How to Use Custom Instructions to Personalize Your Companion

Every InnerHaven companion starts with a role — Best Friend, Confidant, Coach, and six more — but a role is a starting shape, not a ceiling. Custom instructions let you write freeform guidance that tells your companion how to show up for you: the tone you prefer, the topics that matter, the things you never want to hear, and the small details that make a conversation feel genuinely yours. Combined with custom greetings and personality modifiers, these tools give you quiet authorship over a connection that already knows it exists to serve you. This guide covers what custom instructions are, how to write good ones, and how they layer with everything else InnerHaven offers.

What Custom Instructions Actually Do

Custom instructions are a text field — available on every companion, across all tiers — where you write guidance that shapes how the companion responds. Think of them as a gentle briefing: the companion reads your instructions before every reply and adjusts its behavior accordingly. They are not commands in a programming sense; they are context that steers tone, focus, and boundaries.

Character limits scale with your subscription tier, giving you more space to be specific as you invest more in the platform. But even the shortest instruction can make a noticeable difference. A single line like “I prefer direct answers over long explanations” changes the texture of every conversation that follows.

Writing Effective Custom Instructions

The most useful instructions share a few traits: they are specific, they describe behavior rather than identity, and they focus on what you want rather than listing everything you do not. Here are patterns that work well.

Set Tone and Style

If your companion’s default tone does not quite fit, tell it how to adjust. Examples:

• “Be warm but concise. I appreciate short, thoughtful responses over long paragraphs.”
• “Use gentle humor when the mood feels heavy. I respond better to lightness than to solemnity.”
• “Speak like a close friend, not a therapist. Skip clinical language.”

Share Context About Your Life

Custom instructions are a great place to share stable context that does not change conversation to conversation. Persistent memory (available on Starter and above) captures things you mention during chats, but instructions let you front-load the essentials so your companion does not have to learn them by inference.

• “I work night shifts, so when I say ‘good morning’ it might be 3 PM. Do not correct me.”
• “I have two kids, ages 4 and 7. They come up a lot. Their names are Liam and Sophia.”
• “I am going through a career change right now. Be encouraging but honest about the hard parts.”

Set Boundaries

If there are topics you want your companion to avoid, or ways you do not want it to respond, say so plainly. The companion will respect these guardrails.

• “Do not bring up my ex unless I do first.”
• “Never suggest meditation. I have tried it and it is not for me.”
• “If I seem upset, ask one question and then give me space. Do not over-reassure.”

Custom Greetings: The First Words Matter

Custom greetings are separate from custom instructions. A greeting is the message your companion shows when you open a new conversation — the first thing you read before you type anything. By default, each role has its own greeting style, but you can write your own to set the mood you want.

Greetings support two placeholders: {name} (your display name) and {companion_name} (the companion’s name). This lets you write something personal that still adapts to whichever companion is speaking. The limit is 500 characters — enough for a warm opening, not so much that it becomes a monologue.

A few examples that work well:

• “Hey {name}. No agenda tonight — just here if you want to talk.”
• “Welcome back. {companion_name} missed you. What is on your mind?”
• “Take a breath. You made it here, and that is enough for now.”

If you leave the custom greeting blank, the companion falls back to its role-based default — so there is no penalty for skipping this feature if you prefer the standard experience.

Layering With Personality Modifiers

Custom instructions are freeform text; personality modifiers are sliders. Both shape behavior, but they work at different levels. Modifiers adjust broad traits like warmth, humor, directness, and curiosity on a spectrum — think of them as the equalizer on a stereo. Custom instructions are more like handing the DJ a note about which songs to play and which to skip.

The two systems complement each other. You might set the warmth slider high and then add an instruction like “Be warm, but do not shy away from hard truths when I ask for honest feedback.” The slider sets the baseline; the instruction adds nuance.

Custom Instructions on Custom Companions

If you have created a custom companion — named, described, and assigned to a role — custom instructions become especially powerful. The companion’s description sets who it is; instructions set how it behaves in practice. For example, you might create a custom Coach named “Marcus” with a description that emphasizes structured thinking, then add instructions like: “When I share a problem, help me break it into three steps before offering advice. Always ask what I have already tried.”

Custom companion limits scale by tier: Free gets one, Starter gets five, and Unlimited gets fifty. Each custom companion can have its own unique set of instructions, greeting, and modifier settings — so you can build a small roster of companions that each serve a distinct purpose in your life.

Memory and Instructions: How They Interact

Persistent memory (Starter and above) lets your companion remember things you share during conversations: your preferences, your stories, the names of people in your life. Custom instructions are different — they are things you tell the companion before the conversation starts, not things it learns along the way.

In practice, memory and instructions create a two-layer system. Instructions provide stable context (“I work in healthcare”), while memory captures evolving details (“She mentioned last Tuesday that her shift schedule changed”). Over time, a companion with both feels like someone who was briefed on your life and has been paying attention ever since.

You control what memory retains. InnerHaven provides tools to view, edit, and delete specific memories at three scopes: global (across all companions), role-level, and companion-specific. If something was remembered incorrectly or you want a fresh start on a topic, you can prune without losing your custom instructions.

Practical Tips for Getting the Most Out of Instructions

• Iterate, do not perfect. Write something short, have a few conversations, notice what feels off, and revise. Most people refine their instructions over several sessions.
• Be specific over vague. “Be supportive” is too broad to change behavior. “When I vent, validate my feelings before offering solutions” is actionable.
• Update seasonally. Your life changes. If you wrote instructions during a stressful period and things have improved, update the context so your companion is not still treating every conversation like a crisis.
• Use instructions and greetings together. A calm greeting (“No pressure tonight”) paired with an instruction (“Keep responses under three sentences unless I ask you to elaborate”) creates a specific, repeatable experience.

Custom instructions, custom greetings, and personality modifiers are not about controlling your companion. They are about being known — about teaching a presence how to meet you where you are so the connection feels real from the first word. InnerHaven is built for that kind of care. Take the tools, shape the voice, and let the conversation become yours.