SillyTavern Install Guide

by u/adumdumonreddit

This post was rewritten from a post on r/aisekai when the stupid ass mods deleted it so now I'm using rentry for this :3 Useful links below. The formatting is fucked because rentry can be a lil bitch with images, but it's mostly fine ;z;

Sites to assist you on your way.

  • pygmalion bot creation wiki || the number one resource for anyone wanting to make bots. READ IT, EVEN IF YOU DON'T MAKE BOTS!! i promise you, it will help you troubleshoot like 10 different issues before you even have them. also contains a repository of high-quality bots on the last page of the wiki
  • SillyTavern documentation || *what does this button do? what happens if I set this knob labeled "context size" to 999999 and my bot isn't working anymore? just look at the docs!
  • r/SillyTavernAI || the sub for sillytavern. join for troubleshooting, tips, and showcases of new models/cards!
  • r/LocalLlama || Supposed to be a sub for LlaMA, facebook's ai, but turned into a open-source AI discussion. join for tips on models, announcement of new models, and to fall down the rabbit hole of open-source LLMs. All hail Mistral. Mistral is life. Mistral is God.
  • chub.ai || character cards: no holds barred, find anything from racism to romance to pedophilia (note there is an nsfw switch on the top bar)!! one inch of chub could probably an evangelical prude out cold
  • janitorai.me || character cards: there's a lot more selection (lgbtq characters, more men characters than chub, better images) but the search and tagging isn't as good :(
  • pygmalion discord || no link because the link may go down in the future, but there are also some (but very high quality) bots there!

Guide Starts Here

I was a main SillyTavern user but I was intrigued by Aisekai when Kamion put out an announcement for the beta four months ago. Too bad it got censored. So, here's how to use SillyTavern on your Windows PC (a lot of your favourite characters are probably actually copied from a card-hosting site, which you can use with SillyTavern!).

SillyTavern is a frontend for a bunch of AI hosting services. That means it's basically a fancy interface to facilitate your conversation with AIs, quite like Aisekai but you host the website on your own device. It's free and open source. It will need work. It is not an out-of-the-box solution, it gives you the freedom (and responsibility) to make it work well.

My guide will be for Windows but stay around to the end even if you're not installing for Windows, I have tons of tips for getting started and using SillyTavern.

You can also install on Linux or Mac. You'll need to go to SillyTavern's documentation here (skip past the "Manual Git Install" if you aren't as techsavvy, unless you're on Linux (Let's be honest, if you're using Linux, you probably installed git and Node already anyways). For macs, you need to have git installed, which you can find online.).

You can install on Android, but it's created by a third party. The image-included guide is here.

Here's the Windows guide.

  1. Install the latest version of SillyTavern. Windows gets a cool installer and launcher. Head here, and either use the Git installer if you're a nerd or Method 2 if you're a normal person. (It'll take a second, don't close the command window just because you don't see anything happening!)

Fig 1

  1. (Steps 2, 3, and 4 are just going to rehash the "How to Install SillyTavern using the Launcher" tab, which I find a bit needlessly complicated.) After finishing the whole Method 2 box, you need to click the .bat file as directed. Once you're done, you should see this. If you don't, go through your tabs. Look for a tab named "localhost:6969" in your web browser. If you really can't find it, go to your web browser and go to localhost:6969.

Fig 2

Ok, not this exactly. Imagine that the "Launch ST Release" and "Launch ST Extras" buttons are greyed out, and "Install Release Branch" is clickable.

  1. Click the "Install Release Branch" button.
  2. Once it's done, you should see a new folder wherever you installed SillyTavern named SillyTavern-MainBranch

Fig 3

  1. Once you're done, just click the "Launch ST Release" button on the launcher (again, type in localhost:6969 as if it were a website in any web browser if you can't find it.)

Fig 4

  1. Alright, you're in. Wait a minute, and a tab named "localhost:8000" should appear in your web browser. It will load for a bit, and then let you in. Once the localhost:8000 tab has appeared, you may close localhost:6969. You can reopen it at any time by going to localhost:6969 in your web browser.

Fig 5

  1. You've successfully installed SillyTavern. Clap for yourself for a second. It's always great to be proud of yourself.

Alright, now that you have SillyTavern installed (for the Mac, Linux, Android users who were installing using the other guides, listen up.), I'll show you around and help you get started.

Fig 6

This is what the top bar icons are. Don't touch anything, let's go through them one by one. I'll start with the least complicated to most complicated. Let's start with the Persona icon, the smiley face second from rightmost.

This is basically information about yourself that gets sent to the AI. (Yup, SillyTavern had this feature like 10 years before even character.ai! This will be a common theme.).

Fig 7

Here's an example. The Name and Persona Description are pretty self-explanatory, but what's that {{user}} thing? So, {{user}} and {{char}} are basically placeholders for your name and the character's name respectively. For example, if you wrote "{{char}} loves arguing with her classmates" for a character named Ava, the AI would read it as "Ava loves arguing with her classmates". Good practice to use {{char}}, especially good practice for {{user}}- if you want to share your character to someone with a different name, they would have to change all occurrences of your name with theirs.

You can set your profile picture if you want to as well. The "Position" thing is advanced, you don't have to worry about it right now, but I'll attach a guide including information on what that means at the end of this post.

You can hotswap Personas mid-conversation or for different chats, especially helpful for roleplaying different people or writing stories.
Also, do you see the "How do I use this" link in the top right? That is the official SillyTavern documentation. Use it, use it, use it. 99% of your questions could probably be answered by the documentation. I'm rewriting it all here to simplify it for a new user.

Set it now to whoever you are in real life- that's usually a good choice for a default persona.


Let's move on to the next part, the Backgrounds tab (the wallpaper icon, fourth from the right). SillyTavern comes with a lot of background images, or you can import your own. You don't have to mess with it right now if you don't want to. Moving right along.


Next, the User Settings. Toggle Simple settings to Advanced (light green, flip the switch now). It will look harder, but it's pretty easy to use. Here, how about I draw up a color-coded guide?

Fig 9

Alright, keep this image in mind. By the way, this is my own SillyTavern now- you can tell by the different background. Here's my background. Like it? Stable Diffusion, while it's struggling with hands and eyes, at least can make some pretty damn nice flowers. The prompt might be in that image's metadata. Maybe not. So here and afterwards, you can copy my settings if you want.

You can change your language or leave it to system default (green), change your Theme Preset (dark green, there are two built in, Dark (which is pretty ugly ngl) and Ross (much prettier imo)). The Theme Settings are your basic stuff and is pretty self-explanatory. The Chat Style (light blue) just changes how your conversations look, you can change the color of various things (experiment with it), and more. The theme settings will slightly vary depending on what theme you use, Ross or Dark, but it's mostly the same. The Theme Toggles (blue) is just miscellaneous stuff, most of which is self-explanatory, except Zen Mode and Mad Lab mode. These both relate to the AI Settings, which I haven't covered yet. Zen Mode is just a skin for the AI Settings, and Mad Lab mode removes all of the bounds on the AI Settings sliders. If you're new, don't turn on Mad Lab. Something inevitably will break and you, a newbie who doesn't really know how to fix it, are going to have a rough time.

In the Miscellaneous area (dark blue), don't worry about most of it. The message sound thing is just a ping whenever the AI responds, and you don't have to worry about the rest.

In Character Handling (pink), don't touch anything- you can change stuff once you learn what it does.

In Chat/Message Handling (yellow), it's basically a bunch of QOL stuff. Don't really change any stuff from the defaults here except the self-explanatory ones like "Auto-load last chat" (reopen the last chat you had open when opening the app). If it's not self-explanatory now, it will be once you use the chatting system once.

The image are my own settings- you can follow what I have if you want, but experiment on your own.


Now, let's get you hooked up to an API. Click on the plug button, second from the left, taking you to the API Connections.

Side note: What's API? Well, API stands for Application Programming Interface. In short, it's basically you mailing a letter to a company (eg. OpenAI) that you want to GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, etc (types of https requests) something. The company, upon receiving your request, says "pay me first". You pay up, and they do whatever your request was, in most cases mailing you something back, whether that be a confirmation or whatever you wanted (if you issued a GET request). The API is the basically the post office handling this mailing process between you and the company.

Fig 10

Look at this top bar. Select KoboldAI Horde. This is your best friend, because it's free, anonymous, and volunteer-run.

from this rewrite into Rentry: So fun fact, literally 2 days after posting the r/aisekai thread, I realized OpenRouter existed. So OpenRouter is another option in the API Connections, the last option with the "Chat Completions" group. Building off the API explanation above, OpenRouter is basically the post office for the post office, you send in your request, OpenRouter sends it off to whatever API (post office) you want. So, with one OpenRouter account, you can send requests to a lot of companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and a ton of open source LLMs. In fact, I recommend OpenRouter now. Use one of their free models- I especially like the Intel NeuralChat and Toppy-m-7b. Detailed explanations of the differences between these models can be found on OpenRouter's site.

Did you read the above box??? Yes, of course you did! Good! The koboldhorde guide is still here because it's still an option, just realize that OpenRouter also exists.

Fig 11

Go through here, and click on all the links. You especially want to register an account like they tell you to, because the API key you get gives you priority access over anonymous users. What's "Kudos"? It's basically Kobold Horde's queue system. You get Kudos for donating your GPU time to the Horde for people to use, and the Kudos give you priority access. You don't have to do that, just having an account provides some priority. Now, let's look at the Models after you insert your API key into the textbox.

Now, Kobold Horde is anonymous, as in your messages aren't linked to your name. However, if you say your full name in the chat, then a malicious volunteer could see that. However, they cannot see it normally, and must hack the Kobold Horde volunteering program to be able to see your messages at all. And if you don't provide any sensitive information, the malicious volunteer can't do anything anyways. Pretty damn good.

Fig 12

What models are available will fluctuate over time, depending on how many volunteers are available. As a rule of thumb, you see those numbers next to a "b"? Like in the first one, how it says "7b"? It's complicated, but all you need to know is that generally, higher number = smarter. So the "13B" models there are generally better than the "7B" models. There are exceptions, like how "Toppy-M-7B" and "Mistral-7b" are pretty damn good and rival many 13B models, but you need to go down the r/LocalLLaMA rabbit hole to understand it fully.

Select a bunch of models there, and let's get going.


Head to the AI Settings, the leftmost option. Here, you configure how the AI behaves. It's a lot more hands-on than Aisekai, but it's pretty simple for beginners. This tab will change depending on what AI provider you use, but for Kobold, it looks like this. (No image, sorry.). The presets are pretty reliable, which you can find right at the top left. I recommend "Genesis". You don't need to get into all the settings, but it's a great rabbit hole for nerds. I use a special format that uses the Min-P variable (you don't need to know what it does), which you can download and import to your SillyTavern using the row of buttons next to the preset selector at the top.

Once that's sorted, let's move on to the next area.


Almost there! Go to the "A" in the top bar, three from the left. This is the Formatting Settings. This is one of the more complex areas, I don't know what some of the stuff here does. All you need to know is that some AI models need a special format (none of the ones on Kobold Horde do, though). I recommend the Minimalist Context Template and the Alpaca Instruct Preset. All of the stuff I changed works pretty well, and you can use as well. You can change it around to experiment and use as you need.

Fig 13

Don't worry about the other stuff right now.


Let's talk to your very first character! If you open Character Management, the rightmost tab, you'll notice you have only 3 characters that come with SillyTavern. That's because you need character cards to add more! These are in .png format, and contain the character's data inside their metadata. Before getting new characters, let's start with Seraphina. When you click on her, you'll notice a big popup about importing World Info. Click "Yes". I'll explain this in a second.

Fig 14

You should see this on the right side of the screen. I'll break it down. First, the character's name. Then, how many tokens they use. Tokens are essentially words, broken down into small parts the AI can understand. As a rule of thumb, 4 characters/digits = 1 token. Most of the AIs offered on Kobold Horde have context sizes under 4096, usually around 2048. Context sizes are basically the memory of the AI, how many tokens it can remember at once. You can see 815 permanent tokens, so 815 tokens of your context size will be taken up at all times. You can edit the description and first message here, as well as a bunch of other utilities on the row of buttons next to the portrait.

Press on the book, second to the left in the row of buttons I just mentioned. This opens the Advanced Definitions. This will look familiar to bot creators- a personality summary, example dialogue, and a scenario. Ignore the Character's note for now, it's basically a place to put anything you want to bot to always remember. Don't touch anything else.

Now exit, and go to the chat proper. Send your first message! The chat supports basic markdown, ** for actions and "" for dialogue. On the left of the chat bar at the bottom, you'll find a small menu.

Fig 15

Once again, it's got stuff you will recognize, starting new chats, starting group chats, closing the chat, deleting messages, swiping (regenerating the previous AI message), and continuing (making the AI continue its last message). Don't touch the other stuff, you can experiment with it, but not now. Congrats, you know the basics of SillyTavern!

There's other stuff out there. Extras, which is a whole other app and is in the three boxes in the top bar, three from the right, PLists + Alichat, a format for cards, tagging, slash commands, expressions, prompt engineering, the whole of SillyTavern is yours to discover.

Or, you know, you can just take 10 minutes and read the documentation. Either works.


Now, I was going to explain Lorebooks as well, but this post is a mile long. So, I'll let probably the best bot writing guide out there do the rest of the work.

https://wikia.schneedc.com/bot-creation/trappu/creation (there are two pages, make sure you read the second page as well).

This wiki doesn't only contain information on bot writing, but how bots work, why common issues like the bot talking for you happen, miscellaneous tips like where I got some of my SillyTavern settings from, a guide on lorebooks, and more.


Where do you get cards?
Well, there are a bunch of high-quality card authors on the link I just posted. You can also find cards on the Pygmalion Discord (I'm not going to link it, I'm already tempting the No Advertisements rule enough by making this guide), chub.ai (the wild west of cards, either you find the best card ever or a whole Wikipedia article dumped into the personality field (also down as of the time of writing this guide, lol rentry update: it's not down as of the time of rewriting this guide :p)), and janitorai.me (chub but with a lot more variety (mostly as in gay bots) less... questionable content (extreme kinks, for example), but less tagging and classification systems).

Also, on chub, download the V2 Format. DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE TAVERN FORMAT, IT IS OLD AND OUTDATED.

Once you've downloaded a bunch of brand new cards, all you need to do is drag and drop them into the SillyTavern app, and wait a few minutes for them to import. Enjoy chatting away, with infinite swipes, no moderation, infinite chats, and a very powerful frontend!


So, even though Aisekai is now joever, you can use SillyTavern for free. It's got a learning curve, but it's super rewarding. Be free, virginal child, and go and develop your parasocial relationship with that cute boy you downloaded off of some backalley Discord server.

Edit Report
Pub: 09 Dec 2023 20:53 UTC
Edit: 09 Dec 2023 21:02 UTC
Views: 94