Shima Route (5)

The Shima Route (5) is the biggest member of the pack's routing suite: five wildcard inputs, five pass-through outputs, configurable port sides. It's the top of the Route1–5 ladder, and honestly it's where the suite starts to blur into "bus" territory - five related signals changing direction together in one node, with type-aware color coding on each output.

If you've ever looked at a workflow and thought "there has to be a better way to run these five wires across the canvas," this is that better way. The whole routing family does one job - making big graphs readable by bending wires without touching data - and Route (5) does it for the biggest groups the simple family handles. The pack's node reference describes the family as "named pass-through reroute nodes with color-coded labels" for "organizing wire runs without functionality changes," and that's the entire contract: no logic, no gating, just organization.

How it works

Same engine mechanics as every sibling: ANY wildcard sockets that accept any type, VALIDATE_INPUTS returning true, a route() method returning inputs 1:1 in order, and float("NaN") from IS_CHANGED so the node always re-runs. The always-rerun behavior is correct for a wire segment - you don't want a stale value parked in the middle of a wire - but it does cost you the execution cache for anything upstream, which is the trade to remember if you sprinkle these liberally through a big graph. All five inputs are optional; unwired ones pass through as None. Right-click to move the ports to any side.

The inputs and outputs

• in_1–in_5 (optional, any type).
• out_1–out_5 - the same signals, same order, same types.

The wildcards mean the five can be completely heterogeneous: model, latent, image, string, int all in one node is fine.

Where it fits

The natural use is a sampler-plus-context group - model, latent, positive, negative, seed - or a reference set: image, mask, ControlNet image, strength, and a prompt string. At an island edge it doubles as a clear five-slot landing pad for Use Everywhere broadcasts. If you're consistently moving more than five signals, that's a sign you'd be happier with the pack's BNDL bundle system or its 15-slot Multi-Pipe nodes - Route (5) is the practical ceiling of the simple family.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/KDB-USJP/shima_wf.git Shima
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart, then Shima/Routing → Shima Route (5). ComfyUI Manager: search "Shima". First boot auto-clones ComfyUI-Impact-Pack and cg-use-everywhere if missing (Use Everywhere is the island auto-linking backbone) - expected.

Common issues

Five empty sockets is a lot of blank state to misremember. Connect in a fixed order - heaviest signal first - so the mapping stays in your head, and check the source side before blaming downstream for a swapped value, since the node mirrors order without judging. Also: it's a pass-through, so a None on an output means an unwired input, not a consumed value. This is a young pack with little community signal; the routing code in nodes/smart_reroute.py is short and readable if anything surprises you.