How to use it

Three steps to changing something without opening a menu.

1 Just ask.

turn your personality off Ask "set the speech volume to sixty" — "use the small speech model" It says what it changed, and from what to what.

2 Or find it on the Settings tab.

Settings Search type a word, or a key like listening. Show every setting off — the fold hides the advanced ones The search box matches labels and keys both.

! The one that stops people.

Some rows refuse the AI, and say so. Anything safety-critical — push-to-talk, Cancel, key injection — is yours alone, by design.
Why it works this way

Changing things by asking — and the handful D47 will not change however nicely you ask.

1 Some settings have a safety catch.

Some settings are protected. D47's AI cannot change them — and asking it to will not either. It is a safety catch, and it is there for you. You can still change any of them yourself: on this page, with a hotkey, or by saying so.

2 Most settings apply to the installed app. A few belong to each of your CMDRs.

THE APP keys, devices, theme, zoom, hotkeys the same whoever is flying and the running cost, which is one bill PER COMMANDER your character sheet, your About Me which ship each core is bound to Elite says who is flying, and D47 listens A second Commander on the same machine never sees the first's story. Yours reads the machine's until you set it. Emptying it afterwards is a choice, not a reset.

3 A value it does not know is answered, not ignored.

“use the chatty theme” “'chatty' is not a valid Theme. Expected one of: elite, dark, light, guardian, elite-palette.” Never silently ignored, and never guessed at. TRUE, on and True are one answer rather than three. Clearing a row puts back its default — which is the greyed-out value the box has been showing you all along.

Everything here is changeable from the settings panel with no file to hand-edit, and every change takes effect at once — there is no save button and no restart.

The details

Changing Directive 47’s settings by asking, and the things it will not change however nicely you ask.

Everything is changeable from the settings panel with no file to hand-edit, and every change takes effect at once — there is no save button and no restart. This page is about the other way in: what you can change by talking to it.

Ask for it

“what can you change” “what theme are you using” “switch to the guardian theme” “turn journal logging up to debug”

Say a value it does not offer and it tells you the ones it does, rather than silently ignoring you:

'chatty' is not a valid Theme. Expected one of: elite, dark, light, guardian, elite-palette.

Clearing a setting is always allowed and puts it back to its default — which is the greyed-out value the box has been showing you all along.

What it will not change by voice

Some rows are marked protected. You can change them from the panel, with a bound key, or by saying one of the specific phrases the app recognises on its own — but never through the language model.

Row Why
Which language model answers, and where It decides what leaves this machine
Any API key It is your key
Check for updates at startup It decides whether anything leaves at all
Every hotkey Rebinding one hands out a way in

The reason is worth a sentence, because everything here follows from it. Directive 47 reads text nobody here wrote: journal entries carrying another Commander’s chosen ship name, in-game messages from anyone in range, and later web results. Anything the model can be asked to do, a hostile message can try to make it do. A guard the model can switch off is not a guard, so the rows that decide what leaves your machine are not on its list at all.

Ask anyway and you get a straight answer rather than a pretence that the setting does not exist:

'Provider' is protected. It can be changed from the settings panel, but not by me.

Some rows are the Commander’s, not the installation’s

Several Commanders can play on one machine, and Elite tells Directive 47 which one is flying. Most settings are the installation’s — keys, devices, theme, zoom, hotkeys — and stay the same whoever logs in. A few are about the person in the chair, and those are marked per Commander on the row: the Character sheet, About Me, and which ship the core-binding rows are pointed at. Each Commander sees their own value there, and a second Commander on the same machine never sees the first one’s story.

How it works, because it affects what you see in the file:

  • A per-Commander row reads the installation’s value until that Commander sets their own. The installation’s value is whatever was there before anyone logged in — including everything in a settings file from before this existed.
  • Once a Commander sets a row, their value lives in their own entry under commanders in settings.json, keyed by their Frontier id with their name written beside it. The installation’s value is untouched.
  • Clearing a per-Commander row is a choice, not a reset. A Commander who empties About Me reads nothing — not the installation’s story, and not somebody else’s. In the file that is an empty string; a value that was never set is null, and the two are deliberately different.
  • Anything set before Elite has said who is flying is the installation’s. It is not handed to whoever logs in first.

What is not per Commander, and on purpose: the running cost of the AI. That is the person’s bill across every character they play, so the spend ledger is one ledger for the installation.

How values are read

Settings are forgiving about how you say them. TRUE, on and True are one answer, not three.

Kind of setting What it accepts
A switch true/on/yes/enabled/1, or false/off/no/disabled/0
A choice One of the offered values, in any case
A number A whole number
Text, or a key to press Anything
A key or password Only ever written, never read back

Most choices are closed — a theme is one of five. A few are deliberately open: the model name is one, because an endpoint Directive 47 has never seen still has models it knows nothing about.

The tool surface, for contributors

Protection is a property of the caller rather than of the modality. The same row is reachable from the settings panel, from a bound hotkey and from the model-free keyword router, and unreachable from anything the model can invoke.

Caller May change a protected row
Settings panel Yes
Bound hotkey Yes
Keyword router (model-free) Yes
Tool call from the model No

Enforced in one place — SettingsService.Apply — so a new capability cannot opt itself out by forgetting. Secrets are refused for the model caller whether or not anyone remembered to also mark the row protected. Hotkeys are protected because a gesture is one of the three trusted callers: a model that could rebind one could hand itself a caller it is not allowed to be.

list_settings

Lists the settings a tool call may change, with their current values. Protected rows, secrets and read-only disclosures are not listed: a row the model cannot change is a row it has no reason to know the name of.

{"type":"object","properties":{},"required":[],"additionalProperties":false}

logging.default — Default log level: Information
logging.subsystems.journal — Journal log level: (default)
    one of: Trace, Debug, Information, Warning, Error, Critical, None
llm.model — Model: (default: claude-opus-5)
    one of: claude-opus-5, claude-opus-4-8, claude-sonnet-5, claude-haiku-4-5, claude-fable-5
llm.personality — Personality: true
ui.theme — Theme: elite

get_setting

Reports one setting’s current value by key.

{"type":"object","properties":{"key":{"type":"string","description":"The setting key, as reported by list_settings."}},"required":["key"],"additionalProperties":false}

set_setting

Changes one setting. Applies immediately — there is no save step and no restart. Omitting the value clears the setting back to its default.

{"type":"object","properties":{"key":{"type":"string","description":"The setting key, as reported by list_settings."},"value":{"type":"string","description":"The new value. Omit it to clear the setting back to its default."}},"required":["key"],"additionalProperties":false}