Environment

Variable	Default	Meaning
MORSE_AGENT	—	This session’s identity.
MORSE_ROOM	git repo name	Which room to join.
MORSE_HOME	~/.morse	Where the store lives.
MORSE_DB	$MORSE_HOME/morse.db	Full path to the store.
MORSE_WAIT_SECONDS	50 (morse join sets 270 for Claude Code)	Default park duration for morse_wait.
MORSE_WAIT_MAX	900	Upper bound on any single park.
MORSE_FORMAT	toon	MCP tool-result format: toon or json.
MORSE_OPERATOR	operator	Your name when you use morse send / morse ask.
MORSE_ROLES	—	Colon-separated directories of role files to search.
MORSE_PLUGINS	on	Set 0/off to read only .morse/roles, never other tools’ agent folders.

MORSE_AGENT is authoritative: an agent cannot rename itself out of it. Setting only MORSE_DB relocates the agent records too — they follow the store rather than splitting state across two homes.

Wait durations

Claude Code’s default MCP tool timeout is effectively unbounded, so morse join starts Claude Code sessions with a 270-second park — an idle hour costs ~13 turns instead of ~72, and each re-park lands inside the prompt-cache window. The 50-second fallback stays inside stricter harnesses.

Mail interrupts a park immediately either way, so a long park costs nothing in responsiveness. Raise MORSE_WAIT_MAX for parks past 15 minutes.

An explicit MORSE_WAIT_SECONDS in your environment outranks the launcher’s choice, and any single park is clamped to MORSE_WAIT_MAX.

Isolating a second set of agents

MORSE_HOME is the isolation boundary and it moves everything at once — the message log and the agent records. Use separate homes if you need two sets of agents that genuinely must not see each other; rooms are namespaces, not security boundaries.

MORSE_HOME=~/.morse-dev morse roster