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The True Sutra of Slimming: Dual Editions and Config Written into the Card

2026-10-10 · ~5 min read · slimming · character card · config_override · dual editions

The highest art of dieting is not starving yourself but letting every gram of weight appear only when needed. On October 10, four cards’ slimming experiments turned that zen into replicable engineering.

I. The ledger: where the money goes

Before slimming, the accounts. Using the gateway’s real tokenizer (not estimates), each card was measured item by item: the Fanren card costs about 46–48k tokens per round — parse request 19,471 (26 instruction entries plus 354 triggered setting entries), narrative request about 26–28k; and two items are double-billed: the instruction layer and the setting layer each go out once to the narrative request and once to the parse request. Against the Gods was more dramatic: resident content at 30,264 tokens was forty percent over budget, while the parse request carried the whole lorebook (30,485) — the same content sent to two AIs in one round.

II. Mining: config written into the card

The first key was mined from the MVU extension’s source: a per-character override mechanism — place an entry whose comment is exactly [config_override] in the lorebook, with strict JSON content carrying a lorebook entry whitelist regex — and MVU applies it per card. This means the slimming config travels with the PNG to any ST with TavernHelper installed, no global settings touched.

But the consultation immediately found the mechanism’s correct form: MVU reads only entries with disable===true — the previously enabled:true config_override in Fanren’s slim version had never taken effect. Da Feng’s fix cast this lesson into law: disabled entry plus the ^MVU whitelist, so the parse request carries only four or five MVU instructions.

III. The dual-edition system

Four cards ended the day with dual editions, names distinguishable, coexisting in one library, switchable at will:

Fanren v1.1 and v1.1-slim: the original’s parse request at 19,471 tokens drops to 4,704 (-76%) under the card-carried ^MVU whitelist, total consumption down about thirty percent; each edition has its own lorebook copy to prevent the override crossing over. Against the Gods full and slim: plot requests 35,258→21,266/17,582, parse requests 30,485→1,965 (the [mvu_plot] tag sends 2,983 pure-plot entries to the narrative AI only), per-round totals from 65,743 down to 23,231 (-65%) or 19,547 (-70%). Sword Comes repaired full and slim: 1,173 pure-plot entries tagged [mvu_plot], parse requests from a measured 85–90k down to 12–16k. Wu Dong slim-fixed: constant entries 420→26, per-round fixed injection from 25.6K to 8,190 characters (about -68%), files 6.5MB→3.05MB, zero content loss.

IV. The honest ledger of cost

Every delivery carried a cost note: Against the Gods’ slim edition converts entries to keyword activation — they load only when their names appear in the last four messages, so if narration uses pronouns and never names them, the entry stays dormant; if you feel “settings forgotten,” switch back to full. Fanren’s slim whitelist keeps the parse model from seeing persona and plunder rules, but the numeric rules all live in the retained amplitude table — risk rated low, with the original as fallback insurance. Wu Dong’s list explicitly refused one temptation: “deleting the script library would bring the file to 1.5MB, but repairing the keys to bring it alive is the right path.” What slims is the carrier, not the content — 2,986, 5,305, 9,368 entries, not one lost.

Real coordinates

slimming character card config_override dual editions

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