Basic Guider

Basic Guider is the samplest possible steering box: a model, one conditioning, and out pops a GUIDER with no CFG dial and no negative prompt input. It exists because a large and growing slice of modern models don't use classifier-free guidance at all. Guidance-distilled models - Flux Dev, Schnell, Z-Image Turbo, Krea 2 Turbo, most things from 2025 onward - have their guidance baked into the weights at training time. CFG is already "1" for them, and a negative prompt has nothing to attach to because there's no unconditional pass. So you hand them the Basic Guider and let them do what they were trained to do.

It ships with ComfyUI core (comfy_extras.nodes_custom_sampler). It was added in April 2024 with the commit message "Add basic guider for models with no cfg" - the original use case was exactly the guidance-distilled models that were starting to appear.

How it works

Where CFG Guider runs two predictions per step and amplifies their difference, Basic Guider runs one: the conditioned pass, straight through. There's no uncond in the formula, because there's no unconditional prediction to compare against. That's also why it's cheaper - a Basic Guider workflow doesn't pay the doubled compute of real CFG.

The practical consequences:

• No negative prompt. You can't wire one in; the input doesn't exist. If a workflow built on CFG lets you restate constraints negatively, here you write them as positives instead ("sharp, clean, correct hands" rather than "blurry, deformed"). This catches people constantly - see below.
• No CFG tuning. There's nothing to turn up when the image ignores you. If a guidance-distilled model isn't following the prompt, the fix is a better prompt or a different seed, not a dial.

Where it fits

It's the guider half of the custom-sampler graph: Basic Guider → SamplerCustomAdvanced. Pair it with an Euler-family sampler on a conservative scheduler like normal or beta for flow-matching models, and you have the whole "distilled model, 8 steps, CFG 1" workflow in five nodes.

Where people get burned

• "Negative prompts don't work anymore." They don't - and it's not a bug. The field has nothing to attach to at CFG 1, and Basic Guider makes that honest by not even offering the input. The KB's summary of the community's testing: write constraints as presence, not absence.
• Trying to bolt CFG back on. Some people wrap a CFGGuider around a distilled model "to get guidance back." Above ~1.2–2.0 you start applying the correction twice - once baked in, once live - and the image burns at double the render time. A nudge to 1.2–1.5 can fix anatomy on some models (the Klein 1.2–1.5 trick is real), but treat anything above that as overcooking.
• Expecting a negative when there isn't one. If you really need negatives on a distilled model, the workarounds are NAG or PerpNegGuider - neither one is this node. For everything else, Basic Guider is the honest default.

If your model does use real CFG - SD 1.5, SDXL, Pony, Illustrious - skip this and grab CFG Guider. Using Basic Guider there just means no guidance at all.