Here's how you can check API requests to find issues and test settings

I understand this may be very basic advice for most of you, but I'm new to this and only realized it recently, and I've seen other posts that imply the person was also not aware of it, so I hope this helps someone. It involves running terminal commands, but if you're here you're probably more than able to do it, and you can DM me if you need help. Also these are tested in Linux, but I'm sure you can replicate them on Windows or macOS.

You can easily check your API responses by checking logs and terminal output, which lets you look at the actual string being sent to the API, identify problems and test fixes. This is very useful for testing options in complicated settings like lorebooks. For example, I did not understand World Info entry ordering at all until I looked at the API messages being sent out of order - lower order first. I also thought I was sending some entries that were being triggered, but that didn't happen over an incorrect config. There's a lot of stuff I was only able to both find and fix because I could read terminal outputs.

There's multiple ways you can do this. The easiest is probably to check ST logs. I'm running it on a podman container (it's like docker for Red Hat people) with an ID, so I can run podman logs -f silly-tavern which will keep printing out each message sent with proper formatting. If I notice something is missing I can change something, re-send the same message and see if that fixed it. If you're running it from an installation there's probably a logs directory you can look at and just tail -f that.

Another way if you're running a local model in koboldcpp is to run it directly with a config file from the terminal, so ./koboldcpp-linux-x64-cuda1210 --config ./default.kcpps will also keep the terminal window outputting incoming messages and even showing the generation progress. There shouldn't be much of a significant difference if you're just looking at the request text, but ST logs contain a lot more information.

Also shout out to everyone who takes time out of their day to explain the UI to noobs.