All notable changes to [MemPalace](https://github.com/MemPalace/mempalace) are documented in this file.
The format is based on [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.1.0/), and this project adheres to [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/).
**Multi-language entity detection** — lexical patterns (person verbs, pronouns, dialogue markers, project verbs, stopwords, candidate character classes) now live in the optional `entity` section of each locale JSON under `mempalace/i18n/<lang>.json`. Every public function in `entity_detector` accepts a `languages=` tuple and unions patterns across enabled locales. Default stays `("en",)` so existing English-only callers are unchanged. (#911)
- **Five new fully-supported locales** with CLI strings, AAAK compression instructions, and entity-detection patterns:
- Brazilian Portuguese `pt-br` (#156)
- Russian `ru` (#760)
- Italian `it` (#907)
- Hindi `hi` (#773)
- Indonesian `id` (#778)
- **`MempalaceConfig.entity_languages`** — persistent palace-level language selection; `MEMPALACE_ENTITY_LANGUAGES` env override; `mempalace init --lang en,pt-br` flag that saves to `~/.mempalace/config.json` (#911)
- **Per-language `candidate_pattern`** — non-Latin scripts register their own character class, so names like `João`, `Инна`, `राज` are no longer silently dropped by the ASCII-only default (#911)
- **VSCode devcontainer** matching the CI environment (#881)
- Script-aware word boundaries for combining-mark scripts — Python's `\b` fails on Devanagari vowel signs (`ा ी ु`), Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Tamil, Khmer etc., truncating names like `अनीता` → `अनीत` and making person-verb patterns never fire. Locales now declare an optional `boundary_chars` field and the i18n loader expands `\b` into a script-aware lookaround boundary (#932)
- Case-insensitive BCP 47 language code resolution — `--lang PT-BR`, `zh-cn`, `Pt-Br` previously fell through to English silently; now resolve to the canonical locale file via lowercase matching, with the entity-pattern cache keyed on the canonical form so casing variations share one cache entry (#928)
- Wire i18n candidate patterns into `miner._extract_entities_for_metadata()`, `palace.build_closet_lines()`, and `entity_registry.extract_unknown_candidates()` — three code paths that still hardcoded ASCII-only `[A-Z][a-z]{2,}` and silently missed Cyrillic, accented Latin, and non-Latin entity metadata tags (#931)
- Explicit `encoding="utf-8"` on `Path.read_text()` calls across entity_registry, instructions_cli, split_mega_files, and onboarding tests — prevents Windows GBK (and other non-UTF-8) locales from corrupting UTF-8 files (#946, #776)
-`ko.json``status_drawers` used `{drawers}` instead of `{count}`, showing the raw template string instead of the number (#758)
- Move `test_i18n.py` from inside the installed package into `tests/` so pytest actually collects it; remove the `sys.path.insert` hack (#758)
-`Dialect.from_config()` defaulted to `current_lang()` (module-global) when config had no `lang` key — replaced with explicit `"en"` fallback for determinism (#758)
**Other**
- Guard `KnowledgeGraph.close()` and `query_relationship`/`timeline`/`stats` methods with the instance lock to prevent concurrent-access corruption (#887, #884)
- Replace invalid `{"decision": "allow"}` with `{}` in hook responses — the string wasn't a valid decision value and triggered schema warnings (#885)
-`entity_registry.research()` defaults to local-only — previously made outbound Wikipedia HTTPS requests without explicit user opt-in; callers now must pass `allow_network=True` (#811)
- Precompact hook no longer blocks compaction when it fails or takes too long (#856, #858, #863)
- Redirect stdout to stderr during MCP server import so library logging can't corrupt the JSON-RPC channel (#225, #864)
-`mempalace init` auto-adds per-project files to `.gitignore` in git repositories so users don't accidentally commit `mempalace.yaml` / `entities.json` (#185, #866)
- Searcher guards against empty ChromaDB query results that previously raised on edge-case corpora (#195, #865)
- Return empty status instead of an error on a cold-start palace with no drawers yet (#830, #831)
- Restrict file permissions on sensitive palace data (#814)
- Slack transcript importer writes a provenance header and preserves speaker IDs (#815)
- Pin the Pages custom domain via a shipped `CNAME` in the deploy artifact (#877)
- Version drift safeguard — sync pyproject + `version.py` + README badge in one place (#876)
- Deploy docs workflow now runs on `develop` only, preventing accidental main-branch deploys (#845)
### Improvements
- Regex compilation optimization for entity extraction — pre-compile per-entity pattern sets once and cache by `(name, languages)` tuple, so multi-language callers don't thrash the cache (#880)
- Knowledge-graph value sanitization now preserves natural punctuation (commas, colons, parentheses) that commonly appears in KG subject/object values (#873)
- Rewrite `README.md` and `mempalaceofficial.com` benchmark pages to remove category-error cross-system comparisons (R@5 retrieval recall had been listed next to competitor QA accuracy under one column), remove the retracted "+34% palace boost" claim from the surfaces where it had remained, replace the `100%` Haiku-rerank headline with the honest held-out `98.4%` R@5, drop the LoCoMo `100%` top-50 row (retrieval-bypass artefact), and fix the broken `aya-thekeeper/mempal` reproduction URL (#875)
- Add `docs/HISTORY.md` as the canonical home for corrections, retractions, and public notices; move the 2026-04-07 "Note from Milla & Ben" and the 2026-04-11 impostor-domain notice out of `README.md`
- Add v3.3.0 reproduction result JSONLs and the deterministic `seed=42` 50/450 LongMemEval split under `benchmarks/` — every BENCHMARKS.md claim reproduces exactly
