Make your first entries

Opening the codex

From the Library, Manage → Codexes, then Open codex beside the universe. You'll land on a page with a search box in the middle and the entry types down the left—Characters, Places, Items, Factions, Rules, Events, Maps, Other, each with a count. The page is search-first on purpose: a codex that has been going for a few books holds hundreds of entries, and the quickest way to one is to type its name.

Screenshot: the codex's opening page, with the search box in the middle and the entry types down the left (Characters, Places, Items and so on), each with its count.

Click a type and the search box moves up to make room for the list; the box then reads Search in Characters, and the list is everyone of that type, fifty at a time.

Adding an entry

Click + New entry at the top right. A small window asks for one thing—the name—and which type it is. Tanis Richards, Character; the Intrepid, Item; Transcend, Faction. Click Add and the entry opens, ready for everything else. Naming is the only decision you have to make up front.

The entry page

It's laid out like an encyclopedia article: the body in the middle, a box of at-a-glance information on the right, and an Edit button at the top. The page opens in reading mode; click Edit when you want to change something, and Done when you've finished.

Screenshot: an entry page in reading mode, with the body in the middle, the at-a-glance box on the right showing its rows and Edit links, and the Edit button at the top.

While editing, the top of the page has:

• Name, and Aliases—the other names your prose uses for this one thing. Tanis, Richards, the Admiral. Searching for mentions, and the Codex rail in the editor, look for all of them, so it's worth listing the ones that appear in the books.
• Summary—one line. This is what shows in search results, in the editor's rail, and in the hover card, so write it for someone who needs to be reminded who this is: Marine biologist in Halifax and a scholar-player in Athena's Spear.
• Type, which you can change if you picked wrong.
• Find this name in the text automatically—on by default. Turn it off for a name that's also an ordinary word (a character called Rose, a city called Hope), and the editor will stop underlining every rose.

At-a-glance information

The box on the right holds the entry's fields: for a character, things like pronouns, role, born, appearance and status; for a place, where it is and who controls it; and for every type, pictures, an overview and tags. Each row shows the value and an Edit link.

A row with nothing in it offers Add general information—the plain fact, true everywhere and always. Beneath each row there's also Add book, series, or date-specific information, for the version of the fact that's true only in one book or for a while. That's the heart of the codex, and it has a page of its own: What's true when and where.

Some fields are dropdowns, some are tags, some point at other entries (a character's faction, a city's country); the field decides. If a dropdown is missing the choice you want, you can add it right there.

Pictures

Every type has a Pictures field. Pictures come from your media library, and a universe has its own shelf there, so a character portrait or a map is uploaded once and used by every book in the universe. The first picture shows at the top of the at-a-glance box, the way an infobox does.

The body

Below the summary, the body is the long-form description, written in the universe's voice—as much as you like, in paragraphs. Information that differs by book or by time belongs in the fields, not the body, so the body can be the stable account.

Finding it again

Type any part of the name, an alias, or a word from the summary into the search box. Results show the name, the type and the summary; click one to open it.