Presets

A preset is a set of writing instructions you keep in your library and put into any story: who the narrator is, how the narration reads, and how the characters speak and act. It is mostly prose; the rules of the game and everything specific to one world stay with the world, with one exception described under rules prompts.

note

This is not DSH's agent preset, which sets up the agent a chat runs under. Here a preset is only the narration prompts.

A preset has up to three prompts for each language:

Prompt	What it sets
roleplay/persona	who the narrator is
roleplay/style	how the narration is written
roleplay/character-style	how characters speak and behave

It may also suggest the creative temperatures of the narrator and the characters.

Rules prompts

A preset can also carry the other prompts of the story, the ones that hold the rules of the game: how the game master runs a turn, what characters may know and do. These name tools and fields the program reads, so a wrong change can break how the story runs. They are never part of a preset unless someone put them there, and everywhere a preset is shown it is marked with a warning when it carries any: on its card, in its editor, and in the approval the assistant asks for. An assistant that edits a rules prompt keeps the shipped text and adds to it instead of replacing it. The editor can change the text of a rules prompt a preset already carries; adding one is done with the assistant or by importing a lorebook that holds instructions.

The Presets page

The Presets page of the Role Play panel lists your library: each preset's title, description, the languages it has prompts in, and any problem that keeps it from being used.

• New preset starts from the shipped narration prompts in every language. Give it a name (letters, digits, - and _; stories and worlds refer to it by this name), then rewrite the prompts.
• Edit opens the preset: its title, description and suggested sampling, and the text of each prompt it carries. A prompt or language the preset lacks can be added from the list under the prompt. Rules prompts are added from a separate list that starts you from the shipped text, with the warning shown, since a rules prompt is safer to change than to write from nothing. Saving checks a prompt as a story start would, so the ${placeholders} of the original must stay.
• Edit with assistant opens an authoring chat for the preset, like the one a world has. The assistant reads the preset, proposes changes to its prompts, title, description and temperatures, and asks you before each write. If you decline, nothing changes. Use it for larger rewrites or to have a prompt written for you.
• Import SillyTavern preset takes the .json file SillyTavern exports and first shows what it holds: every prompt, in the order the preset sends them, ticked as the preset has them switched on. Tick the ones you want (a preset often holds several alternatives, such as one prompt per writing style, of which only one is on): only the ticked prompts are shown to the conversion, and the others are treated as if the file never had them, including anything they set. The preset's own sampling (temperature, top P and so on) is listed too and kept unless you untick it. The dialog also says what the file holds that is never carried over, such as the regular expressions that rewrite replies and helper scripts of the tool that wrote it. The assistant then keeps only what is about how to narrate (the narrator, the style, how characters speak) and writes it into a new preset. Rules of the game, formats and scripts are not carried over. Only the prompts the preset has switched on are read, in the order it sends them; its variable macros (setvar, getvar) are played first so that a value set in one prompt appears where another uses it, and prompts written as the model's own turn (prefills made for one particular model) are skipped. Presets built around one model's thinking template or jailbreak lines come out as their narration style only. Tick Without the assistant to skip the conversion: no model runs, and the ticked prompts, in the order the file sends them and with the file's own variables played, become the narration style of the new preset at once, word for word. Nothing is split between narration and characters and the file's rules are not sorted out, so check the result in the preset's editor. Use it when you want the preset exactly as written, or have no model to spare.
• Delete moves the preset to the trash folder. Stories that already use it keep their own copy.

The Presets tab of the catalogue lists SillyTavern presets other people published. Import as a preset downloads one and asks what to bring, the same way as the file import, then makes a new library preset of it. Importing it again makes another preset, because the assistant's conversion differs from run to run.

Sampling

A preset, and a world, can suggest how the story's models are asked: sampling in preset.json or world.json, with the narrator's master and the characters' characters temperature (0 to 2), and topP, topK, minP, frequencyPenalty, presencePenalty and repetitionPenalty, which apply to the narrator and the characters and never to the helpers that must be exact. Leave out what you do not want to suggest; a value that only restates the model server's own default is not sent.

{ "sampling": { "master": 0.9, "characters": 0.9, "topP": 0.95 } }

The values are copied into the settings of one story when it starts, and only that story asks its models that way. The order is: the world's values, then the preset's (suggested by the world or chosen at the start), then what you chose in the start dialog or later in Chat settings. Nothing is written back to the library or the world, and a story that is already running keeps its own settings when you switch its preset. They are edited in the preset's About and in the world editor's About. Importing a SillyTavern preset carries its sampling the same way: its single temperature becomes both the narrator's and the characters'; a high temperature makes some models answer in prose instead of calling their tools, so lower it if a story stalls.

A world's own prompts can become a preset too: on the world editor's Prompts page, Save as preset copies the prose prompts the world carries into a new preset.

Using a preset

A story gets its preset copied in when it starts. Later changes to the library never alter a story in progress.

• In a world: the Suggested preset field on the editor's About page, or in the dialog that creates a world, names the preset new stories of the world start with. The world's own prompts still outrank it.
• When starting a story: the start dialog offers the library's presets, "no preset", and the world's suggestion. A choice made here outranks the world's own prompts.
• In a running story: the Preset section of Chat settings shows whether the story still matches the library (current, changed in the library, edited in the story or missing from the library), and can switch to another preset, apply the library's version again, or take the preset out. Replaced copies are kept in the story's .trash/prompts/.

Switching a preset does not change the story's temperatures, and prompts a world carried that an earlier preset replaced are not brought back. The switch is refused while a turn is being played, so the prompts never change in the middle of one.

A preset can also come out of a lorebook import: the instructions to the AI in a SillyTavern lorebook are kept aside and, with your approval, become a new preset.

The full rules (the order the files are written in, what counts as a problem) are in the prompt system specification.