Making what should exist

For Kruithne, most projects begin the same way.

“I go, I wish this existed, and then I remember you can just make things, so then I do.”

It’s a deceptively simple mindset, and one that’s led to years of creative contribution across World of Warcraft. Few of the addons and tools we see and use started with a grand plan. They started with curiosity, a problem to solve, and a willingness to learn by doing.

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I never do when I start something,” he says. “But I’m always happy to throw myself head first into learning something new.”

That willingness to leap without a map has become a defining feature of his work. If something feels missing, broken, or unexplored, he doesn’t wait for permission. He builds it!

Twenty Ideas, One Dice Roll

Deciding what to work on next isn’t a tidy process.

“At any given time there’s at least twenty things I want to build or create,” Kruithne explains. “By the time I get one thing out the door, I’ve added three more to the list.”

Sometimes the next project is dictated by circumstance. Sometimes it’s just what makes the most sense in the moment. And sometimes, quite literally, it comes down to chance.  He moves fast too, often at full speed, across multiple projects at once. The challenge isn’t finding focus. It’s stepping away.

“As soon as I’ve got the itch for a project, I’ll hyper-focus on it for weeks, months, years.”

Building wow.export

wow.export is one of Kruithne’s most widely used projects.  It's a tool many people use without ever thinking about who built it.  Allowing players, artists and other creators to take World of Warcraft assets and bring them into entirely new spaces, but, it didn’t start as a community tool at all.

“It actually started out because of Dungeons & Dragons,” he explains.

Running games online using Tabletop Simulator, he wanted to bring World of Warcraft props into his sessions. That led him to WoWExportTools, created by his friend and co-developer Marlamin. From there, involvement turned into collaboration, and collaboration turned into a bigger question about what the tool could be.

“We felt like we were hitting some bottlenecks in the tech stack,” he says. “So I proposed rewriting it from the ground up.”

What began as a way to solve a specific problem quickly grew into something more open-ended. Kruithne found himself using it not just to test functionality, but to create with it.

“I started doing 3D artwork as a way to dog-food the tool, and then that ended up becoming a whole thing by itself, which then in turn became fuel for a lot of features as I found myself wanting them to help create art.”

For a long time, success looked abstract.

“We knew there were lots of people using the tool, we could see the download metrics… but they’re just numbers on a page.”

The moment it became real came later.

“Actually having hundreds of people joining a community based around wow.export, actual people with names and faces, and having so many of them support the project, that was when I realized.”

Simple on the Surface, Powerful Underneath

Designing a tool for both casual users and advanced modders isn’t straightforward.

“If the tool presents itself with a million bells and whistles, normal users will be scared away,” Kruithne says. “But, if you make it too simple, power users won’t get any mileage.”

wow.export walks that line deliberately. The core flow is kept clean and approachable, with advanced options tucked away for those who want them.

“We keep the default settings aimed at what we think the average user will expect, so there’s no tinkering required out of the gate.”

At the same time, raw data and deeper controls are always there.

“For power-users, we’re always trying to make as much of the raw data available as well, and work with a few of the bigger content creators to understand what they need.”

Asked which feature he’s most proud of, the answer isn’t immediate.

“That’s hard to pick,” he admits. “But I think for me it’ll always be the map viewer. Being able to load a World of Warcraft map, select a specific area, and take it straight into external 3D software still feels magical - I love that.”

Turning Exploration into Play

Where in Warcraft? is a game born out of curiosity and deep knowledge of the world itself. Built around recognising locations from screenshots, it turns Azeroth’s forgotten corners into a shared challenge for explorers who pride themselves on knowing the map inside out.

Kruithne’s game began as a private challenge between friends.

“I’d find somewhere really obscure,” he explains. “Often by breaking out of bounds in dungeons or in unreachable places, and send a screenshot.”

The challenge wasn’t just identifying the location. It was getting there and recreating the shot.

“We were pretty mean to each other,” he says. “The locations would often be very obscure and even more challenging to actually get to.”

Eventually, the idea of turning it into a real game took hold.

“One day we decided it would be cool as an actual game,” he says. “Although a less mean version.”

After thousands of screenshots and more than a few late nights, it became a celebration of exploration rather than endurance.

Tools, Art, and Unexpected Impact

Not all of Kruithne’s work sits neatly inside WoW. His Blender add-ons, for example, exist in a separate ecosystem entirely.

“They’re very detached from most of my other work,” he says. “But I think they’re pretty cool.”

What consistently surprises him, though, is what people build with his tools.

Seeing props and cosplay created using wow.export assets stands out in particular.

“I’ve been involved in theatre work all my life,” he says. “So seeing people bring these things into the real world, and knowing my tool played a tiny part in that, is amazing.”

What Comes Next

The long-awaited wow.export update is no longer looming on the horizon, it’s out in the wild.

With that milestone behind him, Kruithne hasn’t slowed down. If anything, he’s accelerated.

“I recently announced that I’m working on my own game,” he says. “Three games, technically, all built from scratch in my own handmade engine.”

This isn’t a distant idea anymore. It’s already in motion. He’s documenting the journey through a dev log on his website, sharing daily updates across social platforms, and even publishing videos that pull back the curtain on his process.

After a decade of tinkering, the prototypes aren’t staying hidden.

They’re becoming something real, one day at a time.

“Just Start”

If there’s one piece of advice Kruithne comes back to, it’s this:

“Just do it. Just start.”

Excuses build walls but starting knocks them down.

“Draw a box or some text on the screen,” he says. “Once you’ve got a starting point, you can iterate.”

The first version will be bad. That’s expected.

“My first prototype for something will always be the worst, hackiest pile of garbage ever.”

But that’s how things are made.

“You don’t start by wallpapering when you haven’t even got any walls.”

Make a mess first. Clean it up later.

And maybe that’s the thread running through everything Kruithne builds.

Not perfection, or polish, or even certainty. Just the refusal to wait. A belief that if something feels missing, it’s worth trying to make it exist. That tools can invite creativity rather than gatekeep it, and that exploration is still one of the most powerful ways we connect to a world we love.

In a community built on shared spaces and shared stories, his work doesn’t demand attention. It simply opens possibilities and lets people step through.

Lady A x

Kruithne is a long-time World of Warcraft creator whose work quietly underpins how many people explore, reinterpret, and create from the game. From add-ons and tooling to games built purely for the joy of discovery, his projects sit behind the scenes, enabling others to see Azeroth differently.  We caught up with him to find out more about his projects and how he got started!