Writing Vault Entries

Writing Vault Entries

This is the hub for authoring lorebook entries in your Obsidian vault. Start here, then jump to the page you need.

How it works

1. You write notes in Obsidian with YAML frontmatter
2. Notes tagged with #lorebook are indexed as lorebook entries
3. The keys field lists keywords. When those keywords appear in recent chat messages, the entry is injected into the AI prompt
4. With AI Search enabled, a summary field helps the AI decide when to select the entry even without exact keyword matches

That's it. Tag it, give it keywords, write your lore.

The absolute minimum is a tag and some content:

---
tags:
  - lorebook
keys:
  - Silver Keep
---

# Silver Keep

A crumbling fortress on the northern ridge, now home to bandits and bad memories.

When "Silver Keep" appears in chat, this content gets injected. Everything else is optional and exists to give you finer control.

Where to go next

• Vault Entry Templates — Complete, copy-paste-ready notes for every entry type: characters, locations, lore, organizations, story arcs, constants, seeds, bootstraps, and more. The fastest way to start writing.
• Frontmatter Fields — The complete field reference: every YAML field, its type, default, and meaning; priority guidelines; the special #lorebook-* tags; and the recommended content structure (meta-blocks, hiding content from the AI).
• Advanced Entry Gating — Conditional control over when an entry fires: requires/excludes, cooldown/warmup/probability, refine_keys/selective_logic, cascade_links, contextual gating, and macro-based outlet injection.
• Custom Fields — Define your own contextual gating fields beyond the four defaults.
• For World Info Users — If you imported a SillyTavern World Info book, this explains the extra frontmatter fields your entries may carry.

What each AI sees

Your vault entry is used by two different AIs that see very different things. Understanding the difference helps you write better entries and summaries.

The selection AI (AI Search manifest)

The selection AI never sees your full entry. It sees a compact one-line manifest entry and uses it to decide whether your entry is relevant to the current conversation:

<entry name="Valen Ashwick">
Valen Ashwick (285tok) → Ashwick Estate, Ironveil Guild, Sera Thornwick, Korrath
Rogue spellsword and former member of the Ironveil Guild. Select when melee combat,
dual-wielding, shadow magic, guild politics, or the Ashwick bloodline comes up.
Close ally of Sera and rival of Korrath.
</entry>

Part	Source	Purpose
Valen Ashwick	Entry title	Identifies the entry
(285tok)	Estimated from content length	Helps the AI consider token budget
→ Ashwick Estate, ...	Extracted from [[wikilinks]] in content	Shows relationships to other entries
Summary text	summary frontmatter field	Tells the AI when to select this entry

If an entry has no summary field, the content is truncated to ~600 characters instead. Writing good summaries matters: the selection AI's only context for your entry is this compact view.

An entry without a summary or wikilinks gets an even simpler manifest line:

<entry name="Silver Keep">
Silver Keep (25tok)
A crumbling fortress on the northern ridge, now home to bandits and bad memories.
</entry>

The writing AI (injected context)

When an entry is selected, the writing AI sees your cleaned content wrapped in the injection template (default: <Title>content</Title>). Several things are automatically stripped before injection:

<Valen Ashwick>
A disgraced spellsword who left the Ironveil Guild after discovering their
true purpose. Now works as a mercenary, haunted by the magic branded into
his blood.

[Species: Half-elf | Role: Spellsword, mercenary | Aliases: the Duskblade | ...]

## Background
Valen grew up on the Ashwick Estate, trained from childhood in both blade
and spell...

## Relationships
- Sera Thornwick -- Closest ally...
- Korrath -- Former Guild partner turned hunter...

## Combat Style
Valen fights with twin short swords and weaves shadow magic between strikes...
</Valen Ashwick>

Notice what changed compared to the raw Obsidian note:

• The first H1 heading (# Valen Ashwick) is stripped. It's redundant with the XML wrapper title.
• Wikilinks are converted to plain text: [[Sera Thornwick]] becomes Sera Thornwick, [[Link|Display]] becomes Display.
• HTML div tags are stripped (the content inside is kept, so meta-blocks still work).
• Image embeds (![[image.png]], ![alt](url)) are removed.
• Obsidian comments (%%...%%) are removed.

What's included	What's NOT included
Everything after the frontmatter ---	YAML frontmatter (keys, priority, summary, requires, etc.)
Full prose, meta-blocks, all headings except H1	The first H1 heading (used as title in the XML wrapper)
Wikilink text (converted to plain text)	Wikilink brackets and image embeds
Content outside exclusion zones	%%deeplore-exclude%% regions (see [[Frontmatter Fields#hiding-content-from-the-writing-ai

The summary is for the selection AI. The content is for the writing AI. Two purposes, two surfaces. Write each accordingly. See Frontmatter Fields#writing-good-summaries for how to write summaries that actually help the selection AI.

Tips

• Start simple. A tag and some keywords is enough. Add fields as you need them.
• Keywords are case-insensitive by default. "Valen", "valen", and "VALEN" all match. You can change this in Settings Reference.
• Use wikilinks. When entry A links to entry B with [[Entry B]], recursive scanning can pull in related entries automatically.
• Test with Context Cartographer. After generating a message, check what was injected and why. See Features for details.
• Summaries are for the search AI, not the writing AI. Don't put character descriptions in summaries. Put when to select this entry in summaries.
• Priority matters for constants too. Even always-send entries use priority to determine injection order.
• Don't over-tag. An entry only needs #lorebook. Add special tags (#lorebook-always, etc.) only when you specifically need that behavior.
• Run /dle-lint after authoring. Catches common frontmatter footguns (case-wrong field names, comma-string keys, quoted numerics, missing fences) at once.