Entity Types & Traits

Chapters, characters, locations, items, and notes are not hard-coded. Every book defines its own types — its own kinds of things — and the whole app reshapes itself around them: sidebar, list, inspector, graph, timeline.

The example book adds a custom type on top of the defaults: Faction (organizations with a motto, members, holdings, and a founding year — the Central Committee and the Homeless).

The type editor

Book → Edit Entity Types… opens the type editor. There you can:

• create, reorder, and delete types;
• pick each type's icon (searchable symbol picker) and color (a named palette or any custom color);
• choose which sidebar section it appears under and what its things are called ("Faction" / "Factions");
• define its completion stages, its traits, and its custom fields;
• write the starter template every new entity of that type begins with.

Two safety valves:

• Apply Default Template adds the built-in types (the classic five plus Image) back additively — your custom types stay untouched.
• Deleting a type offers to keep its files. Kept files show up as "Unrecognized" and come back fully the moment a type claims them again.

Traits

Traits are ready-made behaviors you mix into a type. Give a type a trait and everything the trait implies appears throughout the app:

Trait	What it adds
manuscript	The type is part of the book itself: it appears in the manuscript tree, can nest children (parts hold chapters, chapters hold scenes), counts toward writing goals, and exports.
status	A completion workflow with stages you name yourself (default: outline → draft → revision → final), shown as a colored progress ring everywhere the entity appears.
timeline	A place in story time — from, to, a label — and a card on the timeline. A type can have its own named timeline row (the example book's notes share a "World Events" row).
relationships	Named connections between entities of the same kind ("creditor", "old friend", "rivals"), edited in the inspector and drawn in the graph.
annotator	Entities of this type can pin themselves to other documents or to exact quoted passages — see Annotations.
journey	The entity's appearances throughout the manuscript are worked out automatically and shown as a journey.
image	Entities of this type each stand for a picture stored in the book, ready to embed in any document — see Images.

Nothing is ever destroyed by turning a trait off: the entity's recorded facts survive on disk and come back if you re-enable it.

Custom fields

Four kinds of field cover most story facts:

• Text — free words (a motto, an epithet).
• Number — a numeric value (a founding year, a population).
• List — several short entries (character traits, holdings).
• Reference — links to other entities: a single one (an item's owner) or several (a faction's members), optionally limited to particular types. A reference field can also be marked as the point-of-view field, which is how journeys and the timeline know whose eyes a chapter looks through.

Fields appear in the inspector in the order you define them — see the inspector's Fields section.

Editing types by hand

Types can also be defined directly in the book folder's settings file — useful for sharing a setup between books or keeping it in a template. See the file format reference.