Questions, answered plainly.

Sylvics is a finished life and knowledge system for Obsidian. It is a ready-made vault of ten numbered folders plus a custom plugin, sylvics-core, that turns notes into dashboards, a daily routine, a planning system, periodic reviews and a 3D graph called the Canopy. Everything is stored as plain Markdown files on your own computer.

It is for people who use Obsidian and are tired of building their own system. You open it and start using it.

Yes, you need the free Obsidian desktop app. Sylvics runs inside it.

Sylvics is an independent product by Verdant Cybernetics. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Obsidian.

No. A template is a set of files you copy and then maintain yourself. Sylvics is a complete vault plus maintained software: the sylvics-core plugin draws the dashboards, routes captured notes, rolls your daily notes up into weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly reviews, and renders the Canopy graph. The notes themselves stay ordinary Markdown.

People who think for a living and already use, or are ready to use, Obsidian on a computer: knowledge workers, students of demanding subjects, writers and researchers. Typically you have tried two or more note apps, built at least one system of your own, and noticed that what you save rarely becomes anything. You would rather follow one opinionated method than design another.

• Teams looking for a shared wiki. Sylvics is for one person.
• People who work mostly on a phone. Sylvics runs on desktop computers.
• People who want a blank notebook. Sylvics is opinionated: it asks for a daily note and a weekly review.

On your own computer, as plain Markdown (.md) files in a folder you choose. There is no Sylvics account and no Sylvics server that receives your notes. You can open, copy, back up or move the files with any tool, and they stay readable in any text editor.

Sylvics is desktop only: macOS, Windows or Linux. If you sync the vault to Obsidian on a phone you can read and edit the notes, but the dashboards, the graph and the assistant do not run there.

No. Sylvics is a new vault in its own folder, and your current vault is left untouched. You can copy notes into Sylvics whenever you like. A guided import is planned but not built yet.

Only if you turn it on. The assistant, Sage, is off by default. When enabled it answers questions from your own notes, using either a local model through Ollama, which keeps everything on your computer, or your own API key for a provider you choose (Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible service). Your notes go directly from your computer to that provider. Nothing passes through a Sylvics server.

Each answer lists the notes that were sent as context, and you can exclude any note, tag or folder. Sage acts only when you ask. Nothing runs while Obsidian is closed.

In the closed beta, Sage arrives in the second build, after a privacy review.

About ten minutes a day, and fifteen to thirty minutes on Sunday for the weekly review: the short version takes fifteen (empty the Inbox, score the eight life areas, write three priorities). The first session inside the vault, the Start Here tour, takes about ten minutes: you capture a thought, turn it into a task, see it on your dashboard, open your daily note and open the graph.

A Mac, Windows or Linux computer and the free Obsidian desktop app. Plan for about 30 minutes the first time, including installing Obsidian and reading each step. You unzip the vault, open the folder in Obsidian, allow its plugins, and wait about a minute for the first indexing. The install guide walks through every step.

Prices are not set yet. The plan is a free version and a one-time paid licence for the extra features, with no subscription for the core system. Final prices will be decided after the beta, partly from what testers tell us.

Closed-beta testers use the full product for free during the beta and receive a discount on the first paid licences.

Yes. If Sylvics is not right for you, write to me within 60 days of buying and I will refund you in full. No form, no argument, no questions you have to answer. Payments go through Lemon Squeezy, which processes the refund and keeps the same 60-day window for itself.

During the closed beta there is nothing to refund: it is free.

A fair question, and I would ask it too. Three things protect you.

• Your notes never depend on me. They are plain Markdown files on your computer and open in any text editor, with or without Sylvics.
• What you buy keeps working. The licence unlocks features; it never holds your notes. Sylvics does not need a server of mine to run.
• If I ever stop developing Sylvics, I will publish a final release that needs no licence at all, so everything you paid for keeps working for as long as Obsidian runs it. I will say so publicly, with notice, not disappear.

I do not plan to stop. I built Sylvics for my own studies and life first, and that does not end when sales slow down.

I built it as a law student, so yes, with a caveat: it is a system for your whole life, not only for school. Each course becomes a project (if it ends) or an area (if it continues). Lectures, readings and cases go into Resources. Your summaries in your own words go into Literature, and the ideas you would defend in an exam become Permanent notes that link to each other. The weekly review is your revision rhythm, and the Loop teaches you to fetch exactly what an assignment needs instead of reading everything just in case.

It runs on a computer, not a phone, and asks for about ten minutes a day.

A small first test of Sylvics with real users: at most 15 people, in two waves, starting in early November 2026 and running about two weeks. Testers get a closed-beta licence that unlocks everything while the beta lasts, a direct line to the founder, and at the end a short exit survey. Completing the survey earns a discount of at least 25% on the first paid licences, up to about 50% for the most useful feedback.

It is unfinished software. Some parts are rough, and that is the point of testing it. Apply here.

They stay exactly where they are: Markdown files on your computer, readable in Obsidian and any text editor. The closed-beta licence expires when the beta ends, which turns off the features that need a licence. Beta vaults are not guaranteed an automatic upgrade path to version 1.0.

Yes, with a caveat. macOS is the reference platform for the beta. Windows and Linux are supported but experimental while we test them, and we will say so plainly in the release notes for each build.

Three things. It is finished: the folders, templates, dashboards and reviews already work together, so you skip months of setup. It is alive: a plugin moves notes along, rolls your days into reviews and shows the state of the whole vault in the Canopy graph. And it is yours: plain files on your computer, paid for once, with AI only if you bring your own.

Those are cloud apps you rent: they work on every device, sync for you and are good for teams. Sylvics is the opposite trade. Your notes are plain files on your own computer, the system arrives finished instead of as an empty workspace, and you pay once instead of every month.

If you need a phone-first app, real-time collaboration or zero setup, those apps will suit you better, and I would rather say so now. If you want to own your notes and stop building your system, that is what Sylvics is for.

It is built against the idea of a second brain as storage. Most systems are good at saving things and bad at using them. In Sylvics every captured note is processed into something you will act on or think with, so the vault moves from "I saved it" to "I know it" and "I did it".

There is no Sylvics account, and the vault sends nothing to us. The network requests it can make are: checking a licence key with our payment provider when you enter one, checking for plugin updates when you ask it to, and the AI provider you choose if you turn Sage on. This website sets no cookies and uses no advertising trackers. See the privacy page.

From the Latin sylva, forest, and -ics, a discipline or system. Silvics is also the forestry science of how trees grow. The project began as "Life Vault", until it became clear that nothing living belongs in a vault.

The interface and the guide are in English. Your notes can be in any language, and Sage's search index is multilingual.