🪛 Pipe from any

The unpacking half of Crystools' pipe pair. Feed it a CPipeAny - built by the companion "Pipe to/edit any" node - and it hands you back up to six individual values, plus a passthrough so you can keep the pipe flowing after unpacking it.

Why you'd reach for it

Pipes exist to fix wire spaghetti. Instead of six long individual wires crossing your entire graph - model, clip, vae, whatever else - you bundle them into one CPipeAny connection and only unbundle where you actually need the individual pieces back. This node is where that unbundling happens: drop it wherever a downstream node needs one specific value out of a pipe you built earlier, and skip the extra wire clutter everywhere you don't.

How it works

It reads whichever of the six slots the upstream "Pipe to/edit any" node populated and exposes them individually, while also passing the CPipeAny itself onward so you can continue or branch the pipe past this point.

There's a real warning worth repeating because it's the kind of thing that actually bites people, and it's straight from the pack's own README: the pipe nodes don't validate that slot number N going in matches slot number N coming out - you're trusting your own wiring discipline to keep the numbering consistent end to end. Worse, the flow has to go one direction only. Feed an unpacked output from this node back into an earlier point in the same pipe chain and you get a RecursionError that can hang the server outright, requiring a restart. The README shows this exact failure as a documented bad example, not a hypothetical.

Inputs and outputs

One required input: CPipeAny (only produced by the sibling pipe node - there's no other way to construct one). Seven outputs: CPipeAny (continue or bifurcate the pipe elsewhere) and any_1 through any_6 (whichever values the upstream node put in those slots, typed *).

Installing it

Through ComfyUI Manager, search crystools. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/crystian/ComfyUI-Crystools.git
cd ComfyUI-Crystools
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI. No models needed for this node.

Common issues

The everyday footgun is mismatched slot numbering - link consciously, number by number, and don't assume the pack will catch you if you don't. The rarer but nastier one is the RecursionError from crossing pipe flows: if ComfyUI hangs or the server needs a restart after you've been rewiring pipes, that's the first thing to check. The fix is a server restart and re-drawing the graph so the pipe only ever flows in one direction, never back into itself.

And separately from pipe-specific issues: if this or any Crystools node disappears from your menu after a ComfyUI update, check the startup console for IMPORT FAILED before assuming your graph is at fault - it's usually a dependency resolution problem that a clean reinstall fixes.