Quickstart

From install to your first discovered connection in under 5 minutes.

Install Valorune

If you have beta access, your invite email includes download links for your platform. Not sure which Mac build to use? Go to Apple menu → About This Mac. If you see “Chip: Apple M1” (or M2, M3, M4), use the Apple Silicon download. Otherwise, use Intel.

For platform-specific install steps, see Install on macOS or Install on Windows.

Don’t have access yet? Join the waitlist.

First launch

When you open Valorune for the first time, the onboarding wizard walks you through setup:

  1. Theme: pick Light, Dark, or System
  2. Features overview: a quick look at wiki-links, backlinks, and the knowledge graph
  3. AI backend: Valorune downloads a small local component that powers the AI features. This takes about a minute on most connections.

After onboarding, Valorune will also offer guided tours, interactive walkthroughs that highlight buttons and panels as you use them. They appear automatically and you can dismiss or replay them anytime.

Create a vault

A vault is a folder on your machine where your notes live. All notes are plain markdown files. Nothing proprietary.

Click Create Vault on the welcome screen, then choose or create a folder. You can have multiple vaults for different projects.

Write a few notes

Create 3–4 short notes about topics you’re actively thinking about. The more related they are, the more interesting the connections will be.

To create a note, click the + button in the sidebar or use Cmd/Ctrl+N.

Write naturally. You don’t need to add tags, categories, or structure. Just write.

While writing, type [[ to create a link to another note. A dropdown appears with your existing notes. Select one to create an explicit connection. Wiki-links are how you tell Valorune “these two notes are definitely related.”

More on this in the Wiki-Links guide.

Index your notes

This is where the AI kicks in.

Open the Graph panel in the sidebar (or press Cmd/Ctrl+2) and click Index All. Valorune analyzes the meaning of your notes, extracting topics, finding relationships, and building your knowledge graph.

Indexing a handful of notes takes a few seconds. A larger vault might take a minute or two.

Don’t worry about credits during beta. They’re free.

Open any note and look at the Backlinks panel on the right side. You’ll see two types of connections:

  • Manual links (arrow icon): wiki-links you created explicitly
  • Discovered links (sparkle icon): notes the AI found to be related, based on meaning

The discovered links are where it clicks. These are notes you didn’t manually link. Valorune found the connection because the content is semantically related.

Click any discovered link to open it. If it’s a good connection, click the link icon to promote it to a wiki-link.

More on this in the Discovered Links guide.

Explore the Topic Graph

Press Cmd/Ctrl+2 to open the graph panel. You’ll see your notes organized into topic clusters. Themes that emerged from your content, not categories you created.

Click any topic to focus on its cluster. Click any note to open it. The graph becomes more useful as you add more notes. With 10+ indexed notes, meaningful structure starts to emerge.

More on this in the Topic Graph guide.

What to explore next