Licensing and editions

How licensing works in Early Access, where owning the app on Steam takes the place of a licence key.

No licence step in Early Access#

Celas Studio in Early Access does not ask you to activate a licence, and there is currently no menu item that opens a licence screen. The app starts and runs fully without any activation step, on every platform. There is no trial period and no time limit tied to a licence: Early Access is a build stage, not a licence tier, and it is shown only as a label on the splash screen and in Help ▸ About.

What runs in the background#

The app has a licensing system underneath, and on Windows it quietly checks and caches a licence status at startup if one is already on record, but this check does not block or unlock anything today: no feature is enforced client-side, and there is no seat counting. Licence state, when present, is one of Active, Inactive, Blocked, Expired or Revoked, and an active licence can additionally carry a tier of Essential or Advanced. None of this is reachable from the interface in this build.

Licence activation only works on Windows, and even there it is not part of the Steam build you are running. On macOS and Linux the machine-identification and network calls a licence check needs are not implemented, so activation cannot succeed there regardless.

The Steam build#

Celas Studio is sold on Steam and nowhere else, so the Steam build is the one you have. Ownership through Steam takes the place of a licence entirely, and the app's own licence-checking code does not run in it at all. Steam itself is the gate: on launch the app confirms it was started through Steam and relaunches itself through Steam if it was not, and if Steam is not running at all it shows a message asking you to start Steam first, then closes.

Everything else (signing in to your celas.studio account, sharing to Artwall, crash reporting) is untouched by any of this and works the same way.

Where licence data is stored#

On the rare install where a licence has been cached, it is kept in license.dat, in a folder separate from the rest of your settings so it survives a reinstall. See Where Celas Studio keeps its files for the exact path per platform. The file is plain text, not encrypted.