MD: Universal Wildcard Orchestrator

Wildcard syntax - {red|blue|green} meaning "pick one" - is old A1111 tech that's quietly become essential again: it's how people do seeded prompt randomization and build character-reference libraries without any LoRA training. This node is a pure, recursive wildcard rendering engine, and unlike the pack's other prompt nodes it's model-agnostic - no audio lean, no LLM required, just fast text in, expanded text out.

How it works

You hand it a template, it resolves every {A|B|C} (including nested braces inside braces) using a seeded random pick, and returns one final string. The seed input makes everything reproducible, and randomize_seed (default on) rolls a fresh seed every run so each generation explores new combinations. delimiter lets you change the split character from the default | - you almost never need to.

The input priority order is the feature most people miss:

1. input_text_override (the noodle) - highest priority; wire an LLM output or another text node here for fully automated pipelines.
2. text_widget - manual template entry; overrides the preset file.
3. preset_file - a dropdown of .txt files in the pack's presets/ folder; only used if both of the above are empty.

That last one ships with real content - 50+ files with names like Abyssal_Bossa_Nova.txt, Chimney_Core.txt, Cyber_Shanty.txt, plus decade packs. If you don't want to run wildcards yourself, hit Random and let it pull a whole prompt out of a file.

Inputs and outputs

The essentials: seed, randomize_seed, text_widget, and preset_file. debug_mode and enable_profiling are console diagnostics - set debug_mode to 1 - Info if you're debugging gnarly nested wildcards and want to see which source the text came from.

Output is a single final_prompt STRING. For image work that goes straight into a CLIPTextEncode; for audio it feeds the ACE-Step caption path. Clean and boring, in the best way.

Installing it

cd path/to/ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/MDMAchine/ComfyUI_MD_Nodes.git
cd ComfyUI_MD_Nodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

Or search MD_Nodes in ComfyUI Manager and restart.

The honest take

Two notes. First, the preset library is heavily music-flavored because the author is an ACE-Step audio person - so image users will mostly live in the text_widget and their own files. Second, you can drop your own .txt files into the pack's presets/ folder and they'll appear in the dropdown (lines starting with # or // are skipped as comments), which is the move if you want your own themed prompt libraries. The engine itself is fast, recursive, and seeded - the same job the bigger prompt-builder node does, minus the structured audio metadata. If that's all you need, this is the one to grab.