How memory works

A common question after a long chat is: why did they remember our first kiss but forget that I'm allergic to peanuts?

The answer is that Reverie has three different memory layers and only one of them is permanent. Understanding which layer your information lives in tells you what will survive a long conversation.

The three layers

   ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
1. │  Live conversation context      │  Last ~50K tokens of raw messages
   └─────────────────────────────────┘
                  │ when it gets too long
                  ▼
   ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
2. │  Rolling summary                │  Compressed narrative of older messages
   └─────────────────────────────────┘
                  │ runs alongside
                  ▼
   ┌─────────────────────────────────┐
3. │  Long-term memory               │  Pinned facts that survive forever
   └─────────────────────────────────┘

Layer 1 — live context

The most recent messages. The model sees them verbatim. Bounded by the model's context window — see the multiplier table on Credits explained for each model's max.

When the conversation grows past the window, older messages roll off into…

Layer 2 — rolling summary

A condensed narrative of the older parts of the chat, regenerated periodically. It preserves: storyline, emotional dynamics, open plot threads. It loses: exact dates, verbatim wording, minor details.

This is why "we fought on the rooftop" survives but "you were wearing the blue dress" might not — unless that detail was emotionally loaded enough to make it into the summary.

Layer 3 — long-term memory

A durable list of facts the character has noted about you. These survive forever, across sessions, regardless of conversation length. They include:

• Your name, age, location, occupation
• Your preferences (likes, dislikes, dietary stuff)
• Big relationship milestones (first kiss, big fight)
• Character growth (promotions, life changes)

Long-term memory is auto-populated by the AI and editable by you — two ways:

• Live, mid-conversation. The character notices a durable fact as you say it and files it away in the same turn.
• Automatically, after the conversation goes quiet. See below.

Making sure something is remembered

If a detail matters and you want it permanent, add it to long-term memory explicitly:

Useful for facts that weren't said in chat at all — your timezone, your pronouns, that you're a vegetarian — or for explicitly preserving a moment from the conversation that you don't want the summarizer to compress away.

Automatic review after a conversation goes quiet

Not everything that matters announces itself in the moment — an offhand comment might only turn out to be significant later. So once a conversation with a character has been idle for a while, Reverie takes a second pass over what was actually said and catches durable facts the live, in-the-moment catch missed: things merged into an existing memory, duplicates cleaned up, anything genuinely new added.

A few things worth knowing about this pass:

• It only runs after the chat goes quiet — never mid-conversation, and never more than about once a day per character.
• What it produces is treated exactly like a memory you typed yourself: it shows up in the same Side panel → Memory list, and you can edit or delete it there.
• It's a safety net, not a replacement for pinning. If something needs to be remembered exactly right, pin it yourself — that's still the fastest, most precise way to guarantee it survives.

Browsing and editing memory

Side panel → Memory shows everything currently in long-term memory for this character. You can:

• Edit an entry (fix a misremembered detail)
• Delete an entry (make them forget)
• Filter by Character-specific vs. Global
• Generate — let the AI scan recent chat and propose new memories
• Clear all memories — fresh start

Character vs. global memory

• Character-specific (default) — only this character knows it.
• Global — every character knows it.

Global memory is for stuff like your pronouns or that you're a recovering alcoholic — facts a character should know regardless of what role they play. Don't put plot points in global memory — your detective character shouldn't know about events from your fantasy roleplay.

Memory + personas + forking

Memory is partitioned three ways:

1. By character — each character has its own memory.
2. By persona — each persona has its own memory thread with each character.
3. By branch — forks inherit memory at the fork point, then build their own.

This means you can run multiple parallel relationships with the same character that never contaminate each other.

When the character forgets something

Three things to try:

1. Reference it again. Bringing it up pulls it back into the live context and gives the summary another chance to keep it.
2. Pin it. If it's important enough to remember, it's important enough to pin.
3. Add it manually. Skip the chat round-trip and add the fact straight to long-term memory.

When the character "remembers" something that didn't happen

Sometimes the summary compresses a scene incorrectly and that error becomes the canonical version. Fix:

• Memory → find the wrong entry → Edit or Delete.
• Pin the correct version to override.

Memory and credits

Long-term memory takes up tokens in every reply — usually 200-800 depending on how much you've pinned. It's worth it. But if you have hundreds of pinned memories on one character, you'll see your per-message cost creep up. Prune occasionally.