NNyquest docs

Switching Chassis

How to change your chassis, what's preserved across switches, and what changes (besides the obvious visual reshape).

How to switch

Two ways:

1. The chassis picker button

Look in the top bar of your current chassis for a small palette button (Palette icon plus your current chassis's emoji) — on phones it sits at the bottom of the nav drawer. Click it to open the full-screen chassis picker:

  • 12 chassis grouped by category (Default, Everyday, Healthcare, Finance, Space/Sci-tech, Hacker/Cyber, Creative, Legal, Education, Game Dev, Future, Wellness)
  • Each card shows the chassis name, emoji, and one-line description
  • The currently active chassis has a green check
  • Click a card → modal closes, the entire UI re-renders in the new chassis

The switch is instant. No reload, no data refetch — just a CSS root attribute change and a custom event fired so React components re-derive their per-chassis labels.

2. localStorage (advanced)

javascript
localStorage.setItem('nq_chassis', 'matrix')
location.reload()

The platform reads localStorage.nq_chassis on boot to pick the chassis. Useful for scripted setups, automated tests, or multi-profile workflows in one browser.

What's preserved across switches

Your data is fully shared between chassis — switching is purely cosmetic:

  • ✅ All conversations
  • ✅ All projects (including their system prompts and pinned models)
  • ✅ All artifacts (the IndexedDB vault is account-wide, not chassis-specific)
  • ✅ All memories (facts, summaries, recall index)
  • ✅ Wallet balance and BYOK keys
  • ✅ Active conversation — the conversation you were in stays open after the switch
  • ✅ Active project — the project you were inside stays the active project
  • ✅ Active model — your selected model carries over

You won't lose anything by trying out chassis. Switch as often as you like.

What changes

Beyond the visual reshape:

  • Terminology: "Project" becomes "Case" / "Matter" / "Mission" / etc. depending on chassis. See Per-Chassis Terminology.
  • Animations: some chassis have ambient effects (Apsis starfield, Matrix rain). See Visual Effects and Animations.
  • Empty-state copy is chassis-specific. Ridgeline says "How can I help today?", Matrix says "[ READY ]", Garden says "Take a breath, then begin."
  • Tooltips and button labels localize to chassis terminology — Garden's send button literally says "Send gently."
  • Some chassis-specific features that don't exist elsewhere (Quant's market ticker, Matrix's code rain, Apsis's starfield)

What does NOT change

  • Your URL — chassis is not in the URL; switching keeps you on the same /dashboard or /help/... page
  • The HTML structure (mostly) — same React tree, different CSS root attribute
  • The backend — all API calls work identically across chassis
  • The model's behavior — the system prompts attached to your projects don't shift just because your UI shifted

Picker UI layout

The chassis picker groups the 12 by domain category:

CategoryChassis
DefaultNyquest
EverydayPaper
HealthcareRidgeline
FinanceQuant
Space / Sci-techApsis
Hacker / CyberMatrix
CreativeAtelier
LegalCourtroom
EducationAtlas
Game DevStudio
FuturePrism
WellnessGarden

Within a category, chassis are sorted by their id. The picker doesn't filter — all 12 are always available regardless of your account or usage.

Performance

A chassis switch:

  • 10-30ms to apply the new data-chassis root attribute
  • ~50-200ms for React components that depend on terminology to re-render
  • 0ms backend roundtrip — no API call happens during the switch

Slow switch usually means a heavy chassis (Apsis with starfield, Matrix with rain) is initializing canvas elements. After the first switch into a chassis, subsequent switches into it are instant (canvas already mounted).

Cross-device behavior

Chassis is stored in localStorage, which is per-browser-per-device. Implications:

  • Same device, same browser, signed in or out: same chassis
  • Same device, different browser (Chrome vs Firefox): independent chassis settings
  • Same device, incognito mode: starts in Nyquest (no localStorage carry-over)
  • Different device: independent chassis settings

A future cloud-sync option for chassis preference is on the roadmap. Until then, you'll pick the chassis fresh on each device.

Where to next