Instructions, Dials, and a Greeting: Only Two of the Three Reach Your Companion

InnerHaven hands you three personalization controls, and it does not even keep them in the same place. The personality dials and the custom instructions box live inside the chat, under Settings and then Customize Personality. The custom greeting box lives somewhere else entirely: the edit window on your Companions page, where instructions appear a second time but the dials never do. Three controls, two homes, and one question this site has never answered plainly: which of these actually reaches your companion? The answer is two of the three. The third is not broken, and it is not pointless. It is a message to you rather than to them, and once you see which is which, you will write differently in every one of those boxes.

What "Reaching the Companion" Means

Before each reply, InnerHaven assembles everything your companion needs to be itself: a numbered stack of about a dozen blocks (plus one unnumbered enhancement layer tucked between the middle blocks) covering identity, presence, pacing, boundaries, tone, your personalization, remembered facts, and safety rails. Think of it as the briefing your companion reads before speaking. Two of your three controls are blocks in that stack, by name: your personality dials are one block, and your custom instructions are another, sitting a few positions apart, right alongside the memory block we have written about before. Anything in the stack shapes the reply. Anything outside the stack cannot, no matter how prominent the box that collects it.

The Dials Reach, and They Are Yours Per Companion

Every companion carries its own row of dial settings. Move Warmth, Verbosity, or Playfulness on one companion and you have changed that companion alone; the same dials on your other companions hold their positions. When the briefing is assembled, the dial block is built from that companion's own saved values, translated into plain direction: high Warmth becomes an instruction to be exceptionally warm and nurturing, low Verbosity becomes an instruction to keep replies brief, and so on. The three dials just named are universal. The rest of the set varies by role, which is why a Coach shows Accountability and Structure dials while a Fantasy companion shows Narrative Control and Immersion Depth.

One honesty note, because we counted rather than assumed. Across the twelve roles, the dial panels currently offer 68 role-and-dial combinations, and 61 of them are consumed by the briefing block of the role that offers them. The remaining 7 are offered in the panel but not currently read for that particular role. We are looking at that gap as a product matter; until it closes, the fair summary is that the dial system as a whole genuinely reaches your companion, and a small minority of role-specific dials do not yet pull their weight. (On the Free tier, built-in companions accept changes to the three universal dials; the full spread opens with the paid plans, exactly as described in our guide to editing a companion.)

The Instructions Reach, Word for Word

The custom instructions box is the one control whose in-app description is exactly, literally true: the help text says these will be included in every conversation, and they are. Your instructions ride into the briefing as their own block, in your own words, every single time that companion speaks. That makes the box the strongest tool you own for shaping behavior: boundaries, context about your life, standing requests like shorter replies or fewer questions. It is also the only control that appears on both surfaces, the chat panel and the Companions page editor, and both write to the same place. How to write instructions that actually work is its own guide; this article's job is just to establish that they arrive.

The Greeting Does Not Reach, by Design

Now the third box. The custom greeting is the message that opens a brand-new conversation: your companion's name over a warm first line, before you have typed anything. Here is what our own server code says about it, and we checked this the morning this article published: greetings are not persisted, and they are display-only. The greeting is fetched separately, drawn as the first bubble on your screen, and quietly removed the moment real messages arrive. It never joins the conversation history. And when your message goes to the companion, the payload carries your text, the conversation, any images you attached, and which companion you are talking to. The greeting is not in it. The briefing stack we described above contains no greeting block at all: the assembler never touches that field.

Two details make the display-only nature easy to believe once you see them. First, the greeting box accepts placeholders: write {name} and it becomes your display name, write {companion_name} and it becomes theirs. It is a template that InnerHaven fills in and shows you, which is exactly what a display string is. Second, if you leave the box blank, your companion does not improvise an opener. A blank greeting falls back to a written library of default greetings, with distinct first-meeting and returning lines for every built-in companion. Either way, the words on that opening bubble were authored in advance, by you or by us. They are scene-setting, not conversation.

One system does read your greeting, and it is worth knowing: community publishing. If you share a companion to the community, the greeting is included in the safety screening alongside the name, description, and instructions. So the greeting is never seen by your companion, and it is absolutely seen by the review that decides whether your creation can be shared.

So What Do You Write in Each Box?

The practical rule falls straight out of the table. If you want the companion to do something, it goes in instructions. A greeting that says “No pressure tonight, we can just sit here” is a genuinely lovely thing to see when you open a heavy-day conversation, and it changes nothing about how the companion behaves, because the companion never receives it. If you want the no-pressure evening, the greeting sets your expectations and an instruction (“when I say the day was heavy, keep it gentle and do not push”) sets theirs. Write the mood for yourself in the greeting box. Write the behavior for them in the instructions box. The two together are the complete experience; they are just addressed to different readers.

A Correction to Our Own Guide

Naming this plainly rather than burying it: our custom instructions guide previously described greetings as setting the emotional tone of each conversation and paired a greeting with an instruction as though both steer the companion. That framing overstated the greeting's reach, and we have corrected the guide today to match what the code actually does. The pairing advice survives in a truer form: greeting for your side of the glass, instruction for theirs.

The Verdict