Load Consolidated References

The consolidation stage of the MiniMax H3 Novel pack can take a while - reconciling every chapter's entities through the LLM and generating the picture and audio asset briefs is real work. Load Consolidated References is the shortcut back in: it reads a previously saved consolidated_references.json off disk and returns it as a MINIMAX_REGISTRY, the exact same type Consolidate References outputs. So when you've already consolidated a book once, and you want to generate H3 prompts for more chapters, or regenerate prompts after tweaking a budget, you skip straight to the prompt stage instead of re-running reconciliation.

One input, validated like a contract

Single input, consolidated_path: a folder that contains consolidated_references.json, or the file itself. The node resolves both and then validates hard - it requires the payload to carry entities, chapter_entity_map, entity_asset_index, picture_assets, and audio_assets, and it refuses anything else with a clear "this is not a complete consolidation output" error naming what's missing. The validation exists because the registry is a contract: Generate H3 Prompts assumes the full asset index and binding structure are present, so a hand-edited or half-written file should fail here rather than downstream in a confusing way.

Why a read-only loader earns its keep

That contract is also the interesting use case. Because the node returns a plain MINIMAX_REGISTRY, you can load a registry, hand-edit the JSON (fix a character's canonical name, delete an asset brief you never want to render), save it, and load it again - your edits survive because this node is read-only and idempotent. Nothing about the load mutates anything. For a long novel you'll likely keep one workflow with Consolidate References as the "regenerate" branch and one with this loader as the "work from the saved registry" branch, sharing the same consolidated_references output type so nothing downstream cares which one fed it.

It's about as thin as a node gets in this pack, and that's fine - it's a resume point, not a feature showcase. The one recurring gotcha is path hygiene: it will only accept a file literally named consolidated_references.json (or a folder containing one), and the shared install story applies unchanged: clone yuyuki/minimax_h3_novel_pipeline into custom_nodes or install it via ComfyUI Manager under "MiniMax H3 Novel Pipeline", restart, and set the LM Studio API key under ComfyUI Settings → MiniMax H3 Novel → LM Studio. This loader itself never calls a model, so it works even when LM Studio is switched off - useful when you just want to inspect what a previous run produced.