When you hit enter on a turn, three things decide what the world says back: the context window, your memory slots, and any story cards pinned to that world. It's worth knowing how they fit together, because tuning your expectations around them is the difference between a story that feels consistent and one that feels like it's improvising badly.
The context window is how much of the story the AI can actually read before it writes the next line — measured in tokens, roughly pieces of words. At 4k tokens, it's working mostly from the last several turns. At 32k, it can weigh a much longer stretch, which is why callbacks and long-game consequences land more reliably on the higher tiers. This is the part that scales with your plan.
Memory slots are different — they're not the raw scrollback, they're a curated set of facts the system decides are worth holding onto past the point where they'd normally fall out of the context window. A character's name, a promise made three sessions ago, the fact that a city is currently at war. The Loremaster rewrite changed how these get selected, scoring them by relevance to the current scene rather than just how recently they came up.
Story cards sit on top of both of those as the one thing you get to decide unilaterally. Everything else is the AI's best guess at what matters; a story card is you telling it, explicitly, this does not drift. That's why five good cards do more work than fifty vague ones — they're not competing with the context window, they're overriding it.
None of this is instant. Holding a coherent world in mind — its people, its history, everything you've already changed — is real computation, and it's the part running in the gap between your turn and the world's answer.
