Consistency and research

Two tools that both write into — and read from — the story codex.

The consistency check

At the bottom of the codex: ✦ Check N chapters · ≈X cr.

One call reads your written chapters against your pinned canon and returns specific, factual contradictions. Not style notes, not opinions about the plot — things that cannot both be true.

Each result is a card carrying:

• a severity — contradiction or warning
• the chapter it is in
• the exact quote that conflicts
• what the issue is, and a suggested fix

Click a card to jump straight to that chapter.

A clean audit returns nothing, which is the answer you want.

On a long book the check reads part of it, and says which part. One call reads about the first 1,500 words of each chapter, up to roughly 15,000 words in all. If that is less than your whole book, the result says how many chapters it read in full, how many only their opening, and from which chapter on it read nothing. It only calls a book clean when it read every word. To check a whole novel in full, use Check continuity under the assistant's Whole-book checks (see The editor).

It audits against the codex. A contradiction between two chapters that you never pinned as canon may not be caught — the codex is what tells the audit which facts are supposed to hold.

Deep research

For books that have to be right about the real world.

Give a topic. Manuscript Studio then:

1. Plans a set of searchable questions from your topic and premise. It skips anything your codex already has research on.
2. Searches the live web for each one.
3. Synthesises what it found into codex entries, each carrying the sources it came from.

The source links are the pages the web search actually returned, so it cannot invent a source. Findings appear with clickable source chips and become part of your canon.

Open a source before you rely on it. A source chip shows which page a fact came from; it does not prove the page says it in those words.

A finding with the same name as an entry already in your codex is not added again. If a run finds nothing new, it says so and refunds you in full.

Cost and plan

Usually about 10 credits, shown on the button. That amount is set aside before the research starts. When it finishes, you are charged for the tokens it actually used: if it cost less, the difference comes back, and if it cost more, the rest is charged, never past your balance. You get a full refund if the job fails.

Paid plans only.

It runs in the background

Research is a worker job. Close the tab, come back, and it is either still running or done. The codex refreshes when it finishes, and an in-flight job is picked back up when you reopen the panel.

What to watch for

• Autosave pauses for a book being researched, so the worker's writes are not clobbered by your editor. It resumes when the job ends.
• Research entries are findings, not gospel. They carry their sources so you can check them, which is the point — click through before you build a plot on one.
• Run the consistency check before you export, not after. It is the cheapest proofread in the product and it catches the errors readers actually notice.