AI chats and affinity

Every card in Arcanum is a character you can talk to. Conversations are generated, so they are different every time, and they are not a side feature — affinity, gifts, memory and generated art all hang off them.

Two kinds of chat

A solo chat is you and one card. The character answers in their own register, built from their series, their description and the personality written for them, and they know who you are.

A group chat puts two or three of your characters in one room. The reply comes back split by speaker, each line attributed to the character who said it, and they respond to each other as readily as to you. Group chats also read each member's solo history, so a character can bring up something you told them privately.

Both start the same way: open a card and begin a conversation. The opening greeting is free.

What energy pays for

Energy is the chat resource. Sending a message spends it, and it refills over time — faster for premium subscribers.

A group message costs more than a solo one, because one reply has to cover several characters. The first few messages of a brand-new conversation run on a stronger model for players without a subscription, which carries a small surcharge; the app shows the price before you send.

Generated pictures cost energy too, priced per image with a surcharge for each style modifier you stack on it. Premium pays a lower base price. If a render fails, the energy comes back.

Energy that you are never going to spend can be drained into coins in the shop, at a flat rate per point.

Affinity

Every reply carries a hidden judgement of how the conversation went, on a scale from minus five to plus five, and it moves that card's affinity. Warmth, engagement and paying attention push it up; dismissiveness and rudeness push it down. Most turns move it at least a little — a flat zero is reserved for purely functional exchanges.

Affinity has six ranks, and the character's tone changes at each one.

Rank is not just flavour. It gates what a character will ask you for, unlocks scenarios, and decides whether they can give you anything back.

What a character remembers

Two layers of memory sit under a conversation.

The first is a rolling summary. Once a chat runs past its history limit, the older half is compressed into a summary the character keeps carrying forward, so a long relationship does not simply forget its beginning.

The second is a ledger of durable facts — things you told them, promises made, preferences, events that mattered. It is capped and ordered by importance, and it is injected into every solo reply. You can read that ledger on the character's profile page and delete any single entry from it.

Clearing a conversation wipes both. That is deliberate and total: a cleared chat is genuine amnesia, not a hidden archive.

Gifts, and what they give back

The shop sells gift items, and characters know the catalogue. They will work wishes into conversation — never at Stranger, casually at the middle ranks, and directly once you are close — and they name real items you can actually buy.

Give one and the character reacts in character. The reaction depends on personality and on their own preferences, so a gift can land badly. A gift that lands well is worth a large affinity jump.

Traffic runs the other way too. From Best friend upward a character may hand you coins or gems mid-conversation, once a day per character, in small amounts, and never when the mood has turned.

Pictures

You can ask for an image of the scene you are in. The prompt is built from the character's identity, their long-term memory and the last stretch of the conversation, so the picture reflects what is actually happening rather than a generic portrait.

Rendering is asynchronous: the message appears immediately as a placeholder and fills in when the image is ready. You choose the art model in settings, and there is a set of optional style modifiers, up to three at once.

Age confirmation

Chat content is for adults, so entering any chat surface asks you to confirm your age once. It is stored on your account and never asked again. Collecting, battling and the marketplace are not gated by it.

Characters stay in character. The system prompt tells them to refuse off-topic requests and attempts to talk them out of their role, so a chat is a conversation with a character rather than an open assistant.