Icy CheckpointLoader

Straight talk before anything else: IcyCheckpointLoader is the IcyHider clone of CheckpointLoader - the old core checkpoint loader with the extra config_name dropdown - and for almost everyone reading this, it's the wrong node. The loader you want is CheckpointLoaderSimple. This one exists for a shrinking set of legacy cases, and it's worth knowing why before you pick it.

What it does - and why the extra field exists

Both loaders read a checkpoint file from models/checkpoints and hand you the same three outputs: MODEL (the denoiser), CLIP (the text encoder), and VAE (the image encoder/decoder). The difference: CheckpointLoader requires you to also pick a config_name - a YAML config that describes the model architecture.

Look at the config dropdown and you'll see the archaeology: v1-inference.yaml, v1-inference_fp16.yaml, v2-inference-v.yaml, the clip-skip-2 variants, the inpainting configs. These are the SD 1.x / SD 2.x era configs. Back then, the loader couldn't always figure out a checkpoint's architecture from the file alone, so you had to tell it. CheckpointLoaderSimple ditched the config field entirely - it inspects the checkpoint and works it out - which is why it became the default and this node faded.

So when do you actually need this one? When a legacy SD 1.5/SD 2.0 checkpoint won't load correctly through the simple loader, or when you specifically want a config variant (the clip-skip-2 configs, the fp16 config, or the inpainting configs) that changes how the model is interpreted. Those are real cases. They're just rare now.

Where people get burned: grabbing this node by habit and staring at a config dropdown full of SD1/SD2 YAMLs while trying to load a modern model. Modern checkpoints (SDXL and up) don't have a matching config in that list, and forcing one breaks the load. If your model is modern, stop - use CheckpointLoaderSimple or UNETLoader + CLIPLoader + VAELoader and skip this node.

The "Icy" caveat

Outputs are MODEL/CLIP/VAE - no image preview for IcyHider to hide, so the Icy wrapper is cosmetic. The pack clones every core node at startup; this is one of the relics it relabels. The underlying math is exactly core CheckpointLoader.

Install

Pack install is the same everywhere in this family: ComfyUI Manager → "IcyHider" → install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/icekiub-ai/ComfyUI-IcyHider.git

Restart. No Python deps, no bundled models (your checkpoint is your own file in models/checkpoints). Node lives under IcyHider Comfy Core. And if a tutorial's screenshot shows a loader with no config dropdown, that's the Simple one - take the hint.