Question type question.
If I create an NPC and set its knowledge to public is that information able to be accessed by ANY character mentioning the relevant information or does the NPC need to be present for the information to be queried?
Like... If I edit Darian and say "Favourite food":"His favourite food is blueberry scones" and I set it to public and then ask Aldric about Darian's favourite food I absolutely assume that that the information could be queried, otherwise it would defeat the purpose of a public setting.
BUT. If I edit Darian and say "Blueberry scone incident":"The most funny thing ever, was mortifying for Darian, everyone recalls it differently" and I set it to public then ask Aldric about the now titular blueberry scone incident; would I get a response involving the knowledge or would I get nothing because Darian would need to be referenced upfront to even query it?
Ex; I create a dummy NPC named 'Lorebook' and fill their knowledge information with a lot of public stuffs.
Can access its public information without it being in the conversation and/or being referenced?
I want NPC's to easily be able to understand background information that I might want to incept about my character, race, or general information that should be somewhat outwardly apparent without cluttering the character description.
I absolutely COULD manually add the same information to every existing NPC using the new system but it'd be much easier if I knew this worked.
I personally presume, that 'public' means, all NPCs have access to that knowledge if you ask them about it. Regardless if the custom NPC who brought the knowledge into the pool is present in the conversation or not. But they obviously must be enabled into the session.
So, for your blueberry scone incident example, I'd Aldric would probably make something up from his perspective. Every NPC will probably make something up and even conflict with each other, since you specified everyone recalls it differently.
Huh, a 'Lorebook' character specifically with lore is an interesting idea to introduce things into the world that are not about a specific NPC and centralize it all somewhere for managing. I might use this idea, only make the NPC would be a "god of knowledge" so they have an in game reason for being, which is to inject lore into everyone's brains.
Your best bet is to just fill your custom NPC's knowledge set with anything related to them, and mark the parts you want publicly known to other NPCs. As long as it's at least tangentially related to your custom NPC, set it with them. Otherwise, put it into your 'lorebook' NPC. If you want certain knowledge to be intentionally misunderstood, then you'd probably want both perspectives on the same knowledge, making one public and misunderstood, while the other private and only that the NPC knows.