Imagina gives you tools to shape your story beyond just typing actions. These features are all optional, but they're useful when you want more control over where the narrative goes.
Below your action input there's a smaller italic field: the steering box. Anything you type here is a private note to the narrator about how the next turn should go, separate from what your character does.
Some patterns that work well:
make it more tense, slow down and describe the environmenta stranger arrives at the inn, it starts rainingTo narrator: the merchant is secretly the prince in disguiseThe To narrator: prefix is especially reliable because it makes clear you're speaking out-of-character. Your character won't suddenly know the secret; the narrator just starts writing with that fact baked in.
Steering is always optional. Leave it empty for normal play.
The AI can extract lasting directives from your steering automatically ("always describe combat in detail", "the shopkeeper never gives discounts"). These persist across turns so you don't have to repeat yourself. You can view and manage them in the debug panel's State tab.
Type /debug in the action input or open it from the slash-command menu. The debug panel shows the internal state of your journey:
If you're using a thinking model, you can see how many tokens went to reasoning versus output. Cached token percentages show how much context the model reused from the previous turn.
The debug panel is read-only for regular users. It's most useful for world authors who want to see how the AI interprets their instructions, or for players curious about what's happening under the hood.