This update makes word counting to be more in line with Scrivener. Both, Word and Google Docs (which we have used as a guideline so far) have issues counting words with em-dashes, punctuation and other special characters. The updated word counting is now more like what people would count as real words.

For comparison:

We internally upgraded to a new version of the framework Novelcrafter is using to render stuff on screen. While there were great performance improvements, the memory consumption should be even less for bigger novels now. Though we did extensive testing, as always, please report if some things aren't updating quite right.

For all system prompts, we now configured all Mistral models to go through the "Mistral" provider on OpenRouter. While OpenRouter does allow calls to "Azure" as well, those have a special moderation layer that can cut off the output too early if it detects an issue, causing you to loose money as the AI already started responding. Novelcrafter cannot show you when these "in-stream moderation" errors happen yet, so we opted for this solution for the time being.

This release mostly contains bug fixes and general improvements:

This release changes the routing to Novelcrafter itself, which should increase stability and reduce latency across the globe, especially for people in Oceania or in rural places.

In addition, the following minor changes have been made:

Let's say you're working on more than one book or series, and you have to add a new person to your writing projects. Before now, it was quite tedious to add them individually, but with the new teams feature you can set one up once and simply share your novels or series with everyone involved!

You can reach the feature through the settings dialog.

You can invite members by email, and even have everyone set whether they want to be visible to the others. Team leads can also decide if sharing of novels and/or series with the team should be allowed and even hide the member list entirely (e.g. for more "public" teams with dozens of members).

With the introduction of teams we also reworked how invitations work and look; only owners and team leads can now see the emails of invited people/members. For privacy reasons we've disabled showing them for anybody else.

For those that have a lot of novels or series shared with them, there was no easy way to figure out who owns what or where you're all involved with. The new "Shared with me" tab in the settings lists out all the content either shared with you directly, or through a team, and allows an easy way to leave them, too.

Sometimes an entry doesn't fit into your current novel or series, or has been mistakenly added to the wrong project. The new "Move to..." feature allows you to move the codex entry somewhere else altogether!

Some people have started to build up hundreds of codex entries and the performance for matching your entries has tanked quite a bit.

A new system has been built that should work much better with entries that share a common structure (e.g. "Town name - entrance", "Town name - central", or things like "Country - Flora & Fauna", "Country - Towns").

In addition, any archived scenes you have will no longer be looked through either, since it didn't make much sense in the first place.

Novels, codex entries, snippets and chats can now be archived and restored. Don't want to delete them right away, or declutter your content? You can now archive them and bring them back any time.

If you want to see your archived content, look for the funnel/filter button:

You can see a detailed guide over on our documentation: https://docs.novelcrafter.com/en/articles/9733992-archiving

This also means that archived novels are hidden by default on your home screen (clear the filter, or toggle to "archived" to view them again).

After some further testing, we are now including the name of the character for each scene in the novel outline. When using chat you can now talk about his & her stories or other setups with either single POVs or alternating viewpoints!

This release also fixes indentation issues in prompts - any indentations or extra spaces at the start of the line are now kept all properly (this should improve AI prompt adherence in some cases). This is helpful when you have multi-level markdown lists for writing rules in your prompts.

This release also contains a couple important bug fixes:

The internal structure for the "Include novel outline" feature has been updated to use a more structured approach (XML instead of Markdown). This should . We've also made scenes with content but no summary visible to the AI, preventing it from underestimating the number of scenes in your story.

A new use case now possible:

If you prefer the old behavior for your custom prompts (although we consider this a major improvement), you can change your call(s) to .

Other chat updates:

We've updated the novel import dialog, including a new setting to enhance imports for users who only use scene dividers. New help text has been added to better explain the options.

For those that don't want to bother with titles and the like, and only have a single-chapter novel, the importer now supports those as well!

We got something exciting to share with you: going forward, every month, we'll send out a new, interactive theme machine for writing prompts and more.

For August, we prepared a fancy Bingo grid. It's there to help you find new and exciting ideas and hone your writing skills along the way. Choose a row or column yourself, use the randomizer, or take a chance with the chaos button! Play around with it here: https://monthly-muse.com/1 (you can also reach it via the NC website.)

If the theme machine doesn't come up with something great, we also included some creative sparks for more fresh ideas.

We cleaned up the current model lists for the system prompts and ! This should make longer chat sessions a lot more budget friendly.

In addition, this release includes the following bugfixes and such:

The long awaited chat prompt preview is here! You can now see what gets sent to the AI when entering a question/message. You can access the prompt preview button from the model switcher in the chat thread header (next to "Select AI").

For some, the custom prompts can be a bit daunting to look at when unfamiliar with programming languages. So we added support for comments inside your custom prompts! The system default prompts now have a couple to tell you, what each section does.

To wrap text in a comment, wrap it in and , like so: .

That way you also can just disable certain functionality from your prompts, without having to remove it altogether.

This update contains a that reduce the number of updates the app does as you work. Editing codex entries should now be smoother/faster, as well as using AI actions should now be a lot faster as well (less choppy/lagging).

While you were able to say "remember where I left off", that only applied to the exact scene and position, but not how your write view looked like. So going back to it, you always ended up back with "everything". This was annoying. So we fixed it.

You can now always go back to exactly where you left your manuscript, which should help a lot with larger projects.

As some of the performance issues stemmed from the AI interactions, this aspect has been updated and visually overhauled, which in turn made a couple goodies possible!

And yes, this update also fixes the issue of the apply/retry/discard buttons being stuck or keep floating around. That was indeed quite annoying.