Kinds of entities

A kind is a category of thing your world keeps track of. Person is a kind, and so are Place, Event and Item. Every entity in your world belongs to exactly one kind, and its kind decides what it is able to record.

Open World Settings → Building Blocks → Kinds of entities to see the full list. Each row tells you how many entities of that kind your world holds and how many details the kind records, reading as “No people yet · 9 details” or “6 rules · 7 details”.

Telling your AI what a kind is for

Every kind carries a short description, shown in the editor as What is this?. It is the most important field on the page, because it is what your AI reads when deciding where a new piece of information belongs.

A vague description leaves your AI guessing:

Things.

A specific one, which also says what does not belong, gives it something to work with:

Physical objects worth tracking on their own, like a car, a camera or an heirloom. Not consumables or groceries.

When you find your AI filing things under the wrong kind, this is usually the field to fix.

Details

A detail is one piece of information that a kind records. Person records an occupation, a birthday and a phone number, among others. You will find them all in the editor under “What each person records”, where you can add, change and remove them.

Every detail has a name, a description and a value type.

The name is what your AI writes, so it takes a restricted form of lowercase letters, numbers and underscores, such as birth_year. Type a name and Orbismo derives a key in this form for you.

The description works the way it does on a kind. It tells your AI what belongs in this particular field.

The value type says what sort of thing the detail holds.

Kinds of value

There are nine value types and they fall into a few groups. A detail can hold words, either as free text or as one of a fixed set of options. It can hold a number, either a whole one or one with a decimal point. It can hold a simple yes or no. It can hold a date, with or without a time of day. It can hold an email address or a web link, both of which are text with a shape Orbismo recognises.

The last type behaves differently from the rest. A group of details bundles several fields into one, which helps when a single value would be clumsy. An address is the natural example, keeping a street, a city and a postcode together instead of scattering them across three unrelated details. Worth knowing if you go looking for it: the Address detail that Person starts with is ordinary text, so turning it into a group is a change you would make yourself.

The settings

Below the value type sit a few more settings. Each of them describes to your AI what a well-formed entry looks like in this world.

Limit it to a set of options turns a free text detail into a short list to choose from. Leave it empty and any text is allowed. Fill it in and your AI picks one of the values you listed. This suits anything with a small and stable vocabulary, such as a status or a priority.

Must be filled in tells your AI not to create an entity of this kind without that piece of information. Use it sparingly, because a detail marked this way is one your AI will go looking for, and it may come back and ask you for it.

Can have more than one makes the detail a list rather than a single value. Personality traits on a Person work this way, because a person has several of them.

When you are adding a new detail you get one more, and it is worth turning on more often than people expect. Show your AI the values already in use lets your AI see which values other entities have for this detail, so it reaches for an existing one instead of inventing a near-duplicate. It is the difference between a world where everyone is a sailor and a world that has sailors, seafarers and mariners all meaning the same thing. The Data model reference describes the same idea under the name enumerations.

Display names and keys

The name at the top of a kind’s editor is its display name, which is only what people see. Underneath it, every kind has a fixed key that your AI writes, such as person, and that key never changes.

This matters more than it first appears. If you rename Person to Character, the menus and lists follow along, but your AI carries on writing person and your entities keep addresses that read person/john_smith. Renaming changes the label and leaves everything else as it was.

Adding a kind

Choose Add a kind, give it a name and a description, then pick an icon. Orbismo derives the key from the name you type.

A new kind is not usable straight away. Your AI can begin filing things under it once it records at least one detail, so adding that first detail is the next step.

Removing a kind

Deleting a kind is permanent, and the change log does not reverse it. A few built-in kinds cannot be deleted at all and show a padlock beside a greyed-out delete button, because other parts of Orbismo rely on them.

If you are hesitating, consider whether the kind really needs removing or whether it needs a clearer description and a better set of details. Those are easy to change again later. Deletion is not.