Everything You Made Up, Where You Can Find It.
World is the story bible inside Shiro: your characters, places, groups, events, lore, maps and invented languages, each with an entry. Whenever the manuscript names one, Shiro links it. That linking runs on your computer and involves no AI at all.
An Entry for Everyone, Including the Dead
An entry can be a character, a group, a place, an event, a calendar, a piece of lore, an item, a secret, a language, a picture, a diagram or a mind map. If your book needs something else, make a kind of your own. Entries are files in your project’s World/ folder, so the bible outlives the app. Our guide to story bibles covers what’s worth writing down, and it’s less than you fear.
World is the lens for novels and short stories. Non-fiction and memoir get Research in its place.
Names Link Themselves, and No Model Is Involved
Give an entry a name and some aliases, and Shiro finds them in your text as whole words. There’s no AI behind this and no network call. It works on a train with no signal, and it works if you’ve turned the AI off for life. Click a name in the text to reach the entry, and open the entry to see where it’s named.
All it does is match words, which has consequences. A character called Will gets credit for every sentence that opens with the word. And being named isn’t being present, so who is really in a scene comes from that scene’s point of view and cast, which you set.
Rename an entry and Shiro offers to change the name in the text as well, taking a snapshot of each scene first. Deciding on page 300 that Thomas was always Tobias is a small event.
Facts That Change as the Story Moves
A fact on an entry has a position as well as a value: captain from book one, disgraced from the middle of book two, dead by the end of book three. You can record one from the passage where it becomes true, and ask for an entry’s facts as of any point in the story.
In a series, later facts stay hidden while you work on an earlier book, so the bride in book one doesn’t start behaving like the widow in book three.
Who Is Related to Whom, and How Far It Is to Walk
Relations have types and inverses: mark her as his mother and he becomes her child without further paperwork. The relationship map draws the whole cast, and the family tree is there for sagas where someone has to establish that those two aren’t cousins before the wedding.
Maps take pins, zones, routes and a scale. Set how far people travel in a day along each kind of route, and the travel-time check tells you when your army has crossed a continent between two chapters. That check runs in code too, with the rest of the continuity checks.
Trackers, for What People Know and What They’re Carrying
A tracker follows one thing through the book. Shiro comes with knowledge, allegiances, appearance, clues, possessions, relationships, resources and wounds. Wounds, because a left arm broken on page 90 has a way of climbing a wall on page 110. Knowledge, because a surprising number of plot holes are someone acting on news they haven’t had yet.
You can fill a tracker by hand. If you use Shiro’s AI, it can read your scenes and propose new entries and facts, each with the sentence it came from. In Manual mode nothing changes until you accept. In Auto they land straight away and stay listed for you to check.
The Language and the House Rules
Invented languages get a lexicon, and you can mark a passage in Write to check it against the words you’ve coined. The style sheet holds the decisions a copyeditor will ask about: how the river is spelled, whether the Guild takes a capital, and whether your hero’s name has that hyphen or only had it in the first draft.
The Questions People Ask
What is story bible software?
A place to keep what’s true about your book: who everyone is, where things are, what happened when, and what the rules are. Shiro keeps it in the same app you write in, so entries and scenes know about each other.
Does mention linking use AI?
No. It’s a local whole-word match on names and aliases. No model is involved and nothing leaves your computer.
Can it track characters across a series?
Yes. Facts can change by book or by position in the story, and facts from later books stay hidden while you write an earlier one.
Can I bring in my Novelcrafter codex?
Yes. Shiro imports a Novelcrafter folder or zip, and codex entries become World entries with their aliases.
Is World available for non-fiction?
World is for novels and short stories. Non-fiction and memoir projects get the Research lens in its place.