Variation Buffer

Variation Buffer is the unglamorous sidekick of this pack, and it deserves its own explanation because it's where beginners trip first. Character Prompt Manager wants a list of variation strings; Variation Buffer is how you hand it one without a rat's nest of cables. Ten inputs - variation_1 through variation_10 - get merged into a single variations output, in slot order, with unconnected slots skipped.

How it works

The mechanism is nearly the whole story: each slot is a plain string input, the node drops the ones nothing is plugged into, and returns the rest as one list. That's it. But there's one front-end detail that catches everyone: every slot is forceInput, meaning there are no text boxes on the node. You can't type into it. Each slot has to be fed by a String (Multiline), a Primitive, or anything else that outputs text. People connect a buffer, see ten empty ports, and assume it's broken - it isn't, it's just expecting to be fed.

A working setup looks like:

String (Multiline) → variation_1    "night scene, neon signs"
String (Multiline) → variation_2    "rainy street, umbrella, puddles"
String (Multiline) → variation_3    "golden hour, field, wide shot"
...
Variation Buffer → variations → Character Prompt Manager → CLIP Text Encode → KSampler

What matters

• Order. Slot 1 becomes the first prompt in the manager's batch, slot 2 the second, and each gets its seed in the same order. Keep your slots tidy or your seed-to-variation pairing stops making sense.
• Ten is the cap on the buffer route. You can't daisy-chain two buffers - its output is a list but its inputs are single strings. If you genuinely need more than ten variations, feed the manager's variations input from any other list-of-strings source instead.
• Unconnected slots are ignored, so you don't have to fill all ten to use the node.
• One slot equals one variation. The buffer doesn't split newlines, so if a variation needs several tags, type them all into that slot's string rather than pasting lines and hoping they fan out.

Installing

Same pack, same steps: ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyUI-CharacterPromptBuffer, or git clone https://github.com/Kyreo/ComfyUI-CharacterPromptBuffer into ComfyUI/custom_nodes, then restart. No dependencies, no models, both nodes appear under conditioning → Character Prompt Manager.

Honest take: this node is pure ergonomics. You could technically skip it and feed the manager from any list source. What it buys you is ten one-line prompts living as readable, individually editable strings instead of one giant paste - which, for a "batch ten character variants" workflow, is a noticeably nicer canvas. Just don't expect anything clever out of it. The clever is all in the Character Prompt Manager.