Candle wizard modes: Guided, Collab, and Advisor
The candle wizard meets you where you are — Guided walks you through every step, Collab works alongside you, and Advisor stays out of the way. Same three modes as resin, tuned for wax.
When you build a candle recipe with Ellie, you choose how much help you want. The mode you pick changes how much Ellie explains and how much you decide yourself — and you can switch anytime, with whatever you've already typed carried over. The switcher lives in a small pill at the top of the wizard; tap it and you'll see the prompt "How chatty should I be?" above the three choices.
Which mode you're in is remembered for you, per person, and it stays in step with the experience level on your Settings page. For the wizard as a whole — the wax, the fragrance blend, the wick, the safety checks — see Making a candle recipe with Ellie.
Guided — "Just getting started"
Ellie walks you through the recipe one decision at a time, as a short stack of steps. You make one call per step — the format, the wax, the scent, the color, the size — and Ellie explains the why as she goes. In her own words: "We'll build this together, one little step at a time." Best when you're new to a wax or a vessel and want to learn the moves.
Collab — "Comfortable"
Everything condenses onto one screen. You set your direction — the fragrance blend, the vessel, the load — and Ellie fills in the rest and sanity-checks it. Her framing here is "Set your direction — I'll work within it." Best when you know the basics but still want a second set of eyes on the numbers.
Advisor — "Knows what they're doing"
The full control surface, on one screen. You set the specifics — format, wax, fragrance and load, colorant, wax weight, pour temperature, the wick you want to run — and Ellie validates, calculates, and hands you her take rather than driving. Her line here is "You drive — I'll validate, calculate, refine." Best when you have a candle in mind and just want a fast, capable assistant.
Switching modes
You can change modes at any point. Whatever you've typed — your brief, your wax and vessel picks, your fragrance and colorant choices — comes with you, so you never retype to move up or down a level. Moving to Guided restarts you at the first step; moving to Collab or Advisor lays your picks out on the single screen.
Check my recipe
There's a second way into the wizard that always lands you in Advisor mode. Open any saved candle recipe and use Ask Ellie to Check: the wizard opens with that recipe preloaded and a review brief, so Ellie critiques the actual candle — its load, its wick match, its pour temperature — instead of building a fresh one. This is the candle version of the resin "check my recipe" path; on candles it's simply the Advisor surface with your recipe already in it, so there's no separate generate-versus-check toggle to set.
The sibling button, Remix ✦, also reopens the wizard with the recipe's picks seeded — but Remix keeps whatever mode you last used, so it's the one to reach for when you want to spin a variation rather than get a critique. Either way, you can then adjust in plain language; see Refining a candle recipe.
Tip: whichever mode you pick, Ellie's wick is always a starting point. Plan to burn test the candle and size the wick up or down at the bench — Advisor mode is the fastest place to feed those results back in.