Characters and Personas - Inktomi93/OrbWeaver GitHub Wiki

The two kinds of people in a story: the characters you talk to and the persona you play as. Starting a chat with a character is on Your first chat. Bringing a whole SillyTavern library over is on Coming from SillyTavern.

Bring a character in

Open the Characters page and use Import a character card. Drop one card or many. Cards are PNG or JSON files.

When a batch is done you get a message saying how many came in. If some failed, it names the first file that failed and the reason.
Importing the same card again doesn't make a second character; it's reported as already in your library. Two different cards that share a name stay two characters. The same card text with different art is a separate alt-art character, and a JSON card followed by its PNG attaches the art to the character you already have.
The world book, regex scripts, alternate greetings and tags inside a card come in with it. Tags arrive as suggestions you accept or dismiss (see below). A card you exported from Orbweaver re-imports as the character it came from.
New makes a character from scratch. It only asks for a name and a one-line description. The rest is in the editor.

To undo edits to an imported world book, open the Provenance field on the imported character and choose Restore the embedded book from this card file. Pick the exact card file you imported, confirm, and the card's own book replaces your edited one. Any edits you made to the book since the import are lost. Importing the same file again does not do this: it keeps your edited book.

Send a character out

Open the character's menu in the Characters list, or the Character actions menu on an open character, and choose Export card. You get two choices:

With avatar (.png) is a card file with the picture embedded, the kind SillyTavern reads.
Data only (.json) is the same card with no picture. Orbweaver's import reads it back.

The exported card carries the character's attached world books, regex scripts and accepted tags. To move everything at once, use a backup instead. → Back up and restore

Edit a character

Open a character and the editor is already live. There is no Save button: changes save as you type, and the header shows Saved, Saving... or Save failed with a retry. It also shows a live token count, so you can see what the card costs in context while you write.

The fields are grouped by how much they matter. Description, Personality and Scenario define the character. Example messages and Creator notes are extras. System prompt, Post-history instructions, Note at depth, Regex scripts and Provenance are under Advanced. Hide spoilers blurs the greeting preview so you can read a card without spoilers.

Alternate greetings

The greeting preview shows the character's first message. A card with more than one shows Opening 1, Opening 2 and so on.

Add opening adds an alternate. Edit lets you type in the preview. Remove opening deletes an alternate while you're editing it.
Each alternate has a Group chats only switch.
Studio rewrites the opening you're looking at (Rewrite, which needs a non-empty opening) or makes a brand new one (Make new). You accept the result and it's saved as another opening, so the original stays. It runs on your Utility model. → Connect a model

Flipping between openings at the start of a chat is covered in Your first chat.

Keep a big library tidy

Tags. On an open character, Add tag attaches an existing tag or makes a new one, and the X on a tag chip takes it off. Suggest tags reads the card and proposes tags for you to accept or dismiss one at a time. It runs on your Utility model, and it needs the card to have more than a name. Tags from imported cards show up in the same suggestion list.

Finding people. The Characters page has search, Sort characters (recent, A–Z, starred first, most chats, best scoring and more) and a Group switch that turns your tags into collapsible folders. A character with several tags appears under each one. The filters, opened with Favorites, archived & tags (Favorites & archived until you have a tag), narrow the list. Each tag chip cycles through off, included and excluded, so you can ask for "fantasy but not romance".

Many at once. Select lets you tick several characters and tag, archive or delete them together. Archived characters leave the list until you turn on the Archived filter. Delete is permanent and can't be undone.

Managing tags themselves. Open the Corpus page and switch to Labels. Tags are called labels there, and the same labels work on chats, world books, personas and presets, not just characters. You can rename a label, color it, merge it into another, hide its chip on cards, or Prune the ones nothing uses. A label's Folder type decides whether its group starts expanded (Open folder) or collapsed (Plain label) in the grouped view.

The character panel

Open a character and its panel has six tabs.

Overview shows where the card came from, when you added it, its quality score if the Refinery has scored it, and when you last chatted. → Refinery
Chats lists every chat with this character. The "N chats" link on the character jumps straight here.
Links is where you Link a book (a world book) and Connect a persona. A new one-on-one chat with a character starts with their connected persona, if exactly one persona of yours is connected.
Look gives the character their own colors, bubble colors, font, corner radius and background. When a chat is just you and that one character, the chat wears it; rooms with other people or more characters keep your own theme. Save as theme... copies it into your theme list, and Start from a theme... goes the other way. → Themes
History is a version log. Snapshot now saves the card as it is. Restore puts a snapshot back after a confirm, and snapshots the current card first so you can undo the restore. There is no side-by-side comparison before you restore. The card is also snapshotted before the Refinery applies changes to it.
Trust has two per-character controls, External media (inherit the default, Allow or Forbid) and HTML rendering (Untrusted, Render HTML or Interactive). The system-wide Block external media setting always wins over External media. A character on Inherit default gets Interactive, so its cards run their own scripts in a locked-down frame. Pick Render HTML or Untrusted to stop that for one character. An admin can stop it for everyone by turning off Let interactive cards run their own scripts in System settings. Then a character set to Interactive shows the same as Render HTML, and one on Inherit default follows the admin's Render rich HTML as trusted setting. Changes apply the moment you make them. → Privacy and security

The Character actions menu also has Duplicate, Archive and Open gallery. Open in Refinery opens that card's Refinery session, resuming the newest open one if there is one. → Images

Personas

A persona is who you are in the story: a name, an optional description the model reads as you, and an avatar. Characters call you by the persona's name. You can have as many as you like.

Your first persona

An account with no persona set up gets a box that asks Who are you in the story? Name is required and Description is optional. There is no way to close the box without making a persona. It becomes both the persona you play as and your pinned default.

Make and manage them

Open Settings and go to Personas. New persona makes one, and each row expands into its editor: Title, Description, Placement and one Lore book. Rows also have favorite, rename, avatar, Duplicate, Export and delete.

Pick who you play as

The pin on a row sets your default persona, the one a new chat falls back to when nothing else decides. Press a pinned pin again to clear it, and Undo in the notice puts it back. On a phone, Set as default and Clear default are in the row's menu.
Your avatar opens the persona switcher. A check marks who you're playing as, a card icon marks who this chat's card calls you, and the pin marks your default. Edit on a row opens that persona's editor.
With a chat open, picking a persona switches who you play in that chat right away, the same as in SillyTavern. Everywhere also makes it your persona for chats you start from then on; This chat changes only this chat.
A new chat starts you as the persona connected to the character (one-on-one chats with exactly one connected), then the persona you're currently playing as, then your default.
With a chat open, Restamp my messages to this persona, in the switcher or in Settings under Personas, This chat, relabels every line you wrote in that chat. Your words stay as they were. Replies keep the names they were written with.
Switched personas partway through? Open the three-dot menu on one of your own messages and choose Reattribute from here. Your lines from that message on take your current persona's name, and earlier lines stay as they were. If you have no persona picked for the chat, pick one first; your messages carry whatever persona your seat has.
This chat in Settings also shows who the card sees you as. It's set when the chat opens, and the host can re-pin it.

In a shared room, everyone plays as their own persona. People who join start as their own current or default persona. → Rooms and group chats

The persona pin: who {{user}} is

You start a chat as John. The card says {{user}} is my brother. Halfway through you switch to Sarah for a scene, and now the character thinks Sarah is his brother. I hated that enough to write a SillyTavern extension for it, PersonaPin, and Orbweaver has it built in. As far as I know, nothing else does this.

The short version: {{user}} in card text is the persona that opened the chat, and stays that persona through a swap. {{user}} in preset text and your own lines is the persona on your seat right now. The full rule, with lore books, swaps and forks, is on How a turn is built under "Who {{user}} is".

Where to see it. This chat in Settings under Personas shows who the card sees you as. It's set when the chat opens, and the host can re-pin it to any present player. In a room with several humans, that's how the host decides which player the card's {{user}} means. → Rooms and group chats

This is not the pin on a persona row. That one sets your default persona for new chats.

Turn a character into a persona

To play as a card you own, choose Convert to persona in a character's Character actions menu, or New persona from a character in the Personas list. Both copy the name, description and avatar. They also swap {{char}} and {{user}} in the description, since a card's "they" becomes your "you". The list version has a switch to leave the swap off. The new persona is marked as made from a character card.

It only goes one way. There is no button that turns a persona into a character.

Back up and move personas

Export on a persona row saves it as a file, and Restore a persona from an Orbweaver backup file brings one back. The file holds the name, title, description, placement and favorite, but not the avatar or lore book. A persona you already have, with the same content, is reused; the same name with different content lands beside it as "Name 2". Nothing is updated in place. That button only reads personas exported from Orbweaver. A SillyTavern persona has no file of its own, so it comes in with the whole-profile import. → Coming from SillyTavern

Limits

Cards import as PNG or JSON only.
A persona has one lore book.
Closed folder (members hidden until you open it) isn't built yet. It behaves like Plain label.
Restoring a character snapshot has no side-by-side comparison first.