The Curse of Patience

I realize now after writing a few guides on SillyTavern that I never made one of the more important ones: Getting the damned thing up and running. Luckily, SillyTavern is supported among all operating systems (even Android, although that IS Linux-based but won’t be covered here). This is meant to be a catch-all, simple guide on how to install SillyTavern on any platform ya got. Without further dribble, let’s begin!

Requirements (The Boring Part)

Windows: Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit, and no Vista pls)

Mac: macOS 12 Monterey or later

Linux: Any modern distro (Ubuntu 22.04+ makes this even more cake)

Node.js v18.16+ (LTS) (Simply select your OS when you get it here!)

Git (optional but recommended on all platforms. Get it here!)

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The Curse of Hollow

How To Write a SillyTavern Character Card (Or for any platform, really) That Actually Has Soul!

So if you’ve checked out my guide on how to write a system prompt (which if you haven’t, check it out here if you’re curious), then you might be wondering how to write a SillyTavern character card. If you haven’t written one before, I suggest you do! Writing your own character card with his/her own quirks and caveats is one of the most enjoyable things you can do in this space IMO. My first character cards were terrible. Straight copy and pasted from the Wiki page of whatever flavor-of-the-month anime I was into. I’d slap in 2-3 adjectives, and an equally terrible first message.

But that’s the Curse of Hollow. A character, a name, and a picture if you really tried. But no personality. Nobody’s home, Charlie. However, much like system prompts, the way you write and fill those fields can make a huge difference. It’s not so complex to call it prompt engineering (*tips fedora*), but knowing exactly how to structure it in order to achieve a desired result makes all the difference, and you’ll notice!

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The Curse of Prompts

If you’ve spent time in SillyTavern, you’ve seen the system prompt field…*shivers*. The lazy either leave the default in place (guilty..), paste something they found on Reddit (uh..guilty?), or dump a wall of instructions in and hope for the best (GUILTY!)

Yes, I was indeed guilty of all three.

inb4 “Just download a preset, bro”, because I surely am.

But for the curious, the system prompt is the most impactful piece of text in your entire setup. It sits at the top of every context window, sets the behavior for your LLM, and directly shapes every response you’ll ever get from a character card. That means that, many times, a well-written character card will actually suffer from a crappy system prompt (or..it might be a crappy card too. In that case, you’re double f’d)

This guide is a little bit of my experience, breaks down what a system prompt does, how to structure one for AI roleplay purposes, what to stop doing immediately, and sprinkled in with a bit of Chemical X. Let’s get into it!

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