The Librarian in the Walls
Imagine you have a librarian. She sits behind your conversation, quietly, with an entire reference collection at her fingertips. She waits, patient and quiet. But the moment someone says the word “castle,” she slides a card across the table: Built 500 years ago by King Aldric. Northern pass. Walls enchanted against siege magic. The AI reads it, nods, and suddenly knows things it didn't know thirty seconds ago.
That's a lorebook. A world-building database that listens for keywords and injects the right knowledge at the right moment, so the AI can be brilliant without you having to cram your entire fictional universe into a single character description.
You can define dozens of entries. Hundreds, if you're that kind of person (and honestly, I admire it). Places, people, political systems, the name of the bartender's cat. Each one waits in the stacks until it hears its cue.
The Shape of It
How the system breathes
You create a lorebook. Inside it, you write entries, each with keywords and content. When you send a message, Inkstone scans the most recent messages for those keywords. When it finds a match, the entry's content gets folded into the prompt, quiet as a footnote. The AI reads it and incorporates the knowledge naturally, as though it always knew.
The result: your world has depth without your prompt having weight. The AI only carries what's relevant to this moment, and the librarian handles the rest.
Building Your Collection
Settings > Lorebooks > tap the + button
Navigate to Settings > Lorebooks and tap the + button to create a new lorebook. Every lorebook has a few properties that govern how it behaves.
Anatomy of an Entry
Each entry is a small, self-contained piece of world knowledge
Name
organizationalA label for your own organizational sanity. The AI never sees it.
Keys
triggersThe trigger words. When these appear in recent messages, the entry wakes up. You can list several: “castle”, “throne room”, “fortress” would all activate the same entry about Aldric's stronghold.
Secondary Keys
precisionAdd precision. If you want an entry to trigger only when both a primary key and a secondary key appear, this is how. Useful for disambiguation: “Mercury” might refer to a planet, a god, or a poisonous element, and secondary keys help the librarian figure out which shelf to pull from.
Content
coreThe actual world information that gets injected into the prompt. This is what the AI reads. Make it count.
Position
Where in the prompt the entry lands. “Before character” places it ahead of the character card, good for world-level context that should color how the character is interpreted. “After character” places it after the character description and scenario, good for situational details that complement the character's existing setup.
Priority
A numeric weight. Higher numbers get matched first and win the budget competition when space is tight.
Case Sensitive
Controls whether keyword matching cares about capitalization. Usually you want this off, unless you need to distinguish between “polish” the verb and “Polish” the nationality.
Selective
When enabled, the entry only triggers when keywords are explicitly mentioned by the user, rather than by the AI. Keeps the librarian from responding to her own suggestions.
Constant
use sparinglyConstant entries ignore all trigger logic and are always present in the prompt. Use these for foundational world rules that should never leave the AI's awareness: the laws of magic, the year it is, the fact that gravity works differently here. But sparingly — constants eat your token budget every single turn.
Insertion Order
Governs the sort order when multiple entries match simultaneously. The librarian has to stack the cards in some order, and this is how you tell her which goes on top.
The Cooldown: TTL
Exclusively in Inkstone
Lorebook entries have a TTL (Time-to-Live) mechanism, and it exists for a good reason, exclusively in Inkstone. Without it, an entry would trigger every single turn the keyword appears, flooding your prompt with the same information over and over. The AI doesn't need to be reminded about the castle's enchanted walls every time someone walks past it.
Once an entry activates, it enters a cooldown period before it can fire again. The librarian slides the card across the table, waits for you to read it, then files it back. She'll pull it again later if you need it, but she won't wave it in your face.
Constant entries naturally ignore TTL. They live on the table permanently. That's the deal.
Connecting Lorebooks to Conversations
Two paths into a chat
Automatically, Through Characters
Many community-made character cards come with embedded world info baked in. When you import one of these characters, their lorebook rides along and automatically attaches to any chat with that character. This is the standard in the character-sharing community, and it means well-crafted characters arrive with their entire world already indexed.
Manually, Through the Chat Menu
In any conversation, tap the options menu and select “Lorebooks” to link or unlink specific collections. Add a shared lorebook to multiple characters. Layer extra world-building onto a conversation that needs it. Remove a lorebook that's cluttering a particular story. The librarian works for you, and you get to decide which books she brings.
Acquiring New Lorebooks
Three directions into your collection
Embedded in Character Cards
The most common path. Import a character from Chub.ai or a similar community hub, and check whether it came with world info attached. Many do, and the result is a noticeably richer experience.
Imported as Standalone Files
From the Lorebooks management screen, useful when someone shares a lorebook separately from any character.
Built from Scratch
Entry by entry, for worlds that exist only in your head. This is where the real worldbuilders live.
Managing Your Library
Settings > Lorebooks
The Lorebooks screen at Settings > Lorebooks is your catalog. Tap any lorebook to see its entries, where you can add new ones, edit existing keywords and content, delete entries that have outlived their usefulness, search by keyword or name, and adjust priority to control which entries take precedence when several match at once.
The Librarian's Advice
One concept per entry works better than stuffing three ideas into one card. The librarian is good at pulling individual references; she's less good at parsing a paragraph that's about a castle, a queen, and the local currency all at once.
Too common, and the entry fires on every other message, burning budget for information the AI already absorbed three turns ago. Too obscure, and it never triggers at all. The sweet spot is words that are specific to the concept but natural enough to appear in conversation. “Castle” works. “Architectural fortification” does not.
At 2,500 tokens, you have room for maybe four or five substantial entries per turn. Priority determines who gets through the door when it's crowded, so rank your entries honestly. The enchanted walls of the castle are probably more important than the color of the courtyard flowers.
If you're importing community characters, always check the lorebook. Some of the best character experiences on the platform come from cards where someone spent hours building a world that the AI discovers one keyword at a time. The librarian is only as good as her collection, and the community has built some extraordinary ones.
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