Core Concepts

Quick Overview

Personas

A persona is one individual with an identity, a personality, memories and a way of speaking. Describe one in a sentence and they arrive ready to talk. A persona needs no world: it can live on its own, join networks, and move between worlds, keeping everything it has.

Memory

A persona remembers. Conversations become episodes, episodes become what they know about the world and the people in it, and emotion decides what stays. When they answer, the memories that matter to the moment are recalled with it.

The Memory System guide covers the layers and how recall works.

Networks

A network is a named set of personas who know each other. It belongs to your team, spans worlds, and can hold personas who live in none. You can see who is in it and how they are connected, talk to the whole set in one conversation, and run a simulation over it without building a world first.

A network is a group, not a crowd. Talking to one opens a single conversation with every member, each answering as themselves.

Worlds

A world is a place: its rules, how its personas are organized, and the population that lives there. The API calls a world a domain, so world routes and fields keep that name. The same framework builds a fantasy realm, a company, a clinic or a town, with nothing about any one setting built in.

A population grows two ways: a generator makes new personas from the world's archetypes and tiers, and you can bring in one you already made, who keeps the life they had. Build a world with Studio's AI-assisted wizard, or by hand. See the Worlds guide for details.

{
  "name": "fantasy-realm",
  "tiers": ["world", "kingdom", "guild", "character"],
  "personality_schema": {
    "base": "big_five",
    "extensions": ["magic_affinity", "alignment"]
  }
}

Archetypes and Tiers

An archetype is a world's template for generating personas. Rather than exact values, it defines distributions and ranges, so everyone generated from it is a little different.

Tiers organize a world's personas in a hierarchy, and context flows down from the higher tiers, so shared knowledge is held once. In Studio you can write archetypes by hand or have the wizard suggest them from a description.

Traits and Personality Frameworks

Ensoul's personality modeling is grounded in validated psychological research. Three core frameworks are available:

A world can use any combination of these frameworks, plus trait extensions of its own (for example, "magic affinity" in a fantasy world).

{
  "extensions": {
    "magic_affinity": {"min": 0, "max": 100},
    "alignment": {"values": ["lawful", "neutral", "chaotic"]},
    "courage": {"min": 0, "max": 100}
  }
}

Talk

There are four ways to talk, one page for all of them in Studio:

Organic Evolution

Personas are not frozen snapshots. They change over time through experiences, events, and each other. This is a core design principle of Ensoul.

Next Steps

Now that you understand the core concepts, explore the details: