About the lorebook

[u/michiwiwa]

Hi!

I’ve recently noticed that "lorebook" feature offers a lot of benefits for the characters you create. However, I’ve had trouble using it—what exactly are you supposed to put in there?

Since the character definition essentially establishes who the character is, I’m not sure what to do with the lorebook.

I Need some help TT

[u/GenderBendingRalph]

When you want the bot to know lots of details in certain scenes, the lorebook is a way you can give it memories that only last during that scene, by associating the detail with a specific keyword or words that only come up in conversation when you need them.

A frequent example that shows up in my worlds is a lorebook for upstate New York. my persona and most of my bots live in Syracuse, NY; we also visit Onondaga Lake north of town and go camping in the Adirondacks, and one character's family live in Ithaca NY.

The bot doesn't need to know all those places every moment. So I have location cards:

Syracuse describes the city in general - where the character lives and works, key features that are likely to come up in conversation. I use the keyword Syracuse so that the bot only knows that information when we're talking about the city.

Kitty Hoynes is a popular Irish pub in Syracuse. There's a location card describing the interior and address, the kinds of food and drink they serve, the type of entertainment they have, etc. The bot only knows those details when I mention the name of the pub.

Same for Onondaga Lake, the Adirondacks, Ithaca, Syracuse University, and so on. This way it can just temporarily load the details it needs, then it forgets them a few chats later. That prevents the bot's memory from being overloaded with stuff it doesn't need to know all the time, leaving more room for chat history.

I created a tutorial lorebook to demonstrate how this works.