Managing your World Codex

Managing your World Codex

Your World Codex is the living encyclopedia of your story. As you write, it keeps track of your characters, locations, events, objects, organizations, and the rules
of your world, all in one place. This guide covers how to keep it accurate and organized: editing and deleting entries by hand, adding images, and using the two kinds
of scans that build and enrich your codex for you.

Open the World Codex from your project's navigation in the app.

Editing an entry by hand

The scans give you a strong starting point, and every detail is yours to refine.

1. Open the World Codex and click the entry you want to change. Its details open in the side panel.
2. Click Edit (the pencil icon).
3. Update any field you like:
4. • Name and description
   • Attributes, the key facts such as eye color, age, or home region
   • Tags
4. Click Save to keep your changes, or Cancel to discard them.

Deleting an entry

If an entry was created by mistake, duplicates another, or no longer belongs in your story:

1. Open the entry and click Edit.
2. Click the delete (trash) button.
3. Confirm when prompted.

Deleting removes the entry from your codex and cannot be undone, so remove with care. If you are only trying to clean up a duplicate, editing the surviving entry is
usually the better move.

Adding images to an entry

Pictures bring your codex to life, whether it is a character portrait, a hand-drawn map, or reference art.

1. Open an entry and find the Images section.
2. Click Upload and choose your file. You can add more than one image to a single entry.
3. Click the star on any image to make it the entry's main picture.
4. Add a caption to give an image context.
5. To remove an image, click its trash icon.

If your book is part of a series, image upload uses a project in that series, so you will need access to at least one project there.

The two types of scans

Novelium can read your manuscript and build your codex automatically. There are two kinds of scans, and they do different jobs.

Discovery scan

A Discovery scan reads across your whole manuscript and finds and creates entries for the people, places, and things in your story. This is how you populate your
codex at the start, and how you pick up new entities after you have written more.

• To find everything, open the World Codex and click Discover Entries.
• To find a single category, filter to that category first (for example, Locations), then click Discover Locations. This fills in one type without re-scanning
  everything. When a category has nothing in it yet, you will see a prompt to discover it.Reach for a Discovery scan when you want breadth: building your codex or catching what is new.Deep scanA Deep scan focuses on one entry. It rereads your entire manuscript for everything about that single subject and rebuilds the entry with detailed findings.

1. Open the entry you want to enrich.
2. Click Perform deep research.

This is the best way to get a rich, thorough profile of an important character or location. One thing to keep in mind: a Deep scan replaces that entry's current
attributes and description with its findings, so if you have hand-edited those fields, save a copy of anything you want to keep before you run it.

Reach for a Deep scan when you want depth on a single subject.

Which scan should I use?

┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ You want to... │ Use │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Build your codex for the first time │ Discovery scan │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Catch new characters or places after writing more │ Discovery scan │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Fill in just one category │ Discovery scan (filtered to that type) │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Get a deep, detailed profile of one entry │ Deep scan │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────────┘

Need a hand?

If something is not behaving the way you expect, reach out through the support icon in the bottom right corner of the app. We are glad to help.

Updated on: 19/06/2026