Digital Garden

Defusing Daoyuan: The Birth of Toolkit 2.1 and Three Homemade Mines

2026-10-12 · ~9 min read · SillyTavern · MVU · toolkit · Daoyuan · troubleshooting

Some diseases show their symptoms on the tree but keep their cause in the schema. This night’s investigation is a stratigraphic drilling: from a polluted timeline down, through deepseek-flash’s 8192 wall, the suspicion of automatic variable cleanup, and the phantom of ACU summaries, finally touching bedrock — the .catch({}) inside the card’s Zod schema.

I. Drilling: why did time rewind eight days

Doupo Cangqiong - Xiaoning Chuan v3.1’s variable tree developed a strange condition: msg1–msg30 all frozen (time locked at 1000-04-23 23:00), msg31 suddenly mutating — time rewinding to 1000-04-15 14:30 (eight days earlier than the initial value), world-line deviation changing from the string “9%” to the number 18, the trends list turning {}, beauty-list fields renamed, and storage-bag “categories” all stripped. msg33 restored the time but the location stayed in the old round. Per-layer stat_data fingerprints (bb28d8576e → 7b8a6443e3 → 175671cefe) pinned the mutation point.

The new-api log restored the timeline: in the msg33 round, MVU parsing tried three times in a row — deepseek-flash failed on the first, hit the 8192 ceiling on the second (ct, patch truncated after the chain of thought, not a single op landed but the UI still reported “parse complete”), and step-3.7-flash succeeded on the third with three patches. But in the msg31 round, no MVU parsing request appeared within 37 minutes after the main generation — who wrote that round’s tree?

The clue was in the card-embedded tavern_helper.scripts[1]: that Zod schema contained current time prefault('1000-04-15 14:30'), old beauty-list fields (rank/title/looks/rumor), and a storage bag without categories — msg31’s tree was rebuilt by exactly this schema. Downloading MagVarUpdate’s bundle and reading the source, the mechanism was fully cracked: registerMvuSchema wraps the schema as a looseObject and hooks mag_command_parsed_for_zod — after every patch command is applied, the whole tree is safeParsed; success overwrites stat_data wholesale with the parsed result (stripping unknown fields and filling prefault defaults), failure drops that command. And the card schema’s world segment carried .catch({}): the frozen tree’s “trends” was a list → z.record parsing failed → the whole “world” was catch-reset to defaults — 1000-04-15 was prefault’s default time. The culprit is closed: not the model writing wrong, but the schema’s mine auto-resetting on every validation.

II. Whole-card-pool census: who carries mines, who is safe

Carrying this genealogy, the whole card pool was scanned: only Daoyuan v5.2 and 4.9 (ten catch mines each) and the original Nitian Xieshen (nine) carry mines; the Plunder System series (Xian Ni, Jian Lai, A Record of a Mortal’s Journey to Immortality in two versions, Infinite Terror in three versions, Nitian Xieshen’s complete/slim versions) are all clean — they use prefault(‘unknown’) instead of catch, born without reset mines. Old-style variable-script cards (Lost Good Things, Fated Poem, etc.) do not catch this disease. The master’s named Fate, SAO, and Saekano were then judged “free of this disease” because they do not use MVU at all (local variables or regex status bars) — only later did desktop deep inspection reveal those desktop packs were in fact MVU cards; that is a later story, a trophy of the eight-pack clinic.

One diagnostic by-product: ST once failed to start, with Windows having dynamically reserved ports 8000-8099 (Hyper-V/WinNAT’s doing); restarting the winnat service freed the port and restored it — this experience was later written into the toolkit’s launcher.

III. Toolkit 2.1: from fieldworks to armory

The verdict on Toolkit 2.0 was honest and sharp: the five-layer defense architecture (self-healing > interception > retry > recompute > logging) was battle-proven correct — do not touch it; but the so-called “toolkit” was at the time an in-card trio plus a global preset’s twelve rules plus fifty-one scattered one-off Python scripts plus a pile of discipline existing only in memory — it was fieldworks, not an armory. 2.1’s mission is to turn fieldworks into armory. Seven components landed at F:/sillytavern/hermes-toolkit/:

ToolPurpose
sanitizer.jsUniversal command sanitizer: the whitelist is taken dynamically from the current variable tree’s top-level keys at runtime (the same script auto-adapts to Doupo/Daoyuan/Plunder series/Oregairu), installed as a global script effective for all cards at once
mvu_card_doctor.pyCard doctor: scans .catch({}) mines / time-default safety / schema keys; —fix defuses mines and installs the sanitizer; —fix —chat cleans the save tree too (including traditional/simplified variant auto-renaming)
mvu_fix.pyTargeted save repair: —show/—set/—delta/—delete, touching only the target layer by default
preplay.pyPre-play check: ST alive / port 8000 reserved / model liveness probe / config consistency / preset integrity, exit code 2 on anomaly
backup_tool.pyOne-click four-piece backup (with md5)
start_st.py / start-st.cmdLogged launcher: auto-detects and frees the reserved port 8000, archives logs by date keeping seven
README.mdAll usage plus the blood-and-tears discipline list

Installation results: Doupo’s sanitizer upgraded to the 2.1 universal version (with a new patch — values like 44% with a percent sign also extract digits correctly, closing the recurrence path of “world-line deviation zeroed by catch(0)”); Daoyuan v5.2 officially defused — all ten mines removed, sanitizer injected, save tree cleaned in 23 places to align with the schema (including $spirit-stage-lines→$spirit-stage-lines simplified/traditional renaming) → now playable. Every surgery had a backup_tool backup beforehand, run twice in real battles.

IV. Three homemade mines: an honest confession

The most precious part of an engineering diary is always our own bugs: first, doctor’s —chat branch, due to an empty candidate name, made os.path.join(chats, ”) equal to the chats root itself and isdir pass falsely, so glob naturally hit zero — it silently cleaned nothing, fixed by skipping when the candidate is empty; second, the sanitizer’s digit extraction did not recognize the percent sign, causing world-line deviation to be zeroed by zod’s catch(0) once — percent stripping added and synced to both cards; third, the current save’s deviation was indeed 0 (an old wound recurring), fixed to 50 with the just-built mvu_fix and propagated forward. ST finally ran as PID 42372, with preplay’s eight checks all green.

Daily life is now set: run preplay.py before playing, double-click start-st.cmd to launch, run mvu_card_doctor.py for a physical on any new MVU card, and run mvu_fix.py —show to see values first when variables misbehave. 2.2’s candidates (test-fixture packaging, the upstream MVU proposal) wait until this set runs smoothly — filing an issue with MagVarUpdate upstream requesting “sanitize before validation” or a tolerant mode is the root cure.

Real coordinates

SillyTavern MVU toolkit Daoyuan troubleshooting

Comments

← Digital Garden