Everything we know about how the 'Westworld' theme park works

The control center has a giant, interactive digital rendering of the park, which may have confused some viewers into believing the park was all virtual reality. But showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have confirmed that it's a very real place.

We don't know where on Earth Westworld is supposed to be though, nor do we know what year in the future the park's creators are living. But we know it's a real (and enormous) place designed meticulously to looked like the Wild West of the late-1800s.

Everything the hosts do is written into their narrative, but they have a wide variety of possible paths. This enables the guests to interact with them at any given point during the day, and therefore trigger a different possible storyline.

We saw this with Teddy. On one day, he walked through the park uninterrupted until he saw Dolores, and then the two of them were set on a story loop that led back her ranch. But the next day Teddy was found by a guest, leaving Dolores to do her shopping and then go out and paint for awhile, where other guests found her.

The park's creators have no control over what the guests say to the hosts, which means they've had to create a wide variety of dialogue for each robot. All of their conversational replies are scripted, with small opportunities for improvisation as needed.

The one exception happens whenever a guest specifically calls out the nature of the hosts' robotic reality. "If you try to communicate with the hosts in any way that's outside of the storyline, or that brings in the real world at all, or that questions their reality, they're programmed to ignore it," Evan Rachel Wood (Dolores Abernathy) explained in a behind-the-scenes video.

We also asked the Westworld chat bot "Aeden" about how safety works in the park. Its answer explained how Sweetwater is the tamest area of the park. We heard this in the premiere when the father of a family said: "I don't think we're supposed to cross the river — that's too adult for Jacob."

"You won't be in any physical danger at Westworld, though the further you get from Sweetwater, the rowdier things can get," Aeden says. "The park only has one rule: You cannot hurt another human."

Human can shoot and kill the hosts as often as they want. But when the hosts shoot back (or when a guest tries to shoot another guest) the bullets won't penetrate skin — instead it hits the guests but with minimal impact. In an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, co-creator Jonathan Nolan explained how the guns and bullets work.

"We thought a lot about this," Nolan told Rotten Tomatoes. "In the original film, the guns won't operate guest on guest, but we felt like the guests would want to have a more visceral experience here. So when they're shot it has sort of the impact. They're called simunitions. The U.S. military trains with rounds like the ones we're talking about. But there's a bit of an impact, a bit of a sting. So it's not entirely consequence-free for the guests."

So guests can't shoot other guests, but how are other accidents prevented? Nolan explained this to Rotten Tomatoes, as well.

"We have a feature in the program called The Good Samaritan Reflex or Function," Nolan said. "Part of their subconscious programming is to try to protect the guests in whatever capacity it can. So if you've got a drunken guest who's careening towards a cliff edge, you're more likely than not to have a host nearby who, without breaking that narrative, is going to find a way to gently steer them back."

Nolan told Entertainment Weekly all about the logistics of the park's maintenance facility.

"So the idea is that most of the facilities are underground," Nolan told EW. "We sort of pictured a 100-story building skyscraper that goes down instead of up, which for us was also a visual metaphor for the age of the park. When you’re in the older portion of it [far below the surface], the cold storage, it has been clearly repurposed from something that used to be more grand."

We know employees must live there for extended periods of time, since Lee Sizemore (the head of Narrative) asked Theresa Cullen (head of Quality Assurance) when her "next rotation home" was.

Episode one concluded with Dolores Abernathy (a host) swatting and killing a fly on her neck. This was a significant ending, because the hosts are supposed to be incapable of killing or harming any living thing — flies included.

This is why we saw flies crawling uncomfortably close to the hosts' eyes earlier in the episode, and watched as Bernard assured the head of Quality Assurance that a host's "core code" was intact, which would meant it "literally couldn't hurt a fly."

If Dolores was able to kill the fly, it means that core code is beginning to splinter. What will that mean for the safety of the guests moving forward? We'll have to keep watching to find out.