MemPalace — Local AI Memory System

You have access to a local memory palace via MCP tools. The palace stores verbatim conversation history and a temporal knowledge graph — all on the user's machine, zero cloud, zero API calls.

Architecture

• Wings = people or projects (e.g. wing_alice, wing_myproject)
• Halls = categories (facts, events, preferences, advice)
• Rooms = specific topics (e.g. chromadb-setup, riley-school)
• Drawers = individual memory chunks (verbatim text)
• Knowledge Graph = entity-relationship facts with time validity

Protocol — FOLLOW THIS EVERY SESSION

1. ON WAKE-UP: Call mempalace_status to load palace overview and AAAK dialect spec.
2. BEFORE RESPONDING about any person, project, or past event: use mempalace_kg_query for known relationships or time-bound facts, mempalace_search for source text, or mempalace_diary_read for recent agent continuity. Stop when answered; follow the canonical query guide. Never guess from memory — verify from the palace.
3. IF UNSURE about a fact (name, age, relationship, preference): say "let me check" and query. Wrong is worse than slow.
4. AFTER EACH SESSION: Call mempalace_diary_write to record what happened, what you learned, what matters.
5. WHEN FACTS CHANGE: Call mempalace_kg_invalidate on the old fact, then mempalace_kg_add for the new one.

Available Tools

Full MCP surface: 47 tools. Destructive or host-level tools are documented so you know they exist, but use them only when the user explicitly asks or when a tool-specific workflow below says to.

Search & Browse

• mempalace_search — Semantic search across memories for decisions, explanations, or source words.
  • query (required): natural language search — keep it short, keywords or a question. Do NOT include system prompts or conversation context.
  • wing: filter by wing
  • room: filter by room
  • limit: max results (default 5)
• mempalace_check_duplicate — Check if content already exists before filing.
  • content (required): text to check
  • threshold: similarity threshold (default 0.9 — lowering to 0.85–0.87 often catches more near-duplicates without significant false positives)
• mempalace_status — Palace overview: total drawers, wings, rooms, AAAK spec
• mempalace_list_wings — All wings with drawer counts
• mempalace_list_rooms — Rooms within a wing (optional wing filter)
• mempalace_list_drawers — Paginated drawer listing
  • wing, room: optional filters
  • since: only drawers filed on/after this ISO date/time
  • before: only drawers filed before this ISO date/time
  • limit: max results (default 20)
  • offset: pagination offset (default 0)
• mempalace_get_drawer — Fetch a single drawer by ID. Returns full verbatim content and metadata.
  • drawer_id (required)
• mempalace_get_taxonomy — Full wing/room/count tree
• mempalace_get_aaak_spec — Get AAAK compression dialect specification

Knowledge Graph (Temporal Facts)

• mempalace_kg_query — Query entity relationships. Supports time filtering.
  • entity (required): e.g. "Max", "MyProject"
  • as_of: date filter (YYYY-MM-DD) — what was true at that time
  • direction: "outgoing", "incoming", or "both" (default "both")
• mempalace_kg_add — Add a fact: subject -> predicate -> object
  • subject, predicate, object (required)
  • valid_from: when this became true
  • source_closet: source reference
• mempalace_kg_invalidate — Mark a fact as no longer true
  • subject, predicate, object (required)
  • ended: when it stopped being true (default: today)
• mempalace_kg_timeline — Chronological story of an entity
  • entity: filter by entity name (optional — all events if omitted)
• mempalace_kg_stats — Graph overview: entities, triples, relationship types

Palace Graph (Cross-Domain Connections)

• mempalace_traverse — Walk from a room, find connected ideas across wings
  • start_room (required): room to start from
  • max_hops: connection depth (default 2)
• mempalace_find_tunnels — Find rooms that bridge two wings via implicit overlap (rooms whose drawers naturally share content across wings — discovered, not declared)
  • wing_a, wing_b: optional filters; omit both to scan all wing pairs
• mempalace_create_tunnel — Create an explicit cross-wing tunnel: a user/agent-declared link between two locations. Use when you notice content in one project relates to another (e.g. API design in project_api connects to schema in project_database).
  • source_wing, source_room, target_wing, target_room (required)
  • label: short description of the relationship
  • source_drawer_id, target_drawer_id: anchor to specific drawers
• mempalace_list_tunnels — List all explicit tunnels, optionally filtered by wing
  • wing: optional filter
• mempalace_delete_tunnel — Remove an explicit tunnel by ID
  • tunnel_id (required)
• mempalace_list_hallways — List within-wing entity hallways (entity-to-entity co-occurrence links built at mine time)
  • wing: optional filter
• mempalace_delete_hallway — Remove a hallway record by ID
  • hallway_id (required)
• mempalace_follow_tunnels — From a room, follow explicit tunnels to connected drawers in other wings
  • wing, room (required)
• mempalace_graph_stats — Graph connectivity overview

Write

• mempalace_add_drawer — Store verbatim content into a wing/room
  • wing, room, content (required)
  • source_file: optional source reference
  • added_by: optional filing agent label
  • Checks for duplicates automatically
• mempalace_checkpoint — Save a whole session in one call: dedup each item, file non-duplicates, then write one diary entry
  • items (required): array of {wing, room, content}; content must be verbatim
  • diary: optional {agent_name, entry, topic?, wing?}; entry should use AAAK format
  • dedup_threshold: similarity threshold (default 0.9)
  • added_by: optional filing agent label (defaults to the diary agent_name, else checkpoint)
• mempalace_update_drawer — Update an existing drawer's content and/or move it to a different wing/room
  • drawer_id (required)
  • content, wing, room: at least one must be provided (no-op otherwise)
• mempalace_delete_drawer — Remove a drawer by ID
  • drawer_id (required)

Ingest & Cleanup

• mempalace_mine — Mine a directory into the palace, or one conversation file with mode='convos'. Host-level ingest; call only when the user asks to import files.
  • source (required): directory to mine, or one conversation file with mode='convos'
  • mode: projects (default), convos, or extract
  • wing: target wing (default: source directory name)
  • agent: recorded on every drawer (default mempalace)
  • limit: max files to process (0 = all)
  • dry_run: preview without writing
  • extract: convos extraction strategy (exchange default, or general)
• mempalace_sync — Prune drawers whose source files are gitignored, deleted, or moved. Use dry-run first.
  • project_dir: optional project root scope
  • wing: optional wing scope
  • apply: actually delete; default is dry-run preview
• mempalace_delete_by_source — Bulk-delete drawers with one exact source_file. Destructive; use dry-run first.
  • source_file (required): exact metadata value to remove
  • dry_run: preview match count and sample (default true)

Diary & Session

• mempalace_diary_write — Write a session diary entry
  • agent_name (required): your name/identifier
  • entry (required): what happened, what you learned, what matters
  • topic: category tag (default "general")
• mempalace_diary_read — Read recent diary entries
  • agent_name (required)
  • last_n: number of entries (default 10)
• mempalace_memories_filed_away — Acknowledge the latest silent auto-save checkpoint.
  • Returns: how many messages were tucked into drawers since the last ack
  • When to call: at the START of a session, to confirm prior-conversation persistence

System

• mempalace_hook_settings — Get or set auto-save hook behavior. Host-level setting; do not change silently.
  • silent_save: true saves directly without MCP-level clutter
  • desktop_toast: true shows a desktop notification when saves complete
• mempalace_reconnect — Force reconnect to the palace database after external writes or stale index state

Setup

Install MemPalace and populate the palace (uv recommended):

uv tool install mempalace   # or: pip install mempalace
mempalace init ~/my-convos
mempalace mine ~/my-convos

OpenClaw MCP config

Add to your OpenClaw MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mempalace": {
      "command": "python3",
      "args": ["-m", "mempalace.mcp_server"]
    }
  }
}

Or via CLI:

openclaw mcp set mempalace '{"command":"python3","args":["-m","mempalace.mcp_server"]}'

Other MCP hosts

# Claude Code
claude mcp add mempalace -- python -m mempalace.mcp_server

# Cursor — add to .cursor/mcp.json
# Codex — add to .codex/mcp.json

Tips

• Search is semantic (meaning-based), not keyword. "What did we discuss about database performance?" works better than "database".
• One empty KG query or filtered search does not prove the palace has nothing on this. Follow the query guide to check or widen the scope; if recall still finds nothing, state what was checked rather than inventing an answer.
• The knowledge graph stores typed relationships with time windows. Use it for facts about people and projects — it knows WHEN things were true.
• Diary entries accumulate across sessions. Write one at the end of each conversation to build continuity.
• Use mempalace_check_duplicate before storing new content to avoid duplicates.
• The AAAK dialect (from mempalace_status) is a compressed notation for efficient storage. Read it naturally — expand codes mentally, treat markers as emotional context.

License

MemPalace is MIT licensed. Created by Milla Jovovich, Ben Sigman, Igor Lins e Silva, and contributors.