SillyTavern branches and checkpoints: try another path

Swipe, branch or checkpoint

Swipes only reroll the newest reply. The moment you want to go back twenty messages and choose differently, deleting messages is the destructive option and a branch is the safe one.

Making a branch

Hover over (or tap) the message where the story should split and open its message options, the row of small icons with more behind the three dots. Choose the branch option. SillyTavern saves a new chat file holding every message up to and including that one, names it after the original with a branch marker, and opens it.

You are now in the copy. Write a different reply from your character, or swipe the character's message, and the story goes its own way. The original chat is unchanged in the chat list, and returning to it is a matter of opening it from there, or using the option in the chat menu that takes you back to the parent chat.

Making a checkpoint

A checkpoint is a branch you do not walk into. From the same message options, create a checkpoint and give it a name you will recognise later, like "before-the-vault" or "told-him-the-truth". SillyTavern saves the copy and marks that message so you can open the checkpoint from it, and you carry on in the main chat.

Good moments to drop one: before a betrayal, before a fight that could go badly, before you confess anything, and at the end of each session in a long campaign. They cost nothing while you ignore them.

A worked example: two timelines

Time travel stories are made for this. Say you are forty messages into a story with Director Rafael Ortega, who treats you as a timeline that should not exist. He offers a deal: inform on the others and your timeline survives.

• Message 40: before answering, create a checkpoint named "deal-offered".
• Main chat: you refuse. The story turns into a chase through the Authority's tower.
• Two days later, open "deal-offered" from message 40 and accept instead. Now the story is a quieter, colder one about guilt.
• Both chats are complete stories. Neither knows the other exists, because each is its own file with its own history.

The same trick suits a comic run with Lê Thu Hà, where trying the most absurd option is half the fun.

Keeping branches tidy

Every branch and checkpoint is a separate chat file for that character, so a busy campaign can grow a long list. Rename the ones you keep, delete dead ends from the chat list, and include them in your normal backups.

• After branching, open anything you keep per chat, such as a chat-level author's note, chat lore or a summary, and confirm it says what this branch needs.
• A branch from message 300 still carries 300 messages. With about 61,000 tokens of context on UnsavedAI, most of that history stays in view, so the branch remembers nearly everything up to the split.
• If you branch to escape a story that went stale, remember the branch inherits whatever made it stale; change something in your first new message.

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