VAESave_motorway_edition

Most of the time you don't touch VAEs - you load the one that came with your checkpoint and move on. VAESave exists for the exception: you've merged, modified, or distilled a VAE and you want to write it to disk so you can load it again later. It's a stock output node under model merging, and this _motorway_edition clone runs it through the agilly1989 Motorway pipe, pulling the VAE from the shared dict by key instead of by wire.

Motorway, briefly: start with MotorwayStart, then each _motorway_edition node trades data wires for key strings, reading and writing a shared dict that flows down one MOTORWAY connection. The clones are auto-generated from ComfyUI's own registry, so underneath this is stock VAESave.

What it does. It grabs the VAE (via INPUT_vae_key, default vae), then saves it to the output folder under filename_prefix - default vae/ComfyUI_vae, which writes to ComfyUI/output/vae/ with a counter suffix. That's the entire job: no output, nothing stored back in the Motorway. It's a terminal node. Run the graph, a .safetensors (or whatever format the save uses) appears in output, done.

The inputs that matter. MOTORWAY is required - this one consumes, it doesn't produce. INPUT_vae_key points at the VAE in the dict, and yes, the case trap applies: if you loaded the VAE with VAELoader_motorway_edition, it's stored under VAE uppercase, so set this to VAE or you'll get 'MotorwayClass' object has no attribute 'hash_'. filename_prefix is where the file lands. Output: just the MOTORWAY port (the actual save result is the file on disk).

Common issues. Two things to know. First, this is a member of the pack's "output node" family - nodes that write files rather than pass data - and the README explicitly warns that motorway-ed clones of output nodes are among the ones that "wont work" as expected. In practice it runs and saves, but don't be surprised if it's the fiddliest of the bunch; if you just want to dump a VAE, the stock node is one wire and no keys, so consider whether the Motorway is earning its keep here. Second, if the node's missing from your menu entirely, the pack's current main branch has the clone registration commented out in __init__.py.

Install via ComfyUI Manager (search "ComfyUI_agilly1989_motorway") or clone into custom_nodes, restart, no models to download. Solo-dev beta pack with an honest "it works on my system" README - fine as a tidy-up layer, and for a rare "export this VAE" task, the plain core node is honestly just as good.