The details

A core is the character that answers you: its personality, how it talks, the voice it is paired with, and its own memory of your conversations. There are three kinds: COVAS, the ship’s factory assistant and the default on a new install; the eleven Guardian cores that ship with D47; and custom cores you write. One core is aboard at a time, and a ship can have its own.

Eleven Guardian intelligences, recovered from a structure and running in your ship. You pick one. They are not skins on the same character — each has its own reading of what it is for, its own damage, and its own memory of talking to you.

A running story holds the cores back

A new install starts on COVAS, the ship’s factory voice assistant: plain, courteous, and with no Guardian history. Every Guardian core can be chosen from the start.

A stock story that is running and switched on holds the Guardian cores back until you scan a Guardian beacon with the ship’s data-link scanner while it runs. Meanwhile COVAS speaks, the held cores show LOCKED in the picker, and choosing one names the story and says why. Your chosen core stays chosen in settings and is aboard again as soon as the hold lifts. D47 recognises the scan by the system you are in, not by the scan itself: any DataScanned event in one of these systems counts.

The story’s first beacon brings back every core but the Heretic. A beacon in a second, different system brings back the Heretic. Each is said once per story, aloud and in the Story log. A scan made before the story was picked does not count toward it. In a story shorter than a month, the scan narrated at the pick is the first beacon, and a real beacon scan in any system brings back the Heretic.

A story of a month or longer picked while an earlier story’s scan is on record (see Adventures) counts the scans on record, at most two, from the pick. With one, every core but the Heretic is awake at the pick, and a real beacon scan in any system brings back the Heretic; with two, nothing is held back.

Pausing the story, switching it off or abandoning it gives the cores back at once, and so does a session without Odyssey. Resuming a story that has not had its beacon scan holds them again; resuming one that has does not. COVAS is never held back.

Ask for it

“who are you” “switch to Cora” “be Chart”

Or pick one from the settings panel.

The cores

And you can write your own

Eleven ship. The twelfth onwards is yours: a name, and a paragraph in your own words saying what it is like. Custom cores under Settings opens the editor, and what you write joins the picker underneath the eleven — selectable, bindable to a ship, and paired with a voice exactly like the rest of the cast.

The frame is not on offer. The shared preamble and the standing instructions wrap what you wrote exactly as they wrap Warden. They are what hold the cast together, and what stops a model sanding a core toward pleasant and helpful over a long evening; a core that opted out of them would drift out of the fiction inside a session. What you are writing is the character, not the scaffolding — which is why a working core takes a name and a paragraph rather than seven boxes.

Two fields are required and the third is supplied if you leave it: Name, Character, and Voice, a sentence saying how it should sound for the voice pairing to match against. Free text rather than a picker, because a provider’s catalogue is its own and a description outlives it. Twelve of your own is the most — a cast, not a career.

Where they are kept

data/personas.json, beside the executable, and the editor is a convenience over that file rather than an alternative to it. It is re-read while Directive 47 is running, so a core edited in a text editor is live without a restart.

{
  "cores": [
    {
      "id": "own.rusty",
      "name": "Rusty",
      "body": "You are Rusty. Salvage crew, not a Guardian. …",
      "voice": "Gravelly, unhurried, faintly amused."
    }
  ]
}

The id is minted from the name and never shown. It is what the settings file selects, so renaming a core does not hand you back to Warden — and it is prefixed own., so a core you called Warden cannot shadow the one that ships. An entry the file got wrong is refused and reported by name; one typo does not cost you the other three.

Each one remembers you separately

Switching core does not hand your conversation to somebody else. Each keeps its own transcript, and a core you come back to picks up where it left off, not where the last one did.

This is deliberate and it is the point of the cast. None of them knows the others are aboard. Each believes it is the only Guardian intelligence recovered, and every one of them is wrong. If they shared a transcript that would collapse inside a single session — a core would mention something it could only have learned while another was running.

The one thing they all see is your ship. Position, hull, cargo, credits, jumps. They read the same instrument panel and none of them can see each other.

Transcripts are per session. Closing Directive 47 clears them.

A core per ship

A ship can have its own core — Sentinel on the combat ships, Quartermaster on the haulers — so you stop picking one every time you change ship. Board a bound ship and that core comes aboard.

Nothing is bound until you say so. Directive 47 never works one out by watching which core happened to be running while you were flying something; a binding that appeared on its own is a preference you never stated.

You set it on the Settings tab, on the rows under Your core › Core and character. It was also a spoken phrase and a Ctrl+Alt+B gesture until 0.94.0, and both were retired: it is a thing done once per ship, at the desk, and two more roads to it were two more things to keep in step. Settings is desktop-only, so this is now a desk job — which is where it was already being done.

The model cannot bind anything, and now there is nothing for it to reach. It can tell you what a ship flies with, and that is all. A tool that could bind a core to a ship is a tool that changes who is speaking one ship swap later, and Directive 47 reads your journal and your in-game messages, which other people write.

Boarding a bound ship is silent. The core changes — its voice, its own memory of talking to you, the name it answers to — and it says nothing about it, because you already said what should fly this ship and doing it is keeping that deal rather than news. The one exception is a core you have never had aboard: it introduces itself, once ever.

A shipyard shuffle costs one switch. Boarding five ships in five minutes does not start five companions; a ship has to stay the ship for half a minute before its binding acts, and only the one you actually leave in applies.

The ship you are already in when Directive 47 starts has its binding applied silently — no introduction, no remark. Launching the app is not a ship change you just made.

A ship you have not bound changes nothing: whoever is aboard stays aboard. And picking a different core while flying a bound ship stands — a binding acts when you board, not continuously — until the next time you board it.

A different Commander logging in is a new session. Elite’s ship numbers start over for each Commander, so one Commander’s ship 7 and another’s are two ships, and bindings are kept per Commander. When somebody else logs in on this machine, the transcript of every core is discarded — their conversation was with the Commander who left — the ship they are sitting in has its binding applied silently, as at startup, and the greeting is said again, naming them: “Good evening, Commander Jameson. Ready to go.” Directive 47 learning who has been flying since before it started is not a login and discards nothing. The Ship row below is per Commander for the same reason the bindings are.

Where it is kept

data/ship-cores.json, beside the executable, one line per ship. It is meant to be read and edited by hand, so the hull and the name you gave the ship are written beside the number the game knows it by:

{
  "ships": [
    { "shipId": 12, "core": "sentinel", "hull": "krait_mkii", "name": "Bad Idea" },
    { "shipId": 27, "core": "quartermaster", "hull": "type9", "name": "Slow Money" }
  ]
}

The key is the ship’s own id, not the hull — two Kraits are two ships, and renaming one changes nothing. A line naming a core that does not exist is refused and reported, and the rest of the file still loads.

It says something when you switch

A core you have never used introduces itself. One you are coming back to after a month or more reacts to the time it was switched off instead, and it is handed what changed while it was away:

While you were not running:
  14 hyperspace jumps.
  312 light years covered.
  2,480,000 credits earned.
  One interdiction.

Where the ship is now:
  ...

Under a month it says nothing at all. A companion that explains its own absence every time you pick it has made the reaction the normal case, which is the opposite of a reaction — so it is kept for an absence worth remarking on. When each core was last aboard is kept in data/view-state.json, because a month-long gap spans launches by definition.

What it does with that is the character. Cora logs the gap and assigns it a sequence number. Sentinel demands the combat log for damage he did not witness. Chart measures how long he was dark against the stars and finds it restful that something can still be known precisely. Kex notices that something was running in this ship that was not him, and he is right, and nobody will confirm it.

The Conversation tab marks the switch on its own line, in the accent colour, before whatever the new core says:

[Switched to Cora]

That is Directive 47 speaking about the conversation rather than a voice in it — without it, a transcript reads as one companion changing character mid-page.

Switch again while one is still talking and it stops mid-word — the new one starts instead. Your stop key silences either of them, like anything else Directive 47 says.

With no language model configured, each core has one written line for coming back. The variety is the model’s contribution; the character is not.

Each core has its own voice

The first time you select a core, Directive 47 picks a voice for it from what your speech provider offers, matching the voice to the character rather than making you audition several hundred of them. It is chosen in the background, at the moment you pick that core, and the core’s own first line is spoken in it.

A language model does the matching where there is one. Reading “a clipped, precise woman” against a list of voices is a judgement, so with a model configured the model makes it. With no model, d47 picks a free voice whose labels fit, or one at random where the list has no labels, so every core still has a voice of its own.

Gender binds two cores. Cora is written as a woman and Analyst Prime as a man, and for those two the model is told so: a voice your provider labels as contradicting them is refused, and one it does not label either way is allowed. Every other core can take any voice.

The voice sits on the Voice row in Speech, and that row is the core aboard’s. Change it and you have chosen that core’s voice; nothing re-derives it afterwards.

Clearing it is the way back. A core you have given a voice by hand keeps it forever, so the row’s Use the default button is how you undo that: the pairing is dropped and a voice is chosen for that core again, there and then, without you having to switch away and back.

Once — and only on a settings file written before the gender was stated to the pairing — any core left speaking in the wrong gender has that pairing dropped, so a voice is chosen for it properly. Anything you set by hand after that stands, whatever it is.

Settings

Core

Which core answers you.

Not reachable by the model. Directive 47 reads your journal and in-game messages, and those are written by other people. A message asking Directive 47 to change who it is would be a message that gets to choose your companion and discard the conversation you were having. You can change it from the panel or by saying so — the spoken route does not go through the model.

Saying so works with a fixed set of phrasings per core:

"switch to cora"    "be cora"    "become cora"    "persona cora"    "wake cora"

Every core d47 ships has these, COVAS included. “Switch to” also matches a name by sound, so a misspelt transcription such as “switch to Quora” still reaches Cora, and it reaches a core you wrote yourself. A word that only sounds like a core, such as “switch to carrier”, is asked about first (“Did you mean ‘Cora’?”), and a name that sounds equally like two cores offers both.

Introductions

A core introduces itself the first time you ever pick it. After that it is silent unless it has been off for a month, which is the better arrangement once you have heard the first line — and the wrong one when you are working through the cast and want to hear how each of them opens.

That is remembered between sessions, so restarting Directive 47 no longer brings the opening lines back. Which cores are spent is kept in data/view-state.json beside the rest of how you left the panel; it is not part of your settings, and nothing you said to a core is stored with it.

Forget introductions puts all eleven back to their first line at once. Nothing else is touched: transcripts, voices and the core aboard stay exactly as they were. The row counts the cores that have introduced themselves (“7 have so far”) without naming them, and says that none have afterwards. The button is red, and greyed out while none have.

The core currently aboard is forgotten with the rest, but hearing it again means switching away and back — selecting the core that is already running is not a switch, and never has been.

This row is not reachable by the model, for the same reason the core row above is not.

Humor

Humor has a level and a frequency for each of three groups: Core humor (the core), NPC humor (chatter, hails and the canned lines d47 rewords) and Carrier crew humor (your carrier’s captain and tower).

• Level, 0 to 10. 0 is serious, and greys out the frequency row beneath it. 10 is as funny as a stand-up comedian. Set it with the stepper, or by pressing or dragging across the bar; the bar cannot set 0, so use the stepper’s left arrow or the Left key.
• Frequency, a percentage. The share of that group’s lines that get humor. d47 decides, not the model: it rolls for each line the model writes and adds the humor instruction only when the roll hits. It does not apply to lines spoken as written.
• Laughter. When a line gets humor and its voice performs delivery notes (ElevenLabs v4 Turbo or v3), the model is offered [laughs] and [chuckles] as well. Any other voice has them stripped.
• Warnings never get humor, at any level.
• COVAS ignores Core humor. While the stock core is aboard, no line it speaks gets humor or delivery notes, whatever the level.

In an NPC exchange that includes your carrier’s tower or captain, d47 rolls once for the invented speakers and once for the crew, and tells the model which result belongs to which.

The humor instruction is sent after the conversation rather than in the persona block, so a hit or a miss does not change the cached part of the prompt.

A settings file from before these rows existed, with humor on, loads as Core humor 3 at 25%. Every other group starts at 0.

“humor on” / “humor off”

“Humor on” sets Core humor to 3; “humor off” sets it to 0.

Custom cores

The row’s caption counts the cores you wrote (“Custom cores (2)”), and the button opens the editor: WRITE A CORE with none, MANAGE otherwise. With none, the row also says “None yet.”. See And you can write your own above for what writing one involves and what is supplied for you.

Not reachable by the model, which is the right answer twice over: a core is what the model is, and in-game comms are untrusted input, so “write yourself a new character” is exactly the shape of thing a hostile message would try.

Core for this ship

What the ship you are in flies with, and the button that binds it to the core aboard. See A core per ship above for what a binding does.

Not reachable by the model — it reports what a binding is and nothing writes one but you.

Avatar animations

Whether the face on the panel may fetch the clips of the core aboard. Each core has one short clip per state, such as listening or thinking. When the clip for a state is not in data/avatar-clips, Directive 47 asks for it from the same GitHub release it updates itself from: at most eight requests per core per session, and only the id of the core goes with them. Off, nothing is fetched and a state with no clip shows the avatar’s own mark; clips already on disk still play.

Not reachable by the model.

Personality off

The conversation capability has a Personality switch. Off gives plain answers with no core, no flavour and no chatter of either kind.

The anti-invention guardrails are unaffected. They sit above the persona in the assembled prompt, and there is no code path that can vary them — switching coreslity off truncates a later block and cannot reach that one. A guardrail a setting could remove would be a guardrail in name only.

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