The game's plot was fragmented and incomplete with tiny snippets of background information about the world and its history being learned from scanning various in-game objects.

Atlas crystals were minerals once mined by the ancient precursor civilisation referenced in Worlds Adrift's lore and were valued for their anti-gravity properties.

[6] The game's complex persistent world is run by a cloud-based operating system called SpatialOS created by a UK-based company named Improbable.

[7] SpatialOS allows a simulated world, with a day and night cycle, to be inhabited by millions of complex entities in a real-time environment.

The program's "worlds" can span massive regions of digital space (processing power per cubed kilometer ratio), contain millions of individually simulated entities with complex behavior, and run across thousands of servers in the cloud.