SimpleWildcard

Automatic1111 had a wildcards extension, and a lighter inline trick that came with it - wrap alternatives in {brown|blonde|black} inside your prompt and each generation in a batch picks a different combination. It's genuinely useful for building a set of variations without hand-writing a separate prompt for each one, and it's old enough that a lot of people who arrived in ComfyUI after 2024 never learned it existed. SimpleWildcard is Prompt Control's version of that idea, packaged as a standalone node.

What it does

Feed it text and a seed, and it resolves random-choice syntax in that text into one concrete result, reproducibly - same seed, same picks, every time. That reproducibility is the whole point: it lets you lock in a combination you liked the same way you'd lock a sampler seed, instead of every run rolling the dice again.

The inputs that matter

• text (required, multiline, default empty) - your prompt text containing wildcard/random-choice syntax.
• seed (required, default 0) - controls which options get picked. Change it, get a different resolution of the same wildcards; keep it fixed, get the same one back.
• use_pnginfo (optional, default false) - reads the wildcard resolution back out of an image's embedded metadata instead of re-rolling from the seed. This matters because a workflow edit elsewhere in the graph can shift what a given seed resolves to even if the seed number itself hasn't changed; if you saved an image whose exact wildcard picks you want to reproduce, feeding that image's info back in with this flag on is the more reliable path than trusting the seed alone.

Output is a single STRING - the resolved text, ready to feed into a text encode or scheduling node.

How to install it

• ComfyUI Manager - search "ComfyUI Prompt Control", install, restart.
• Manual - cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/asagi4/comfyui-prompt-control, restart ComfyUI.

Requires ComfyUI v0.8.0+.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Same seed, different result than last time. If you edited anything upstream of this node - even something that seems unrelated to the wildcard text itself - the resolution can shift. That's exactly the case use_pnginfo is built for: point it at a saved image from the run you're trying to reproduce, rather than trusting the seed number to survive a workflow edit on its own.

"Simple" isn't a joke - it's genuinely basic. This node does inline random-choice substitution and that's about it. If you need weighted options, nested wildcard files, or the fuller file-based __category__ wildcard system A1111 users are used to, look at a dedicated wildcard pack instead - Dynamic Prompts is the well-known one in the ComfyUI ecosystem for exactly that fuller feature set. SimpleWildcard is the lightweight option that ships in the box, not a claim to be the most powerful one available.

You're combining this with Prompt Control's scheduling syntax and something looks off. Resolve the wildcard first (this node), then feed the result into your scheduling node (PromptToSchedule or PCLazyTextEncode) - don't expect wildcard syntax and schedule syntax to be parsed in the same pass by the same node.