Entry Types

Your Book Wiki ships with three built-in kinds of card: Character, Location, and Plotline. But stories carry more than people and places — factions, magic systems, artifacts, houses, creatures, technologies. Entry Types let you define your own kinds of wiki card, with your own fields, so the structured parts of your world live in the wiki instead of scattered notes.

A custom type behaves like a built-in everywhere: its entries get the same cards, the same search, the same Trash and recovery, and the same optional AI help. You are shaping the wiki to your story — not learning a database.

Where types are managed

Open Manage Entry Types from the button in the Book Wiki panel, or run the Manage Entry Types command from the command palette. It opens as its own editor tab called Entry Types.

Types are project-level: a type you define is available in every book of the project, so you set your world's vocabulary once. (Entries themselves still belong to a single book.)

Changes save on their own as you make them. If an edit can't be saved yet, the tab keeps its unsaved mark and tells you why — nothing is lost quietly.

Create a custom type

In the Type Manager, choose New type and give it:

A label — the display name, for example Faction or Artifact. You write it as you want it read; it shows exactly that way whatever language the app's interface is in.
An icon from a curated set of story-oriented symbols (people, places, factions, artifacts, world flavor).
A color, drawn from the same palette as your tags — optional.
A set of fields (below).

When you create the type, it also gets a type key — a short internal identifier written into every entry file of that type. The key is fixed once the type exists; only its label stays editable. (Changing the key would mean rewriting every entry, so the app protects it. The label is free to change at any time.)

Custom types work just like the built-in Character and Location types: alongside structured facts and description, a type can take scene appearances (mark where its entries appear in a scene) and media (a cover/avatar and reference images). You turn these on per type, so a Faction or Artifact can appear in scenes exactly the way a character does.

Fields

Every card already carries the shared spine — Name, Aliases, Summary, Description, Tags, Notes. Fields are the extra, type-specific slots you add on top.

Each field has:

A label — how the field is shown on the card (editable at any time).
A kind, one of:
- Text — a single free-form value (for example Motto).
- Choice — a value picked from a fixed list you define (for example Allegiance: loyal, neutral, hostile). A choice field needs at least one value.
- List — several free-form values (for example Known members).
An AI-fillable switch — see AI and your fields.

Like the type key, a field key is fixed once the field is created (the label can still change). This is what lets your entries stay stable on disk while you keep refining how they're labeled.

Extend a built-in type

You don't have to create a whole new type to add structure. From the Type Manager you can add your own fields to Character, Location, or Plotline — for example a Theme song on Character, or a Founded in on Location.

The new field appears as an empty slot on every existing entry of that type, right away, without changing anything already written in those entries. Fill it in when you get to each card; leave it blank where it doesn't apply. Nothing you had before is touched.

A built-in type's own core fields (a character's role, a location's type) can't be removed — but you can hide them (below) if you never use them.

Hide and reorder fields

Any type — built-in or custom — lets you tidy its card:

Hide a field to take it off the card. Hiding keeps the field's value: unhide it later and the value is still there. Hiding is just about what you see, not what's stored.
Reorder fields to put the ones you care about first. Reordering only changes the card's layout — it never rewrites your entries.

Both hide and reorder are remembered with the project and survive closing and reopening. Because they only affect the view, your entry files and their version history stay exactly as they were.

Delete a type

You can delete a custom type — but only once nothing uses it. If any entry of that type still exists, anywhere in the project, including in Trash, deletion is blocked with a message telling you how many entries still use it:

N entries still use this type — remove or permanently delete them, including from Trash, to delete the type.

Remove those entries (and empty them from Trash) and the type will delete. This is deliberate: a type is never removed out from under entries that depend on it.

Built-in types (Character, Location, Plotline) can never be deleted by any route. If you don't use one, hide its fields rather than trying to remove it.

AI and your fields

The AI assistant works with your custom types the same careful way it works with built-ins: it can suggest a new entry of any type you've defined, and you confirm or reject it — nothing enters your wiki without you. The assistant never invents a new type of its own.

For your custom fields, you decide how far the assistant may reach. Turn on AI-fillable for a field and the assistant may propose a value for it as part of a suggestion; leave it off and that field stays yours alone — the assistant can't write it. The spine fields (name, aliases, summary, description) are always fair game for a suggestion; your idiosyncratic fields are opt-in.

It's your file

The definition of your types — the custom types, the fields you added to built-ins, and your hide/reorder choices — lives in a plain text file inside the project at .internal/wiki/types.yaml. It travels with the project, is included in backups, and you can read or hand-edit it outside the app if you like.

If that file is ever damaged or edited into an invalid state, the app doesn't fail silently: it opens the book with the built-in types intact and shows a clear error, so you can fix the file and get your custom types back. And if a hand-edit removes a type that still has entries on disk, the app tells you loudly rather than hiding those entries for good — restore the type in the file and the entries read again.