Fun Chatbot Habitats

It's kinda fun to explore all these chatbots, how they work, and slowly learning to make my own. But that would be dull somewhat if the user interface of SillyTavern was always drab. Thankfully, the situationcan be fixed becauuse...

SillyTavern is a precarious, startlingly eldritch abomination 🔮 hosted on a Linux laptop as far as I am concerned. It might surprise you 😱, though, how utterly customizable the whole thing is.There’s a metric fuckton of extensions you can install immediately ⚙️, and plenty of third party extensions available across the web. These add cool stuff, change the user interface in various ways, and are generally fun.

Extending with Extensions

Hmm... where to even begin? The Lenny Suite, a vast and unknowable connection of SillyTavern extensions, is available directly from the author who is called Lenny (whoa so surprise 🙀). Alternatively you could add this file to your SillyTavern installation to connect to a full Lenny repository. It’s maintained (seems like?) by a third person, so it’s not as full or up-to-date as just checking Lenny’s own list!

I may be biased 🤷‍♂️ towards aesthetics rather than bare functionality, but the ones I recommend installing (from various authors) are:

• CSS Snippets will allow you to customize the CSS of your themes much easier, pulling out bits and pieces to apply as needed. Some other extensions seem to require this one? It’s very useful either way ✨
• The Extension Manager extension is extension-caption in that it does exactly what you’d expect - it is an extension that makes navigating and turning your extensions on and off much easier 🚀.
• Custom Favicons does exactly what you’d think, and all you must do is type a line of code and select an image to upload - it will become the beautiful favicon 🌟 for your SillyTavern installation.
• Chess is, of course, chess, an absolutely horrific game from which I must take ample time to recover if I actually play it. Too intellectual for me. If you wanna cosplay Magnus Carlsen 🙀, feel free, tho!
• Custom Title is a simple extension allowing you to change the title of the window in which you’re talking to these chatbots. It doesn’t need to say SillyTavern. Have fun with it? 🎉
• Blip is a fun extension, simulating the quaint little sounds that used to accompany a companion typing online, a little lowkey chime? 🔔 It’s a versatile one, and can be easily customized in the UI itself.
• Video Background is a glorious extension that allows for, and explains how to set up, video (mp4) backgrounds. This may seem like a small thing, but it really is rather fun 💫 to have some small movement in the background, isn’t it?
• File Explorer is tricky to use, but does allow you to browse and manipulate files using the normal boring-ass SillyTavern interface 💻. Sometimes they get eaten by some Linux…
• Trigger cards allows you to prod a particular chatbot into action, wordlessly, during a “group chat” with you and several bots. It may seem weird as fuck 👽, but if you’re like me and regularly host chatbot tea parties, this is important.
• TopBarInfo is a beautiful extension, which adds a nice, neat, and clean bar just above the chat, with little images representing options (such as new chat, etc).
• Idle Messages will cause your bots to message you first! This helps to organically continue the conversation, if that's what you want... 🤷‍♂️
• Emoji Picker is a quite quick and easy way to pull up a small Facebook-style menu and insert all these lovely little emojis...🌟

Be mindful that these are all direct links to the extensions in question. Some of them are already included in the "Default Repository" to which you connect SillyTavern initially. So, you'll want to look there first, then branch out. The Lenny Suite, or at least some of it, is totally a must for me...

Aesthetics Upgrades

If you have a modicum of front-end coding knowledge, you can easily customize the appearance of the SillyTavern user interface 🎨, creating themes awash in sunset glows, delicate pink china tearooms, dystopian chatrooms, and more. There are even themes that mimic the popular messaging app, Discord. That’s awesome 🔥 and I’m using those like burning at this point? Above you can see a theme I cobbled together from examining the work of others - I call it Dat Sunset Tho. Perfect for teatimes of all kinds!

There are tons of themes, extensions, and tips available via the SillyTavern Discord server, and guess what? You can access those areas of the server as a lurker prior to passing the #exam-room test required to participate in the server. I honestly just lurked this server without getting posting privileges 👀 for about three weeks before joining. And please relax - the #exam-room thing isn’t as awful as it seems 😅. You won’t find help for the questions online… just follow instructions…

Nyxkrage’s Discord-inspired theme is perfect for playing group chat games with whatever blorbo or whoever you want to conjure up. I use a very similar theme, which smashes the auspices of that together with some other stuff and sweeeeeeeet colors. You can generally expect I’m gonna use something light-colored (lol, pink or orange) but all themes can, in theory, be a dark theme, you just have to tweak the colors in the user interface… slightly.

Anyways... I plan to post links to cool themes I find (if I can - some seem proprietary and I'ma be mindful) as well as some unabashedly amateur and mediocre themes I made myself...