SillyTavern Quick Replies: buttons for repeat OOC commands

Make your first set

Open the Extensions panel and find Quick Reply. Create a new set, name it after its job ("Story steering"), and add buttons. Each button has a label, which is what you see, and a message, which is what it sends or runs. Enable the set globally to see it in every chat, or attach a set to one chat for a campaign with its own commands.

The phrases themselves are covered in steering a story with OOC. Quick Replies are about never typing them again.

Six buttons worth copying

Paste the text after the colon into the button's message field; the word before it is the label.

• Skip: {{input}} (OOC: Skip ahead to the next scene. Cover the time that passes in one or two sentences, then continue.)
• Slower: {{input}} (OOC: Stay in this moment. No time skips and no big reveals this reply.)
• Mine: {{input}} (OOC: Do not write {{user}}'s actions, words or feelings. End your reply when it is my turn.)
• Narrate: /sys {{input}} | /trigger
• Status: /send (OOC: Pause the scene. List water, food, warmth and morale as numbers, then continue.) | /trigger
• Recap: /gen Summarize the story so far in five short bullets. | /popup {{pipe}}

How they behave: the first three send your typed turn with the note attached, so you write *I shoulder the pack.* and tap Skip. Narrate posts your text as a narrator line instead of your character's, then asks the character to respond. Status adds your note as a message and starts a reply. Recap asks the model privately and shows the answer in a popup, so nothing lands in the chat.

Status suits stat-tracking games like Greer Kettering's island survival, where she counts every match you strike; Recap suits a long quiz run with Faris the Riddle-Broker.

Plain text versus slash commands

A message that starts with a slash runs as STscript, SillyTavern's command language, and the pipe character chains commands: the output of one feeds the next as {{pipe}}. Anything else is sent as if you typed it. A few commands cover most needs:

Each button also has an option to drop its text into the input box instead of sending, handy when you want to tweak the note before it goes.

Auto-run, carefully

Buttons can also run on events: when SillyTavern starts, when you send a message, when a reply arrives, or when you open a chat. A button that runs on chat open could, for example, post a one-line scene reminder at the start of every session. Be careful with anything that runs on every message: a button that triggers a reply on each reply loops forever.

Notes that outstay their welcome

An OOC note sent as a message stays in the chat history, and the model keeps reading it for as long as it fits in context. With roughly 61,000 tokens of context on UnsavedAI, that can be hundreds of messages, so last week's "keep it lighthearted" is still nudging tonight's tragedy. Two fixes: hide old OOC messages from the prompt with SillyTavern's per-message hide option, or put lasting rules in an author's note and keep Quick Replies for one-off pushes.

Story-game characters reward a good button set; Don Chema Villalobos and his lucha libre bouts are a fun test bed for Skip and Narrate.

Questions people ask