Advanced Entry Gating

Advanced Entry Gating

These fields give you fine control over when an entry fires — beyond simple keyword matching. For copy-paste examples of each, see Vault Entry Templates; for the field table and defaults see Frontmatter Fields. New to authoring? Start at Writing Vault Entries.

All of these are optional. A plain entry with just keys works fine — reach for these when an entry triggers too often, too rarely, or only in specific situations.

requires / excludes — entry dependencies

requires makes an entry activate only when other named entries are also matched in the same generation. excludes blocks an entry when any named entry is present.

requires:
  - Valen Ashwick
  - The Soulbrand   # both must be matched for this entry to activate
excludes:
  - Brand Removed   # if this entry is matched, block this one

• requires: all listed titles must be matched.
• excludes: if any listed title is matched, this entry is blocked.
• Titles must match the target entry's title exactly, and are case-sensitive. A typo silently drops the gate, so run /dle-lint after editing.

Note

requires / excludes match by bare title, which is cross-vault: a Castle entry in vault A satisfies a requires: [Castle] gate in vault B. This is intentional. If you have same-named entries in different vaults, be aware they're interchangeable for gating purposes.

Use cases: spoiler prevention (don't reveal the twist entry until the setup entry is active), mutually exclusive world states (Brand Removed excludes the Active Brand entry), and detail entries that only make sense in the presence of their parent concept.

cooldown / warmup / probability — trigger rate control

These three throttle how often an entry fires.

cooldown: 5       # after firing, skip for the next 5 generations
warmup: 2         # keyword must appear ≥2 times in scan text before firing
probability: 0.5  # 50% chance to fire even when matched

• cooldown — After the entry triggers, it's skipped for N generations. Prevents the same atmospheric or flavor block from repeating every turn. Only values greater than 0 take effect.
• warmup — The keyword must appear N or more times in the scan text before the entry can trigger. Filters out one-off passing mentions. Only values greater than 0 take effect.
• probability — A 0.0–1.0 chance the entry fires when matched (values are clamped to that range). Omit, or set 1.0, for "always when matched." Useful for random flavor — a rumor that surfaces only sometimes.

refine_keys / selective_logic — secondary keyword filter

refine_keys adds a second keyword set on top of your primary keys. The selective_logic field decides how those refine keys are evaluated. This is the tool for entries whose primary keyword is common ("the Guild", "the king") and over-fires.

keys:
  - the Guild
refine_keys:
  - contract
  - mission
  - branded
selective_logic: and_any   # default — ≥1 refine key must also appear

A primary keys match is always required first. Then the refine keys are checked according to selective_logic:

selective_logic	Triggers when…
and_any (default)	At least one refine key also matches.
and_all	All refine keys also match.
not_all	At least one refine key is missing (a full match blocks the entry).
not_any	No refine key matches (any refine-key hit blocks the entry).

Invalid selective_logic values fall back to and_any and are flagged by /dle-lint with W_INVALID.

Note

An empty refine_keys list passes for all four modes — the refine gate is vacuously satisfied, so the entry behaves as if it had no refine filter.

Note

Refine-key gating applies to the primary keyword and recursion match paths. The BM25 fuzzy-match path does not apply refine keys (TF-IDF scoring is content-wide by design).

cascade_links — auto-pull related entries

cascade_links pulls in other named entries unconditionally whenever this entry matches — no keyword check on the linked entries.

cascade_links: ["Soulbrand Removal", "Ironveil Guild"]

This is different from [[wikilink]] recursion. Wikilinks make the linked entry a candidate that still has to pass its own keyword scan; cascade links pull the entry in regardless.

Use cases:

• Lore mechanics that always travel together (a blood-bond entry cascading to its feeding-mechanics entry).
• Locations with sub-locations (a fortress cascading to its dungeon and armory).
• Characters with a dedicated ability entry that should always come along.

Contextual gating — era / location / scene / characters

The four default contextual fields gate an entry on the current story context, which you set with slash commands rather than chat keywords:

era: pre-war
location: The Docks
scene_type: investigation
character_present:
  - Maren Blacktide

Set the active context with /dle-set-era, /dle-set-location, /dle-set-scene, /dle-set-characters, or the generic /dle-set-field <name> [value].

How it works:

• Entries with no contextual fields are always eligible (they pass through unfiltered).
• Each field is checked independently: an entry with only era set is filtered only on era, regardless of location / scene / character.
• The four defaults use the match_any operator at moderate tolerance — the entry passes if any of its listed values matches the active context value.
• Use /dle-context-state to see the current active context.
• Context is stored per-chat in chat_metadata.deeplore_context.

These four fields ship out of the box. You can add, remove, or modify gating fields via the "Manage Fields" rule builder (Filters tab toolbar or Settings popup). Custom field definitions are stored in DeepLore/field-definitions.yaml in your vault, where each field gets a type (string, number, boolean), a gating operator (match_any, match_all, not_any, exists, not_exists, eq, gt, lt), and a tolerance level (strict, moderate, lenient). See Custom Fields for the full schema.

outlet — macro-based injection

The outlet field injects the entry's cleaned content wherever you place the matching {{outlet::name}} macro, instead of using positional injection.

outlet: house_rules

Place {{outlet::house_rules}} in your system prompt, character card, or any prompt-list slot, and DLE substitutes the entry there. Outlet entries skip the normal positional injection (before / after / in_chat). Useful for recurring lore that must appear at a precise, fixed spot in the prompt.

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