Short answer: The strip across the bottom of Forge shows every scene in your project as a card, with the episode brackets above it. Hold Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) and scroll to zoom - the zoom centers on your cursor, and one zoom level covers both the scene cards and the episode bar. Plain scrolling pans the strip sideways. Zoomed out, cards simplify in stages until the strip becomes a compact read-only overview you can use to jump around a big project; you can never zoom out past the point where the whole story fits on screen. You can also drag the strip's top edge to make the cards taller and richer.
Zooming and panning
- Ctrl/Cmd + scroll zooms in and out, anchored on the point under your cursor.
- Plain scrolling pans the strip sideways; horizontal trackpad swipes work naturally.
- A small console sits at the strip's right edge with - and + buttons around a percentage readout: click the percentage to snap back to 100%, or click FIT to jump straight to the whole story on screen.
- The zoom floor always fits the whole story - you can't zoom out into empty space, and small projects hit that floor quickly.
- The thick scrollbar under the strip shows how much of the story is visible, so it doubles as a zoom gauge.
What cards show at each zoom level
At full zoom each card shows its scene number, event counts, and title, with its money and menu controls inline. As you zoom out, cards simplify in stages: first to just the title, then to a scene number with a compact title (controls move into a small toolbar that appears on hover), and finally to a slim read-only overview where cards exist only to jump you to a scene - hover one to see its title in a tooltip. The episode brackets simplify along with the cards, and the thin colored access marker on monetized scenes stays visible at every stage.
Making cards richer
The strip's height is draggable - grab its top edge. Taller cards show more: titles wrap to multiple lines, and a small event reel appears along the card's bottom edge whose length reflects how many events the scene holds. Shorter cards collapse to a single compact row. Every card also carries a quiet grip rail down its left edge - the drag handle for reordering scenes, which grows with the card - while the card body itself stays click-to-open.
Adding scenes and episodes from the strip
Every gap between two scene cards is an insert point, including before the first scene and after the last. Hover a gap and the strip parts to reveal a + that creates a new scene right there. The gaps between episodes carry their own always-visible + chip for creating a new episode.
Where the strip sits
By default the strip sits under the Stage. The pair of layout buttons at the top of the console at the strip's right edge (also in Forge's settings under General, as "Full-width strips") stretches it across the entire window instead.