, and Clear list empties it while keeping your connections and keys. When a model is rate limited decides what a short pause from the provider does: use the next one straight away (the default), or wait and try the same one again, which spares your backups' daily allowance at the cost of a slower turn. Model reasoning sits under the list and applies to every entry.

The Connections section below it lists every saved connection, how many entries use it, and ready-made ones to add: + Groq, + OpenRouter and + Local Ollama. Removing a connection names the entries that go with it before it asks.

A first Gemini connection fills the list with Google's defaults — gemini-3.5-flash-lite, with gemini-3.1-flash-lite as its backup. An OpenAI entry with no model runs gpt-6-luna; an Anthropic one runs claude-haiku-4-5.

On beta the key field has an eye button to show or hide the key as you type it, and in the desktop app there is a sixth provider, Your own Agent, under Your subscription. It needs no key: what you start waits for your own Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Antigravity CLI, signed in with your own account and opened in the Agent folder (Open the Agent folder, and a Copy the command for… button for each), where typing /answer answers everything waiting, a whole time skip included. Its switches say which of Time skips, Advisor, Diplomacy, Game Master and Interactive events go to it; Pause my Agent sends everything to the entry below it while you are away. Anything unticked, and what the game starts by itself, goes to the next entry in the list — with nothing below it, that background work does not run.

AI requests

A free key allows a few hundred requests a day, and this section decides how many the game spends. It shows how many have been used today (counted on this device, from midnight Pacific time, which is when a Gemini key's day begins) and what your last time skip cost.

On beta the section does more. Used today, by task opens the day's count task by task; an Emergency AI stop box holds Cancel all AI requests, which stops every AI call the game can still abort; and NPC votes in an institution are a second thing, beside the Stats refresh, that can add a request to a skip when they fall due.

Generation behaviour

On beta, Player focus sits here too — how much of each time skip is about your own country, stored with the game rather than the device. See time and turns. So does Stop when my events fail, off by default: on, a skip that has an event about your country refused, or an order of yours left without an outcome, stops before anything is saved and lists what failed, so you can retry those events, retry the whole skip, or keep it and move on.

General

UI language translates the interface. Applying it reloads the page. Twenty-two languages ship fully translated — Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu and Vietnamese — and the list marks them. In those, the interface costs no AI requests at all; only content a scenario's author or a player wrote (scenario names, polity names, custom events) is sent to your model to translate, once. Other languages are still offered, translated by your model as panels are met.

AI chat language is separate: it is the language leaders and events are written in. You can run an English interface with French diplomacy, or the reverse.

Fullscreen is under Display, and Reduce motion under Accessibility. Reduce motion turns on both camera switches in the Map section at once — turn it on first if the game feels busy or you are prone to motion sickness.

Privacy holds the two things the game tells other services about you, with a link to the privacy policy:

On beta, Display also has Show the vault door every time, off by default: the door shows the first time the game opens after an update, and with this on, at every start. Reduce motion also follows your system's own reduced-motion setting (the switch then shows on and cannot be turned off here), lands a region's new colour at once instead of sweeping it in, and lets the vault door simply fade away.

Sound

Beta channel only.

The game has a soundtrack: music by Scott Buckley, released under CC BY 4.0, which Settings credits along with every piece it ships. The menu, a game opening, a game being played and the War Room each have their own; a scenario may bring tracks of its own from the community hub's music list.

While a scenario's own track plays, Now playing names it and who made it.

Map

Switching the globe on or off shows the game's loading screen while the map redraws from nothing.

On beta the Map section has more. Map mode switches between Political and Diplomatic, which colours each country by where it stands with you — your puppets, allies, friends, hostile countries and enemies at war; every time the game opens it starts on Political. In a game, Basemap picks among the maps the scenario offers, the starting one first, and the pick is kept for that game on this device; from the main menu it is Use my default basemap and Default basemap, a built-in map every game starts on wherever its scenario offers it. In the desktop app, Detailed maps lists the scenario's large terrain maps you are missing or have an older version of, with Download…, and Browse and download maps… opens your basemaps, your detailed maps and the community's. Seasons and weather (on by default) tints the map by the season and shows its weather, and Weather effects under it (on by default, off by default in Low memory) draws the rain, snow, frost and fog. Performance mode is Auto, Low memory or Full: Auto picks Low memory in the Android app, on a touch screen with no mouse, and on a device with 4 GB of memory or less, and a change applies after the game is reloaded.

Advanced

On beta, with Let other devices connect on, a second switch — Let other devices send AI calls through this server — lets a browser on another device reach a model running on this computer (LM Studio, Ollama) that refuses calls from other sites. And a Storage section, on the desktop, says how many community downloads are kept and how much room they take, with Clear download cache; past 1 GB the ones used longest ago are removed on their own.

What to change first

1. Set up your AI provider. Nothing else matters until this is done.
2. Look at AI requests if you are on a free key — the defaults are chosen for one, and the counter tells you what a turn costs.
3. Turn on Limit AI generation if you are running a local model.
4. Try the 3D globe. It is the better way to look at the world, and it costs little.
5. Leave 3D terrain off unless you specifically want it — it is the most expensive thing in the game to render.
6. Reduce motion if the interface feels restless.

Where settings are stored

All of it lives in your browser's local storage, or in the desktop app's own profile. Settings are therefore per device and per install, not per save — moving a campaign to another machine does not carry your API key with it, which is deliberate.

It also means the beta build keeps entirely separate settings from the stable one. Installing beta does not inherit your stable API key; you will need to paste it in again.

Detailed logging

☰ → Settings → Advanced → Diagnostics → Detailed logging, off by default.

The ordinary log is a running record of what you did — saves opened, orders queued, turns taken — and anything that went wrong. Detailed logging records everything, and it is the difference between a bug report someone can act on and one that just says the game misbehaved.

Please turn it on before reporting a bug

If you are about to report something — especially anything about the advisor, diplomacy or a turn going wrong — switch it on, reproduce the problem, then save the log as a file and attach it. A maintainer can very often find the cause immediately from a detailed log and not at all from a normal one.

What it adds

Both keep up to 5,000 entries and 1 MB; the difference is what gets recorded, not how much is kept.

And it records what the normal log leaves out:

• Every message to and from your advisor, in full.
• Every diplomatic message, in full, with who said it to whom.
• Letters the advisor drafted, and the notes countries send you.
• Every AI task and what it answered, and why an answer was rejected.
• What each turn changed in the world.
• Every server request and every save, with sizes.
• Which panels you opened, and the game's routine console messages.

The conversations are deliberate. The bugs people actually report about diplomacy are about the content of an exchange — "it forgot what I told it", "it replied as the wrong country", "it drafted a letter and sent something else" — and a log that records only that an exchange happened cannot settle any of them.

What it means for your privacy

It quotes considerably more of your campaign than the normal log: your conversations, in full. That is all fiction you or the model wrote, but it is yours, so read the log before you paste it somewhere public.

API keys are never recorded. Nothing on this path reads a key deliberately, and every entry is run through a redaction pass as it is written — not at export time — so a key that arrives by accident inside a provider error or a URL is scrubbed before it is ever stored.

Both switches persist across restarts and across campaigns.

Next

• The interface — the rest of the screen.
• AI providers and models — choosing a model properly.
• Troubleshooting — when a setting does not fix it.

Open Historia is under active development on two channels, and this wiki is written by hand — a page can fall behind a release. Last checked against the game on 2026-10-25 · main 6e6239c4 · beta d7e8fa85. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.