Instruction/Role and Reminder Messages

The instruction/role message is the main way to define/describe the character. It tells the AI how to speak and behave. It can be reasonably long - up to maybe 500 words, but you should still try to be as concise as possible. You could go up to 1000 words if you really need to, but it'll reduce the AI's ability to remember stuff in the chat. If you can describe your character well using only 100 words, then there's no reason to use more than that. Use lorebooks (in the character editor) if you need to tell the AI a lot of info about the character/world/etc. - you can add thousands of paragraphs of text using the "lore" feature.

The reminder message should be significantly shorter than the instruction/role. Probably keep it under 100 words. It's basically a small "hidden" message that's placed within the chat thread, right before the AI's next response. This can have a powerful influence on the AI's behavior because of its proximity to what the AI is about to write next. It's hard for the AI to ignore it. If it's too long, it can disrupt the flow of the conversation and "distract" the AI too much - with great power comes great responsibility. It's okay to leave the reminder message blank, and sometimes that will work best.

Note that when you edit a character's instruction/role and reminder messages, all existing threads will immediately receive the new updates. This is because the instruction and reminder messages are a part of the character itself, and not of individual chat threads. There's no way to define an instruction or reminder that only applies to a specific chat thread.

Advanced Instruction Messages

You can actually add multiple instruction/role messages and reminder messages. Just use the same format that's used for initial messages. You can use multiple instruction/role messages as a way to add 'initial messages' that are never summarized away - i.e. messages that are always placed at the start of the thread. And you can change the author of these messages from the default 'SYSTEM', to e.g. the 'AI', or 'USER', or any combination of those.

Here's an example of some text that you could write in the instruction/role input box that 'characterizes'/instructs the character using a first-person message:

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[AI]: I'm a dragon.
[USER]: I'm the queen of kingdom that is near the dragon's lair.
[SYSTEM]: What follows is a story about the queen and the dragon.

(Please be more creative than this 😅 I'm just hastily writing documentation here.)

As you can see, this is just like initial messages, except these messages will never get summarized. They'll always remain at the start of the chat.

Note that, normally, you'd just write something like this in the instruction/role input box:

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You are a dragon. The user is the queen of kingdom that is near the dragon's lair. What follows is a story about the queen and the dragon.

That's actually exactly equivalent to writing this:

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[SYSTEM]: You are a dragon. The user is the queen of kingdom that is near the dragon's lair. What follows is a story about the queen and the dragon.

So you can see that by default the instruction/role is 'spoken' by the 'system'. Using this 'advanced' approach you can create instructions which mix all messages types (user, ai, system).

Advanced Reminder Messages

All of the above applies for reminder messages too. For example, below we set a first-person reminder message - i.e. we make the AI remind itself. This is useful to prevent the AI from "replying" to the reminder message.

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[AI]: (Thought: I need to remember to be very descriptive, and create an engaging experience for the user)

If you didn't include the [AI]: part at the start, then it'd just be a 'normal' reminder message, and would be 'spoken' by 'SYSTEM'.

Notice that I put "Thought:" at the start of the message and wrapped it in parentheses. I could have also used (OOC: ...), which mean "out of character", or something like that. That way the message doesn't get treated like it's part of the actual conversation.

And you can of course add as many reminder messages as you like using this [AI]:/[USER]:/[SYSTEM]: format. Just follow the examples above, and in the initial messages doc.

Summary Stuff

Note that the chat summarization algorithm doesn't "see" the instruction or reminder messages. This is unlike initial messages, which are just treated as normal messages - they'll get summarized if the thread gets long enough.

Again, all "normal" messages (including 'initial messages') will eventually get summarized if the thread gets long enough, assuming you've got summarization enabled in the character settings, whereas instruction/reminder messages aren't considered as being part of the "real" chat messages, and so they don't influence the summary.