Symbiotica Asset Recipe

What this node is for

This node only makes sense inside a particular way of working. You render game assets one at a time off an order sheet - a client's monthly .xlsx listing every item they want art for. Each asset needs its own prompt, its own reference image, and a handful of settings true for that asset and no other: which LoRA, that LoRA's strength, the seed, the denoise.

In a normal graph those values live in widgets scattered across the canvas, so moving to the next asset means re-dialing five things and hoping you found all of them. Symbiotica Asset Recipe moves them onto the node that picked the asset: one node per asset, the whole recipe in one place.

How it works

Structurally it's the pack's Symbiotica Asset Focus with slots bolted on - same inputs, and every Asset Focus output appears here in the same order. On the end it adds sixteen slot_1 … slot_16 outputs (wildcard type) and a hidden slots string widget, the table the canvas writes and Python reads.

The gesture: drag a wire from the empty + widget output at the foot of the output column onto a widget's socket on another node - a LoRA strength, a seed, a denoise. The node reads the name, type and current value off the far end, records them as a slot, turns that far widget link-driven and opens a fresh empty slot below. A small widget appears on the node so you can type the value there.

The slot block rides in that one slots JSON string and the per-slot widgets are marked non-serialising, because ComfyUI restores a saved graph's widget values by position - a growing block of real widgets would shift every value below it. Each row converts back to its original type (a seed stays an INT, not a float the sampler refuses), and unreadable JSON counts as no slots rather than a crash.

Inputs you actually set

• category - narrow the picker to one asset type, or empty for all of them.
• asset - which asset, set by clicking it on the node. Empty means the first - unless you want every asset in the event, in which case leaving it empty emits one item per asset and the graph downstream runs once each. Typed names work too; a name that no longer exists raises an error listing what the event actually holds.
• project_path / month / feature - read only when nothing is wired into order, and this node then does the whole selection itself. feature picks which event of that month.
• ref - which of the client's reference images to emit, by filename; clicking a thumbnail on the node sets it. Empty means the first, which is what every other asset gets in an all-assets run.

What comes out

asset_name, category and client_prompt are what you'd expect, and save_path is month/feature/category/asset - it drops straight into a Save Image's filename_prefix, no string-joining. Then the asset's record: order, narrowed to this asset, and event_order, the whole event unnarrowed, for the Order Tracker; bucket, the sub-kind of a category (Drinks); ref_image / ref_mask / ref_name, the client reference you clicked and its alpha; category_recipe, the category plus its canvas in tiles (Appliance 1x2 - a 128x128 and a 128x256 Appliance are genuinely two recipes); and width / height, that canvas in pixels, for saving at the game's own size. Then slot_1 … slot_16.

One split worth knowing: the asset-level outputs are lists and fan out over a whole event, while the slots are single values shared by every asset in that run.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager → search Symbiotica → install, then restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/symbiotica-ai/comfyui-nodes.git symbiotica
pip install -r symbiotica/requirements.txt

Dependencies are requests and pillow - nothing heavy, usually already there. No API key is involved here; the keys in the README belong to the pack's Claude and Gemini nodes.

The setup that actually bites: project_path is a project folder - one with an orders/ subfolder (the monthly .xlsx, the per-month client-refs folders) and a reference-assets/ folder. A project living outside ComfyUI's own input/ and output/ also has to be declared, in Settings → Symbiotica → Paths → Asset folders or:

export SYMBIOTICA_ASSET_ROOTS="/Users/me/games/my-game, /Volumes/art"

Without that the project browser comes up empty, which reads as a broken node but is a permissions story: naming a folder in a request can't make it readable.

Where people get burned

Dragging a MODEL or IMAGE socket onto a slot gets refused with a toast, and rightly so - a slot holds a value you can type, not a model. That's the most common first attempt.

Empty asset means everything, not nothing: leave the field blank when you wanted one asset and you queue the whole event. A slot also only adopts a drag when it's the empty one at the foot - an existing slot taking a second wire drives both widgets from the one value - and removing a slot is the right-click menu on its dot.

Finally, don't confuse this with the pack's Recipes node, which is a different feature entirely: a project, a template workflow, and one generated workflow per recipe. Asset Focus and Asset Recipe are the selection layer; Recipes is about generating workflows. Same word, different thing.

One last thing: this pack is written against ComfyUI's newer V3 node API, and it's a studio tool rather than a community darling, so there's no pile of forum threads to fall back on. On an old ComfyUI the console prints [Symbiotica] Failed to load … with a traceback and the whole pack vanishes at once. Update ComfyUI.