256

Two hundred fifty-six. The workhorse power of two that doesn't get a hall of fame entry but quietly appears everywhere: half of 512, a quarter of 1024, the batch size of countless internal operations, the tile size of a fast-but-rough upscale pass. This constant node from 2daadv's ComfyUI-GadgetNodes pack outputs a locked INT value of 256 and does absolutely nothing else - and that's the point.

Like every member of this pack's Gadget/core/const family, it's a no-input, no-state node that returns a fixed value: empty required inputs, one INT output, done. There's no list mode, no caching, no way for it to surprise you. It comes bundled with its siblings (0, 1, -1, 64, 512, 1024) in one MIT-licensed, one-developer pack that's too new to have any community reputation - judge it on the code, which for the const nodes is trivial. Install once: ComfyUI Manager → search "GadgetNodes", or clone the repo into custom_nodes/, pip install -r requirements.txt, restart.

Where 256 shows up in practice:

• Small-side resolution. For a "fast pass" or a draft render, generating at 256 on the short side is a legitimate VRAM-saving move, then upscaling to 512/1024. Constants mean every branch of the workflow agrees on what "small" is.
• The half-step. Resize chains that halve: 1024 → 512 → 256 → 128. If you're building a progressive refinement ladder, 256 as a constant keeps the middle rung honest.
• An attention-friendly tile. Many tiled samplers and ControlNet preprocessor crops default around 256, and it's a real sweet spot for tile size on consumer cards - small enough to fit, big enough to keep context.
• Batch/stream sizes in image-batch utilities, same logic as the 64 node but fatter.

Honest take: on its own, 256 is the least glamorous number in the set. But the deeper lesson the const family teaches - and this node is a good excuse to internalize it - is the one from the node-plumbing layer: a value you want in multiple places should come from one source. Typing 256 into four widgets is how you get a workflow where three of them silently disagree. Wire this node's output into each of those four inputs and the disagreement becomes impossible.

The usual caveat applies: 256 is only "right" if you decided it was. If you keep changing your mind mid-run, that's what a widget is for. A constant is for the values you want to stop thinking about.