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Overview

This guide covers everything you do inside NeoTavern on a daily basis: chatting with characters, building your library, tuning generation, and keeping your data safe. Each page is self-contained, so start anywhere.

How the Guide Is Organized​

The user guide follows the shape of the app itself. NeoTavern keeps a single chat-first workspace: the chat canvas is the main screen, and everything else — characters, chats, lorebooks, providers, themes, plugins, and settings — opens as a panel or modal on top of it. Closing a panel returns you to the exact chat, scroll position, and draft you left, so none of the pages below assume you ever leave the conversation.

The pages build on each other in a loose order:

Sections​

  • Chatting — sending messages, streaming responses, swipes (alternative replies), regenerate, edit, stop, and message snapshots. Start here if you want to understand the core interaction.
  • Characters — the character gallery with its search and filters, the character card fields, and importing or exporting cards as PNG or JSON.
  • Groups — multi-character conversations: what exists today, how SillyTavern group chats arrive through migration, and what is planned.
  • Lorebooks — world knowledge injected into the prompt when activation keywords match, entry settings, insertion order, and binding books to characters.
  • Memory & Recall — the rolling conversation memory, keyword-activated memory entries, vector recall, and RAG.
  • Settings — where global and per-chat settings live, connection profiles, providers, and the local API key manager.
  • Themes — bundled and custom themes, the three theme levels, installing and switching, and safe mode.
  • Extensions & Plugins — installing plugins, the permission and consent flow, managing and uninstalling them, and plugin safety.
  • Data & Backups — the data directory layout, export and import, SillyTavern migration, and creating and restoring backups.
  • Keyboard Shortcuts — the default shortcuts for the composer, editing, navigation, and chat actions in one table.

Before You Start​

If you have not installed the app yet, begin with Installation. To go from a fresh install to your first message, follow the Quick Start. If something misbehaves, check Troubleshooting, and for short answers to frequent questions, see the FAQ.