Limits & Large Vaults

What (+8) means

A branch labelled Site Refresh (+8) means your coral has reached Liefwork's rendering limit. Liefwork draws up to 8,000 items at once. Past that, the deepest parts of the coral are folded away, and each folded branch tells you how much is hidden inside it.

The limit is there because every branch and lief is real geometry, not a row in a list. Beyond about 8,000 items, panning and zooming stop feeling instant — and a map you cannot move around is not much of a map.

To expand collapsed branches, open a smaller folder as a coral. Right-click any folder in the file explorer and choose Open as Liefwork coral; anything under 8,000 items renders in full, down to the last lief.

It needn't be the folded branch itself. The folding happens at a single depth across the whole coral, so a (+8) is telling you about the size of the coral you are in, not about that branch. Opening any smaller part of the tree — a parent, a neighbour, an area you care about — brings its contents fully into view.

You will only meet this on very large vaults. 8,000 items is already far more than the working set most people navigate at once, and it is a limit on what is drawn at one time, never on what you can keep.

Other limits

Desktop only. Liefwork reads folder creation times from the file system, which the mobile app has no API for. It needs Obsidian 1.8.7 or later.

One very wide folder. If a single folder has more than 8,000 direct children, there is no depth at which the coral fits, and Liefwork will say so rather than render something unusable. Open a subfolder instead.

The coral pane is dark by design. The canvas uses Liefwork's own palette in both Obsidian themes; the HUD and controls follow your theme.