Getting started with the Crux Daemon

Getting started

The Crux Daemon is one free binary. It runs on your machine, on CPU, with no account and no cloud dependency. From the first state mutation it signs a CROWN receipt (Ed25519) onto a BLAKE3 append-only spine, so your trail is evidence from minute one.

1. Install

Docker or a single binary; the /install page has the copy-paste commands for both. Up and running takes about 60 seconds.

2. Bind a passport

Every connection binds to a passport; there are no anonymous writes. Your first passport is created locally. Every tool call your agents make will carry it, and every receipt resolves back to it.

3. Connect your agents

The daemon speaks MCP and exposes 100+ tools: memory, retrieval, sessions, checkpoints, ExecPlans, handoffs. Every retrieval call takes a hard token_budget and the daemon trims results to fit, so a chatty tool can never blow out your context window.

4. Verify your own store

Run corecruxctl verify-store at any time. Verification works offline; you are not trusting our servers, or even your own uptime.

What you get locally, free

• BM25-class lexical retrieval plus graph fusion on CPU.
• Dense retrieval if you bring your own embedder (Ollama, vLLM, TEI, llama.cpp, LiteLLM). The local dense lane is never metered.
• The operator console at localhost:14800: canvas board, relation graph, ExecPlans kanban, sessions.

Richer hosted lanes (entity, event, navigational) and fleet features come later, when you want them. Nothing about the local daemon expires.