Conditioning Batch Start

If you've ever wished regional prompting in ComfyUI felt less like assembling furniture with only the instruction "some assembly required," the Conditioning Batch nodes are the answer. SimpleSyrup's regional system runs on an ordered CONDITIONING_BATCH - a list where each entry belongs to a specific region, and the consumer decides the convention (the regional samplers make entry 0 the global prompt; the SEGS detailers match one entry per region). Something has to start that batch, and that's exactly what Conditioning Batch Start does - it takes one CONDITIONING value and wraps it into a batch with a single entry, ready to align with the first SEGS item.

It's a two-line idea, and its whole job is to exist at the front of a build-it-by-hand chain. The alternative to hand-building is Encode Prompt Batch, which does the whole thing from [SEP]-separated text. But when your per-region prompts come from somewhere text can't express - say, each region's conditioning is already composed with its own LoRA hooks or per-region scheduling - you assemble the batch manually, and Start is where that starts.

How it works

Position is the contract. The batch you get out has exactly one entry: the conditioning you put in. You then append more entries with Conditioning Batch Append - one per region, in the exact order your SEGS arrive downstream. The tooltip calls it out explicitly: this is a per-segment batch, "ready to align with the first SEGS item." Entry 0 is the first region's conditioning, not a global prompt.

That's the thing to keep straight, because the pack uses two batch conventions and they don't mix. This Start/Append chain builds a per-SEGS batch for detailer-style consumers like Detail SEGS by Scale Factor, whose conditioning batch is "matched to SEGS order" - one entry per region, no global slot. By contrast, the regional samplers (KSampler (Prompt by Region), Compose Regional Conditioning) expect a global-first batch where entry 0 is the whole-canvas prompt. If you feed a Start-built batch into a global-first consumer, the first region's prompt gets treated as global and everything shifts by one - the classic "face got the background prompt" surprise. If you need global-first, prepend the global entry with Batch Region Conditioning or build the batch from [SEP] text with Encode Prompt Batch instead.

Inputs and output

• conditioning (CONDITIONING): the conditioning for the first SEGS item in the batch. That's the only knob.
• output batch (CONDITIONING_BATCH): a batch of one entry, ready to feed Conditioning Batch Append, Batch Region Conditioning, or a batch-aware sampler like KSampler (Prompt by Region).

No settings, no options, no surprises. If this node looks too simple to be useful, you're seeing it correctly - its value is in what it enables, not what it does.

Install

It ships in SimpleSyrup, so the install is the pack install. ComfyUI Manager → search SimpleSyrup → Install → restart. Manual:

Set-Location ComfyUI\custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Artificial-Sweetener/SimpleSyrup.git
Set-Location SimpleSyrup
..\..\venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart after. Remember SimpleSyrup needs a current ComfyUI (v3 extension API); on an outdated build the whole category just won't show up.

Common issues

• "Where are my other regions?" - you only started the batch. Feed it through one Conditioning Batch Append per region; nothing adds itself.
• Wrong region / wrong prompt mapping - the batch order is set by the chain of Append nodes. Trace the chain top to bottom and it's the region order.
• Node missing - update ComfyUI, then check Manager's log for the requirements install.

Boring by design. It's the "Start" in a two-node pattern that gives you full control over per-region conditioning when text-splitting won't cut it.