The Codex
The Codex is a collection of all the information you have about your story. It is a place to store all the bits and pieces of information about your characters, locations, items, and more.
When writing your prose, the system automatically detects any Codex entries you have created by their name and aliases.
Types of Entries
The Codex is divided into several categories, each with their own type of entry. In general, they only serve to organize your entries, except for characters (as they can be references for POVs).
- Characters
- Locations
- Objects/Items
- Lore
- Other
Entry Details
Each entry has a set of properties that can be used to organize and describe them.
Name
The name of the entry. This is the primary name that will be used to organize the entry in your prose. As a tip, you should fill out their full name (e.g. “Dr. John Smith” instead of just “John”).
Tags
Tags are for grouping types of entries together. These are additional bits of information you can search for in the Codex. You can use them to quickly find all entries that have a certain tag.
Examples for tags are Gang Member, Orc, Planet, Artifact, etc. as well as tags like Protagonist, Antagonist, and so on.
In case you use a tag like their job description (e.g. “CEO of XYZ Corp”), you need to add the information to the description field as well. Otherwise the AI won’t know what you mean as tags aren’t added to their context.
Aliases
Aliases are alternative names for the entry. These can be just their first name, or a nickname, or even a title.
Description
The description is a place to write down any necessary information about the entry that the AI should know about as well. You should be fairly descriptive, while being concise to not overload the AI with too much context.
Notes
These notes are only visible to you and are not used in the generation of new prose. They are a place to write down any additional information you want to keep track of.
References
Behind the scenes, novelcrafter will automatically detect any Codex entries you have created by their name and aliases in your text. Places include scene summaries, notes, snippets and your prose. Detected entries are usually decorated with a dotted underline.
Once you click on a detected reference, a small preview card pops up to quickly glance at the entry’s details.
Global Entries
When you mark an entry as “global”, the entry’s details will always be included in the AI context.
Do Not Track
When you mark an entry as “do not track”, the entry’s details will never be looked for in any of your texts. Sometimes it makes sense to combine this with the global option!
Use cases include global entries for story details (e.g. “genre details”).
Nested References
These are meant to be a grouping feature. Let’s say you have something like “The Council of Five” and want to pull in the character sheets for all five members whenever the council gets mentioned.
You can also use this feature to have a single mention pull in all referenced documents (e.g. “Using World Building” could be a group that pulls in data about the Country, their customs and social structure…)
External References
In case you have a big character sheets or other notes that you have in Google Docs, Notion, or another tool, you can those that there. These links are not pulled into AI context (the AI can’t browse the web).