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Keeping characters and locations straight across twelve episodes

Last updated September 10, 2026 · 17 min read

In one line: where your cast and your locations actually live now that there is no character bible — how the register builds itself, what a character sheet is, and what to do when a name has to change in all twelve episodes.

Ink Tide (Screenplay), Episode 07. The dashed underline under Shen Yan means the name matched Characters/Shen Yan.md in the tree. Clicking the magnifier before the name opens the character card: 41 scenes / 122 lines is the total across all twelve episodes, the bars break it down per episode (Episode 11 leads with 14, Episode 08 has one), and Open character file jumps straight to that .md. The roster is derived from the scripts — there is no separate character table to keep up to date.

Where it went: two things, not one

If you are coming back from the old Script Studio, this is the answer to where did my character data go, and it has two halves.

Then: one record

  • A character was a database record you created
  • It held age, role, goal, flaw, arc, sample lines
  • A scene "had" characters because you linked them
  • An appearance matrix drew scenes × characters

Now: a register plus a sheet

  • The register builds itself from the names you type on character lines. Read-only, no file, nothing to maintain
  • The sheet is a plain .md you write, and only if you want one
  • A scene "has" a character because someone speaks there

Neither half needs the other. You can write twelve episodes with no character files at all, and the autocomplete, the counts and the cross-episode bars all work. You can also keep eight character sheets and never look at the register. Most people end up with sheets for the six people who matter and nothing for the rest.

How the register builds itself

Every .script file in the book is read, and every name you have typed on a character line goes in. Nothing else does.

  • Ordered by dialogue lines, then by scene count, then alphabetically. So the autocomplete puts your leads at the top without being told who the leads are.
  • It appears about half a second after you type it — the register is recomputed from the files, so a name typed in episode 7 shows up in episode 2's autocomplete on the next save.
  • A name mentioned only in action or dialogue text is not in it. Write Pei Zhao turns the page as an action line and Pei Zhao is not cast; he joins the register the first time he speaks.
  • V.O., O.S. and CONT'D are not part of the name. They are a separate badge you click to cycle through, so SHEN YAN and SHEN YAN (V.O.) are one cast member. Imported files have these stripped into the badge for you.

The register is case-sensitive, and this is the number one way a cast splits in two. Ann, ANN and ann are three separate people with three separate counts and three separate rows in the dropdown. Nothing merges them and nothing warns you. Full-width and half-width letters are separate too. Pick a spelling on day one and take it from the autocomplete afterwards rather than retyping it.

An empty character line is nobody — it doesn't enter the register, and the dialogue underneath it is credited to nobody either. If a character's counts look low, check for a half-typed cue.

The card behind a name

Click the small magnifier that appears before a character's name — View character info.

Shen Yan
  41 scenes · 122 lines            ← the whole book, not this episode
  Episode 01  ████████      11     ← one bar per episode, sized by dialogue lines
  Episode 08  █              1
  Episode 11  ████████████  14     ← her busiest, and what the other bars scale against
  Open character file              ← or "No character file yet"
  • The bars appear only when the character speaks in two or more episodes. A one-episode character gets the summary line and nothing else.
  • Each bar is scaled against that character's own busiest episode, not against the rest of the cast. It answers when do they go quiet, not who has the most lines.
  • Nothing on the card is editable. It is a read-out. Goals, flaws and the way someone talks belong in the sheet.
  • There is no first-appearance marker, no age, no role, and no scenes × characters matrix anywhere in 4.0. Those bars are the closest thing, one character at a time.

"Create new character" does not create anything

When you type a name the register has never seen, the last row of the autocomplete offers Create new character "…". It types the name onto the line. That is all it does — no file appears, nothing is registered, and the name enters the register on the next save exactly as if you had typed it in full. The same is true of Create new location "…" in a scene heading.

So there is nothing to clean up afterwards, and equally nothing to fill in.

A character sheet is a .md with one structured field

Want a profile? Make a manuscript file and name it after the character. Right-click a folder → New Manuscript, rename it Shen Yan.

Characters/
  Shen Yan.md
  Pei Zhao.md
Screenplay/
  Episode 01 - The Copyist Girl

Now the name in every screenplay in the book picks up a dashed underline, and Ctrl/⌘-click opens the sheet in the other half of a split editor — the screenplay stays where it is. Hovering the name shows the file's path with (Ctrl+Click) after it.

How the match is made, precisely:

  • On the filename, minus the extension. .md, .markdown and .txt all count.
  • Case-insensitively, after trimming spaces. So shen yan.md still links.
  • The folder is irrelevant. A sheet anywhere in the book links. Folder names like Characters or Locations only nudge Slima about what kind of thing it is; they never gate the match.
  • Plus every alias in the file's frontmatter. The only structured field a sheet has is aliases:
---
aliases: [Yan]
---

# Shen Yan

Sixteen, copyist girl at the You'an Scriptorium…

## Appearance
## Temperament
## Want and Need
## Flaw
## Arc (12 episodes)

Every heading under that is yours. There is no schema, no required field, no form.

Aliases only affect the underline, never the autocomplete. Putting Yan in the frontmatter means a screenplay line reading Yan links to Shen Yan's sheet — but typing Yan in the character autocomplete will not suggest Shen Yan. The register has no aliases; it only knows the strings you have actually typed.

Two files matching one name: the file actually named after the character wins over someone else's alias. If two files tie, one of them wins silently and there is no warning. Don't give two sheets the same name.

Locations: the same machine, one affordance short

  • The register is built the same way, from the location field of every scene heading in every .script in the book, ordered by scene count.
  • The dropdown opens when you click into the location field, even before you type — so an empty field offers the whole book's locations, most-used first. That is how episode 2 picks up You'an Scriptorium from episode 1 without a spelling risk.
  • The / slash palette's quick-insert carries the five most-used locations in the book.
  • A same-named .md links the same way — dashed underline on the location, Ctrl/⌘-click to open. But locations have no card and no "open location file" button: the Ctrl-click is the only way in.
  • Interior/exterior is remembered per name from the last scene that used it, so if the same place is sometimes inside and sometimes outside, the dropdown's INT/EXT pill shows whichever you set most recently. It is a hint, not a rule — set the marker on each scene.

There is no per-episode view for a location. Characters get distribution bars; locations get a total scene count in the dropdown and nothing else. To find out which episodes use the night market, search for it.

The first scene heading of Episode 04 in Ink Tide (Screenplay). Clear the location field and click it — no typing — and the book's locations drop down: You'an Scriptorium 16 scenes, The Chengwen Sea 7, The Mud Bay 7, Linze Harbor 4, and so on, each row carrying an INT or EXT pill on the left and its scene count on the right, most-used first. A location is not a list you maintain; it grows out of what you have typed into scene headings. The empty field itself reads + Location.

Seeing one name across the whole season

Three places, and it is worth knowing which answers which question.

You want to know Look at
Which episodes does she speak in, and how much The character card's per-episode bars
Which files mention her at all — including in action and in your notes Her sheet's Linked Elements panel
Who is in this episode, scene by scene The Outline panel's Characters tab (Ctrl+Shift+O) — this episode only

The middle one is the one people miss. Open a character's .md and the Linked Elements panel lists Mentioned in, grouped by folder, with a match count per file and a few highlighted snippets — and screenplay files are scanned, so the sheet tells you that Pei Zhao is named in episodes 2, 8, 9 and 11 even where he doesn't speak.

What does not exist: no book-wide cast list screen, no location list screen, and no character-by-episode grid. The old appearance matrix has no replacement. The nearest thing to a full roster is the read-aloud Character voices dialog, which lists everyone in the book's screenplays so you can assign each a voice — a settings dialog doing double duty as a cast list.

Changing a name in twelve episodes

There is no rename tool for a character or a location. What there is, and it does the job, is book-wide search and replace.

Renaming a character across a season

Ctrl/⌘+Shift+F Show Replace Type both spellings Replace All

Replace All walks every file in the book, not just the ones showing in the result list.

Inside a .script, replace reaches the fields that matter: dialogue, action, parentheticals, transitions, character names, shot content, scene-heading locations and annotations, scene summaries, and the title page's title, subtitle, writer and logline. It never touches internal ids, element types, time of day or scene numbers.

A screenplay can only be replaced a whole file at a time. Prose files get a Replace button on each individual match; structured files (screenplay, relationship map, timeline, world map, beat board) get only Replace N in this file, and the panel says so. Read the matches first, then replace the file.

Leave "Whole Word" off for a Chinese, Japanese or Korean name. Search deliberately ignores whole-word for these scripts — but replace does not. With the option on, a CJK name finds matches and then replaces none of them, with no error. This is the one setting that will waste an afternoon.

Two more things about the panel: the result list stops at 1,000 matches (Replace All is not capped, so it still covers everything), and searching starts after two characters — a single-character query only runs when you press Enter.

Renaming the sheet breaks the link, silently. Rename Shen Yan.md and every dashed underline in the screenplays goes plain; the only sign is the card flipping to No character file yet. The same happens in reverse when you rename the character in the script.
The fix is one line: put the other spelling in the sheet's frontmatter aliases and both link.

The relationship map, and how it finds your files

A .map is a canvas of nodes you type — it is not generated from the register, and there is no "build a map from my cast" anywhere.

What connects it to your files is the same idea as the underline, with one difference worth remembering: a node links to a file when the node's text is exactly a filename in this book — and here the match is case-sensitive. A linked node wears a small link badge above it, and Ctrl/⌘-click opens the file. Dragging in from the file tree accepts manuscript files only, but a hand-typed node naming a screenplay file will open that too.

Because a .map is just a file in the book's tree, one map serves everything in that book — a novel's chapters and a screenplay's episodes in the same book share the same map. And it works in the other direction: a character's sheet shows that map's connections in the same Linked Elements panel, under Relationships.

The map itself is covered in Relationship Map: Draw Your Characters' Connections and The Relationship Map Is Also a Whiteboard.

When not to bother

  • Don't make a sheet for every walk-on. A name on a character line is already a fully working cast member with counts and autocomplete. Sheets are for people whose contradictions you need to keep straight.
  • Don't rely on aliases to save typing. They link; they do not suggest. Take names from the autocomplete.
  • Don't retype a name you have used before. One capital letter and you have two characters.
  • Don't wait for a matrix. If you need to know who appears where, the sheet's Mentioned in list is the honest answer, and it is per file rather than per scene.
  • Don't rename anything mid-draft without Replace All, and check the count it reports against the count search found.

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