Saya Image VAE Routes · Settings Only

Every large auto-generation pipeline has a silent problem: it decodes and encodes through a VAE half a dozen times across its passes, and nothing in the graph records which VAE each site should use. The checkpoint's baked-in VAE is often not the one you want - maybe it's an fp8 VAE for speed during the mid passes and the full-quality one only at the end. SayaImageVAERouteSettings exists to make that routing visible and saved, and nothing else. That's the whole job. It has no outputs.

What you get is ten dropdowns, each offering Checkpoint VAE, Custom VAE 1, Custom VAE 2, or Custom VAE 3. Each one maps a decode or encode site in the author's multi-pass template:

• sampler_1_decode, sampler_2_encode, sampler_2_decode - the VAE used coming out of (and, for the second pass, going back into) the sampling stages
• hires_1, hires_2, hires_3, usdu_1_tile, usdu_2_tile - the hires / tile upscale passes
• pre_detail_hires and final_hires - the pass before the detailers and the final upscale

The "Settings Only" in the name is doing real work. The node's entire function returns nothing - it deliberately never touches a model, never decodes anything. Its purpose is to keep the route choices alive in the workflow JSON so they survive saves and round-trips, and to give whoever builds the pipeline a single visible place to answer "what decodes this stage?" If you're copying the author's auto-template, that's your config surface. If you're not, think of it as documentation-on-canvas: it sits in the graph and says which VAE each phase of your own graph should use, even though it isn't the thing enforcing it.

Because there's no output socket, there is genuinely nothing to wire from this node. That trips people up exactly once - they add it, stare at the lack of output ports, and wonder if it's broken. It isn't. The values it holds only mean something if the actual VAE loaders elsewhere agree: the pack's own Saya Lazy Checkpoint Loader is where a route saying "Checkpoint VAE" versus a standalone VAE gets honored, and whatever feeds Custom VAE 1–3 has to load the same files this widget names. Set the two consistently, or your "Custom VAE 2" route will silently decode with whatever the loader decided instead.

Setup is the shared pack story: ComfyUI Manager search saya-comfy-couple-plus, or

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/alphaziod/saya-comfy-couple-plus

then restart. Runtime deps are just numpy and Pillow; no models to download. The pack's README is all about the Comfy Couple side and doesn't document these pipeline nodes, so treat them as the author's in-progress tooling - back up workflows, expect the occasional port change on update, and hard-refresh your browser after updating so the bundled frontend reloads.

It's a niche node with a precise job: making "which VAE, where" a question your workflow can answer and your saved JSON can remember. If that's not a question you're asking, you can skip it without missing anything.