Daneel ships a first-class Offline Mode: a single switch that blocks every outbound call the extension would make, verifiable in DevTools, with three independent ways to turn it off. This guide covers activation, what you will see while it is on, and recovery.

## Prerequisites

- You have run through [How to Prepare for Offline](/how-to/prepare-for-offline/) at least once. The Prepare panel makes sure your models and resources are cached.
- You have imported your vault documents. Import is a local operation and works any time, online or off.

## Activate Offline Mode

You have two toggles in **Settings > Offline mode > Mode**, and they do different things:

- **Switch to offline mode** — persistent. Survives browser restarts. Use this before a flight.
- **Test offline mode** — transient. Active until the service worker reloads (browser restart or extension update). Use this to verify your offline setup without actually disconnecting.

Flip either one. The effective state becomes offline. A green OFFLINE MODE pill appears in the Settings header and the Vault header, so you can tell at a glance.

## What changes while offline

The behavior is deliberate and predictable. Nothing crashes, nothing hangs waiting for a timeout.

- **The provider bar** — if your active provider is Claude or Azure OpenAI, any new question shows an amber banner with a one-click switch to WebGPU, Gemini Nano, or Ollama.
- **MCP surfaces** — the Settings > MCP panel and the Tools section of the vault render a disabled overlay labelled "paused". Local MCP servers you host via Docker Companion still work.
- **Cloud backup** — the Azure and S3 cards in Settings > Data grey out with a short notice. The local filesystem export and import controls in the same panel stay active. Your vault can still be backed up to a USB drive.
- **Model Storage** — the Settings > Models Storage panel is locked. This is on purpose. Deleting a cached model mid-flight would leave your local providers unable to answer.
- **Wikipedia and external links** — the knowledge graph's Wikipedia lookup pauses with a short notice. The fetched-page viewer in the vault hides the open-in-browser icon for the same reason.
- **News, documentation, changelog, credits** — served from the local cache instead of the live site. The Refresh button is disabled until you go back online.

All of these reflect the same underlying rule: if a call would leave your machine, it is blocked. See [Offline Mode](/concepts/offline-mode/) for the full rule table.

## Recover from offline

Three independent escape hatches, any one of them works:

1. **Extension popup** — click the toolbar icon. A green OFFLINE MODE card with a Turn off button appears. One click. Works on any tab, including blank tabs and error pages.
2. **Vault tab banner** — open the dedicated Vault tab. A banner at the top of the page shows the same Turn off button.
3. **Settings toggle** — from any normal webpage, click the widget, open Settings > Offline mode, flip Switch and Test back to off.

Turn off clears both the persistent and the transient flags. Whichever one was active, it is fully off afterwards.

## Open the vault when no webpage is available

Daneel's widget normally injects into the page you are viewing. On a blank new tab, on a `chrome://error` page, or on a captive-portal holding page, that assumption breaks. The extension popup has an **Open Vault** button that launches a dedicated Vault tab at `chrome-extension://...//src/vault/vault.html`. The Vault tab hosts the full vault experience: search, chat, knowledge graph, import.

In Offline Mode you will also see a URL-parameter deep-link option: `vault.html?action=import` opens the import dialog automatically once the active vault loads. This is useful if a preflight button in the Prepare panel needs to route you to vault import.

## What keeps working

This list is the heart of the feature. All of it works identically in Offline Mode:

- Chat with any document in your vault, via WebGPU, Gemini Nano, or Ollama
- Search your vault (cosine similarity over cached embeddings)
- Import new documents (.md, .txt, .docx, .pdf, .html from disk)
- View documents, including PDFs rendered with edgeparse-wasm
- Explore the knowledge graph in 3D
- Browse previously cached pages via the vault mini-browser
- Read cached news, documentation, changelog, and credits
- Export your vault to a local ZIP file
- Use local MCP servers via Docker Companion

## What does not work

All of these are blocked by design:

- Chat with Claude or Azure OpenAI
- Connect to a remote MCP server (Stripe, Supabase, public registries)
- Cloud backup to Azure Blob or S3
- Index a new site (requires fetching pages)
- Fetch a fresh Wikipedia page from the knowledge graph viewer
- Activate or refresh a license

For license specifically: the cached JWT lasts 7 days. You can use paid features offline during that window. After, you have to turn off Offline Mode, refresh the license, and turn it back on.

## Related

- [How to Prepare for Offline](/how-to/prepare-for-offline/) — get everything cached before you go
- [Offline Mode](/concepts/offline-mode/) — the rules behind what is blocked and what is allowed
- [Privacy Model](/concepts/privacy/) — the data-residency picture per provider