XY Input: Clip Skip

This is one of the ammo nodes for the XY Plot system. Its whole job is to generate a series of clip-skip values so you can plot them against each other and see what clip skip actually does to your image, instead of arguing about it on Reddit. Feed it into an XY Plot node, run it, and you get a row (or column) of the same prompt at clip skip -1, -2, -3, and so on.

On its own it does nothing - it's an input generator for the plot, not a standalone node.

Why you'd reach for it

Clip skip is one of the most misunderstood settings in the whole hobby, so plotting it is genuinely useful. Quick grounding: clip skip conditions your prompt on an earlier layer of the text encoder. It exists because NovelAI conditioned on CLIP's penultimate layer back in 2022, and that convention got inherited by basically every anime checkpoint since - Pony, Illustrious, NoobAI all expect clip skip 2. So on SD1.5-family and anime models, a clip-skip plot shows real, meaningful differences.

On SDXL, though, both text encoders already default to the penultimate layer, so setting 2 usually changes nothing and setting 1 can push certain models into noise. If you plot clip skip on a plain SDXL model and the whole row looks identical, that's not a broken plot - that's clip skip being mostly inert on SDXL. Save this one for the models where it matters.

The inputs and outputs

• first_clip_skip / last_clip_skip - the range to sweep. Defaults are -1 to -3. Clip skip values are negative here (the ComfyUI convention), and can go down to -24.
• batch_count - how many steps to divide that range into, i.e. how many cells you get. Default 3.
• target_ckpt - Base or Refiner, which model in an SDXL setup the sweep applies to.

The single output, labelled X or Y, carries the pack's XY type. Wire it into either the X or the Y input of an XY Plot node - X for a horizontal sweep across columns, Y for a vertical one down the rows.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager → search Efficiency Nodes for ComfyUI, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/jags111/efficiency-nodes-comfyui

Restart after. Nothing extra to download.

Common issues

The big one is the SDXL non-effect above - a clip-skip plot that shows no change on an SDXL model is expected, not a bug. Test on SD1.5 or an anime checkpoint to actually see the setting move.

Second, this node only means anything wired into an XY Plot that's driving an Efficient KSampler. By itself, or feeding a vanilla sampler, it does nothing.

Pack-wide: if the node's missing entirely, check the console for IMPORT FAILED (often a pip freeze error) and update ComfyUI, the packages, and the node. This pack breaks on ComfyUI frontend updates fairly regularly; updating to the latest commit is the standard fix.