What's new in Novelcrafter

This update took a bit of time, but we implemented further internal changes that now made the following possible:

1. You can now enroll for experimental features. We have a new system where you can try out things we’re still tinkering with, or need a lot more feedback on. Check it out in the general app settings!

2. The update banner will not show right away. Previously, we bundled a lot of changes together which prevented quick and easy fixes. Going forward, we’re doing incremental updates and changelogs will be more along the lines of “what we did this week”.

New: Tip of the Day! 📅

As our first experimental feature, we’re introducing a “Tip of the Day” that shows up when you start Novelcrafter in a new window/tab.

Maybe you’ll learn about cool features that you’ve missed so far!

Organizational

• Added a way to create codex entries from scene summaries (helpful when you’re working on your outline first, before filling the codex)
• Added a way to collapse or expand all codex categories at once. We also updated the overall layout of the codex settings menu itself.
• Add a new “slim” style for the codex - for those that have hundreds of entries, this means a lot less scrolling!
• Changed relations on codex entries to use the more compact styling, same with codex preview cards now using the slim styling.
• Fixed archived codex entries still appearing in the Matrix view
• Fixed Tags from archived codex entries still appearing in suggestions
• Various other tiny visual fixes in Matrix and Outline plan views

AI

• Improved handling of “provider returned error” messages. The actual cause should now be displayed when available
• Fixed overload errors deleting partial chat messages
• Finger’s crossed, that we fixed the “model (not found)” error inside of chat when retrying a previously broken message

Other changes

• Fixed a rare novel loading error that occurred right after you created/imported a new novel. This was basically a timing thing, as the system hasn’t caught up yet
• Added support for comma-like separators in Tag fields - this should help with people writing in Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK)
• Fixed codex preview cards not being interactable when shown inside a modal
• Various other bug fixes and improvements

Along with this update, we also updated our Privacy Policy to reflect our addition of early access features and changes in the product metrics.

This update is more on the technical side, but we updated some internals to stream the data in when loading a larger novel project. Previously, projects that have gotten too big (usually by having too many chat messages), would no longer load.

With this change, this should no longer be an issue - but we still recommend cleaning up chats you no longer need and continue to advise against having chat threads with hundreds of messages (or even more).

Other Changes

• Improved error handling around the “provider returned an error” messages that sometimes happen when using OpenRouter
• Other fixes and improvements

AI & Prompting

• Added the total word count (all messages combined) to the prompt preview
• Fixed an error when trying to save empty OpenRouter routing settings on a model
• Fixed sending a frequency and presence penalty of zero when not specifying a custom value.

Other changes

• Added a little tooltip to custom codex details in the sidebar. That way you know exactly what they are!
• Fixed the floating codex/snippet/chat panel being a bit narrow on smaller screens
• Fixed incorrect order of custom codex details in rare cases
• Various other bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed being unable to copy/paste model settings via clipboard
• Fixed the editor formatting bar flickering when dragging the mouse cursor
• Fixed custom codex details shown in the sidebar not being in the right order
• Other bug fixes and improvements

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s our first release of 2025, packed with fixes for all those bugs you helped spot over the holidays:

Custom Codex Details

• Added “show history” option for text line details as well
• Fixed some details on brand new codex entries disappearing until page reload
• Fixed some scene beat warnings being incorrect when custom codex details were used
• Fixed visual duplication glitches around custom details

AI and Prompting

• Added an alert when trying to use a prompt that has no models assigned to it
• Fixed clearing of “last used prompt” when opening the prompt preview
• Fixed some issues when copying prompts to clipboard that resulted in corrupted instructions
• Fixed some issues around adding custom prompts when not having a novel open

Other Changes

• Added support for importing highlighted and strikethrough text
• Fixed word count in sections not updating properly
• Selecting all text in a scene will now include any scene beat/progression boxes at the start and end as well.
• Other various bug fixes and improvements

New: Search in Codex entry selectors 🔍

Those with (really) large codices can rejoice: even though the menu already had search (by just entering the start of the name), it wasn’t obvious (all menus actually have this feature, actually!)

As such, there’s now an easy-to-reach search box up at the top:

AI and Prompting

• Progressions are now included in the current scene when summarizing (and the summarization prompt includes the codex)
• Allow summarizing scenes without content (in case they have an existing summary already)
• Upgraded the Ollama AI integration to use newer APIs
• Fixed syntax errors in chat prompts not allowing to go open the original prompt

Other changes

• The Codex search (in the sidebar) now also looks into text area and text line custom details.
• The marker timeline in Write mode will now merge consecutive highlights (e.g. if you highlight a couple paragraphs in a row)
• Fixed certain long novel titles overflowing in your novel shelf
• When copying text from text areas (e.g. codex, snippets, …) into the clipboard, they’ll now be in Markdown
• Various other bug fixes and improvements

New: Codex references as custom details!

This one needed a bit more testing, but you can now also have a custom codex reference as a codex detail!

Some examples include:

1. Picking a race/species entry (no need for custom dropdown options!)
2. Selecting the vampire sire of a fledgling
3. Associating an entry with a faction/country/home town

Other changes

• Added a handy “sort labels” button to novel labels and dropdown details
• Fixed a couple overflow/layout issues with the new codex entry design
• Fixed the tags input not closing the first time you go out of it
• Fixed some inconsistencies with the codex settings and details in read-only novels
• Other various bug fixes and improvements

2nd update (hotfix):

• Fixed an issue with the prompt editor where keyboard interaction got blocked
• Fixed copying prompts with many components

We’ve been hard at work these past months, and finally have a little holiday present that you all have been waiting for:

New: Custom Codex Details!

Forget about splitting a codex into many pieces, or cramming too much detail into the description box. With custom details, you can now have more control over the individual pieces that make up your story!

For example:

• Specify a story role (protagonist, antagonist…)
• Which faction someone belongs to
• Autopsy reports (that only NSFW models get as detail)
• Contents that should be invisible to the AI (e.g. personal notes)

Special thanks to our dedicated community of testers who spent months helping us debug and refine codex details!

Furthermore:

• You can also have your custom categories only collect entries for when a specific detail has been set
• You can have details only show up in NSFW prompts, or exclude them from the AI completely (useful for private notes)
• Additions have evolved to Progressions! You can now target a specific detail (not just the description), and even say if it should replace the full text. This is helpful, if you want to change the interior design of a place after renovation.

There are a couple things we haven’t managed to finish in time, but will be added soon:

• Support for custom details in Chat Extraction
• Support for importing your codex (including any details)
• Support for codex details in novel templates

Other changes:

• We moved tags on the codex entry to the top, below the entry name, since that’s a more natural place.
• We also reorganized the tabs a bit: Notes and external links are now under “Research”, the “Appearances” tab has been renamed to “Mentions” and we got a new “Tracking” Tab to consolidate all the options. The “Relationships” tab has been shortened to “Relations”
• You can now decide to never have a codex entry included in the AI context (no need to archive them anymore), even if you use custom prompts
• Labels no longer require a color

New: Last used prompts now get remembered 🧠

When picking a scene beat, chat or summarization prompt, Novelcrafter will now remember the selection for the current session. This should speed your workflow up quite a bit!

New: Prompt components! 🧩

You can now split out instructions that you want to reuse all over the place. No more copy-pasting of things you want to have in all of your copy-editing/critique/… prompts!

Then, to include a component in your prompt, just call them by name!

{include("My global style guide")}

To make things easier, there’s a handy-dandy “Copy” button for this specific instruction below each component.

With components, it makes it easier for us to add additional features to prompts, since previously you’d have to manually update your own variations when the system prompts changed.

As such, all the system prompts have been updated with new calls to components.

New: Improved copy-pasting of prompts 📋

Since prompts can now be more modular, we had to update how sharing works. When you copy a prompt, you will now get different options to choose from. Similarly, when pasting a prompt, you can now see a fancy preview, before adding the prompts immediately to your library!

Some more prompting updates

• When pasting prompts, the “(Copy)” suffix will no longer be added
• You can now add a formatted description to a prompt, either for notes to yourself - or as a guide for when you share it with others.
• When your prompt instructions have a syntax error, the message will now show you a location (line and column) where it happened, and also offer to open the prompt right away.

Other Changes

• Added the ability to cancel a scene summarization (in case you mis-clicked or something)
• Added links to the last 3 changelog entries to the help menu (in case you missed one!)
• Some AIs like to use a “bullet point” character in chat, so we’re now converting those into a proper list on the fly
• Fixed some empty error message issues surrounding the Google AI Studio integration
• Other fixes and improvements

Write

• Colorized sections are now being highlighted in the marker timeline as well (righthand side in the Write view)
• Added support for HRs, headings and blockquotes in beats

Chat

• The chat now supports certain types of code blocks in chat messages
• Fixed extract sometimes matching the wrong codex entry (like “Geneva” for “Eva” - whoops!)

Prompting

• We made parentheses in #if blocks optional (so you can write {#if context.isStartOfScene} as well)
• Fixed the first/last N number of words not being cut off properly for non-latin languages (esp. Japanese, Chinese, …)

Other changes

• Added experimental “Google AI Studio” support as an AI vendor - this one requires you to provide your own model list.
• Added a support diagnostics modal to help us with common issues
• Fixed codex matching not updating when changing novel language
• Fixed scene subtitles overflowing in plot matrix
• Fixed brown colors for dark mode looking more like orange
• Other various fixes and changes