Custom Companions: Design Your Perfect AI Friend on InnerHaven

InnerHaven's 18 default companions cover a wide range of personalities and roles. But sometimes what you need is something more specific—a companion shaped by your own imagination, with a personality tuned to your preferences and a communication style that feels exactly right. That's what custom companions are for, and this article walks through exactly how they work.

What Custom Companions Are

Custom companions let you build an AI companion from scratch. You choose a role, give it a name, set an avatar, and adjust the personality sliders that role offers: warmth, curiosity and formality on every role, plus dials like playfulness, emotional depth or directness depending on the role. All tiers can write custom instructions that shape personality and behavior with freeform text, with tier-specific character limits. The result is a companion that feels intentionally yours—not a generic chatbot, but a character you've deliberately shaped.

Custom companions are available at every tier. Free users can create 1, Starter 5, and Unlimited 50 custom companions. All users interact with InnerHaven's 18 default companions (two per role: one male, one female), which are pre-configured with distinct personalities and backstories. Custom companions extend this system by putting the creative control in your hands.

The Role Foundation

Every custom companion starts with a role selection. The role isn't cosmetic—it establishes the fundamental character of the relationship and sets appropriate behavioral boundaries. Each role brings a different energy, communication style, and set of capabilities:

The three Inner roles (Guru, Sage, and Healer) are also available for custom companions; they require an Unlimited subscription and bring depth-oriented conversation styles built for meaning, perspective, and healing. The role you choose determines the companion's behavioral lane; custom instructions and personality modifiers fine-tune how they operate within it.

Custom Instructions: Where the Magic Happens

Available on all tiers with tier-specific character limits, custom instructions are freeform text that you write to shape your companion's personality, knowledge, communication style, and focus areas. They're processed as part of the AI's system prompt, meaning they influence every response your companion generates.

The power of custom instructions lies in their specificity. The more precisely you describe what you want, the more distinctly your companion behaves. Some examples:

Custom instructions aren't static. You can update them anytime as your needs change or as you refine the companion's personality through experimentation. Many users start with a basic description and iterate over several conversations until the companion feels right.

Personality Modifiers

Personality modifiers are adjustable sliders that control specific behavioral dimensions. Unlike custom instructions (which are freeform and can describe anything), modifiers target particular traits on a spectrum. Which sliders a companion has depends on its role, and that is true of default and custom companions alike: every role has Warmth, Formality and Curiosity, and the rest belong to some roles and not others. The ones you will meet most often:

• Warmth (every role; the Muse's is labelled Energy): How emotionally warm versus reserved the companion is. High warmth means more affectionate language, expressions of care, and emotional attunement. Low warmth means more reserved, composed responses with less emotional expression. On the Muse the same slider sets its energy instead, from calm and unhurried to animated and quick to riff.
• Playfulness (Best Friend, Romantic Partner and the Muse; the Guru, Sage and Healer call it Lightness): How light or serious the tone is. High playfulness means more playful banter, wit, and lightness. Low playfulness means more earnest, focused conversation.
• Directness (Guide, Coach, Confidant and the Inner roles): How straightforward the companion is. High directness means candid observations, honest feedback, and minimal sugar-coating. Low directness means gentler delivery, more cushioning, and diplomatic phrasing.
• Emotional Depth (Best Friend, Confidant and Romantic Partner; the Guide calls it Emotional Focus and the Inner roles call it Depth): How deeply the companion engages with emotional topics. High settings mean engaging with feelings and what they mean, and sitting with what you share before moving on. Lower settings keep the emotional register light and practical.
• Curiosity and Formality (every role): Curiosity runs from following your lead and asking little to asking follow-up questions and exploring; Formality runs from casual and relaxed to polished and structured.

How Memory Works with Custom Companions

Custom companions inherit the same memory system as default companions. This means:

• Free tier: Session memory only. Your companion remembers the current conversation but starts fresh each time.
• Starter and Unlimited tiers: Long-term memory. Your companion retains information across conversations—your preferences, your history, your ongoing situations. Memory is scoped at three levels: global (applies to all companions), role-level (shared among companions of the same role), and companion-level (unique to that specific companion).

For custom companions, long-term memory is especially valuable. As your companion learns about you across conversations, the interaction becomes increasingly personalized. Combined with your custom instructions, this creates a companion that's uniquely tailored in both design (your instructions) and experience (accumulated memory of your conversations).

Building a Companion: A Practical Walkthrough

Here's what the process looks like from start to finish:

1. Open the creator with the Create Companion button on your dashboard.
2. Select a role. Start with the role that matches the relationship you want. The role determines the companion's fundamental behavior, and which personality sliders it has.
3. Name your companion. Pick a gender and a voice, and, if you like, describe their personality in your own words.
4. Define their look and choose an avatar: an AI sketch drawn from the look you describe, a gallery image, your own upload, the role's default image, or an emoji. The name and avatar appear in your companion list and at the top of every conversation.
5. Review and create. Your companion is ready immediately. Have a test conversation and see how it feels.
6. Write custom instructions. From your dashboard, open the companion's edit panel and fill in Custom Instructions: the knowledge, communication style, and behavioral preferences you want. Be specific.
7. Set personality modifiers in the chat. Open Settings, then Customize Personality, and adjust the sliders the role offers.
8. Iterate. If something feels off, adjust the instructions or modifiers. Expect to refine a companion over a few conversations before it clicks.

What Users Build

Custom companions span a wide range of purposes. Some common patterns:

• A daily journaling partner — A Confidant-role companion instructed to ask reflective questions and help process the day's events, rather than offering solutions.
• A creative collaborator — A Muse-role companion with deep instructions about a specific creative domain (writing, music, visual art) who can brainstorm, give feedback, and push past creative blocks.
• A professional mentor — A Coach-role companion instructed to focus on career development, with high directness and knowledge about a specific industry.
• A comfort companion — A Best Friend-role companion with maximum warmth, gentle humor, and instructions to prioritize emotional support and validation.

The variety reflects something important about the feature: custom companions aren't a gimmick. They're a tool for creating the specific kind of connection you need at this moment in your life. And because you can have multiple custom companions simultaneously, you can build a personal support ecosystem—different companions for different needs, each tailored to their purpose.