Load VAE

The plainest node in Sage's loader family: give it a vae_info bundle, get back a loaded VAE. That's the whole thing.

Why it exists as its own node

Sage Utils builds its metadata pipeline around a MODEL_INFO-style bundle - a checkpoint gets hashed, matched against Civitai when it can be, and cached locally (sage_cache_hash.json / sage_cache_info.json under comfyui/user/default/SageUtils/, per the README). Once that bundle exists, the pack gives you a family of small nodes that each pull one component out of it: Sage_CLIPLoaderFromInfo for the CLIP, Sage_ChromaCLIPLoaderFromInfo for the Chroma-specific CLIP variant, and this one for the VAE. Splitting them apart like this is what lets you, for instance, take the VAE from one model_info bundle while pulling CLIP from a different one - useful if you're deliberately swapping in a specific fixed VAE separate from whatever's baked into a given checkpoint.

Inputs and outputs

Just vae_info in (the MODEL_INFO-family bundle) and vae out - a loaded VAE model, ready to wire into Sage_KSamplerTiledDecoder, Sage_KSamplerAudioDecoder, or any standard VAE Decode node. There's no widget to set, no options to tune - this node is a single, deliberately boring link in the chain.

That plainness is the point of splitting the loader family this way in the first place. A lot of checkpoints bundle their own VAE, and most of the time that's exactly what you want. But some workflows benefit from a specific, known-good VAE instead of whatever's baked in - a fix for a known color-shift issue on a particular architecture, or just a VAE the community has settled on as sharper than the default. Because this node pulls from its own vae_info rather than sharing one input with the model/clip load, you can point it at a completely different metadata bundle than the rest of your graph without disturbing anything else.

Installing it

Through ComfyUI Manager: search Sage Utils, install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/arcum42/ComfyUI_SageUtils
cd ComfyUI_SageUtils
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart afterward. This node itself needs nothing extra - it loads whatever VAE file your vae_info bundle points to.

Common issues

If the load fails or comes back wrong, the problem is almost always upstream: vae_info needs to actually be populated by one of Sage's metadata-aware loaders first. If you're feeding it something that was never hashed against a real model file, or a bundle that only has partial metadata because Civitai didn't have a match for your checkpoint, this node has nothing to load a VAE from.

Also worth knowing: because this is one node in a fairly small, single-developer pack, it doesn't get the same volume of real-world testing that a mega-popular node pack does. If you're doing something unusual - swapping VAEs across architectures, feeding it a bundle assembled in a nonstandard way - it's more likely to be genuinely untested territory than a documented limitation, so check the repo's issues before spending too long assuming you've misconfigured something.