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Lorebooks

This page explains lorebooks: collections of world knowledge that NeoTavern injects into the prompt exactly when it becomes relevant.

What a Lorebook Is​

A lorebook is a set of entries about a world, a setting, or a character: locations, factions, history, people, rules of magic — anything the model should know but that would waste tokens to include in every message. Instead of loading the whole book into the prompt, the app activates only the entries whose keywords match the current conversation.

A book is scoped either global (available in every chat) or bound to a character (used only in that character's conversations). You can link and unlink books per character from the character editor's Lore section.

Entries​

Each entry has:

  • Primary keys — one or more activation keywords. At least one primary key is required.
  • Secondary keys — additional optional keywords.
  • Content — the text injected into the prompt when the entry fires.
  • Position — where the entry is inserted relative to other entries.
  • Toggles — enabled (participate in activation), constant (always included), and selective (insert only at the configured position).

Matching is a case-insensitive substring match against the conversation context. When an entry fires, its content is inserted into the prompt at the entry's position, and the entry dialog shows an estimate of its size in tokens so you can keep the budget predictable.

Insertion Order​

The pipeline assembles prompt blocks in a fixed order: main prompt, lorebook before the character, persona, character, lorebook after the character, dialogue examples, memory, chat history, post-history instructions, and the current user input. Lorebook entries are ranked by relevance alongside memory blocks, and constant entries are always present. The effective order of activated entries follows their position within the book, so a well-structured book produces a stable prompt.

Managing Books​

The Lorebooks panel in the navigation rail has three tabs: the list of books, the book editor, and the entry list. The list shows each book's name, description, load count, and a scope badge (Global or Character), with filters for global books, a specific character's books, or all books. Books are deleted to a trash state and can be restored, and search over books is debounced for large libraries.

New books created from the character editor are immediately bound to that character. See Characters for the editor, and Memory & Recall for how memory blocks interact with lorebook entries.