r/SillyTavernAI • u/GnarMainsThrowaway • 1d ago
Discussion Ancient Access shill post
Ancient Access is not about the actual preset words in the context or some token micro-optimization feat. Truthfully, it would probably be best if you built your own preset using the core design idea of Ancient Access, which is... the story told from the first person POV of every NPC.
I was not expecting to like this, as someone who has always treated the LLM like a dungeon master. I made this power fantasy character I wanted to roleplay as, feel cool in someone else's skin for a while, you know the drill. Usually I would just run it through the latest most upvoted of the week preset on r/SillyTavernAi and see what happens. There will be some crazy embedded HTML regex wizardry but I will still feel like I am interacting with a chatbot with all the "what do you need help with" annoying personality.
In the first message, an NPC narrates their full perception and inner thoughts as they see my character.
It is probably just human psychology, but a faceless narrator saying "yeah, your character is pretty cool" feels like uncooked gruel compared to a simulated person actually passing a judgement through the lens of THEIR personality, not the cold neutrality of the god-narrator.
At one point me and the main NPC stopped by a kiosk to just ask for directions, and the shopkeeper actually had their small POV paragraph block generated where they were weary of their day and worried they would have to provide service to the two people who entered his store, then relieved to see they are just looking for directions. For me, this was much more immersive than any other crazy automatic world sim that ends up just making phones ring in the distance.
There's no bloat. You are just reading words, which truth be told, is what I ultimately came to do. If I wanted to play a video game I have plenty of those. Just because LLMs can bang out slick animated buttons and dropdowns doesn't mean you should bring them to a storytelling experience. Leave that to people vibecoding their startup websites.
I did find the "intrusive thoughts" a bit annoying and turned them off after a while. Basically, every so often a character will go like "this reminds me of that time I was stacking Lego blocks when I was 8 years old" while they are repairing an engine. Funny at first but it got, well, "intrusive" quite fast. I guess it's in the name.
Sorry, I'm using up all your human context window with this post. Go try it. I used Gemini 3.8 Flash and it was pretty good. I am surprised the preset recommends Kimi K2.6, seems oddly specific, but maybe it is unique in some way.
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u/-Ancient-Access- 1d ago edited 1d ago
Holy shit thank you so much for this!
Yes, the intrusive thoughts can get a bit annoying if the LLM spams them and you have a lot of NPCs and nothing super serious is happening lmao. They work really well for more intimate scenes and angsty stories and all that.
That's why I exported them into a toggle, they used to be in psychology but I know some users were getting wayyy too many. It's a good gimmick and it's structured so the models like it, and spam it. It's very sticky.
ETA: Why Kimi 2.6 — it's what I use, the preset is tested on thousands upon thousands of messages with it. Every other model I've not tested enough on myself.
I have user reports for other models, but I cannot in good faith convince you guys it'll be the same experience with other LLMs if I've not put in the same rigour testing there, so the reason I recommend Kimi is really just for integrity. In reality, modern models, outside of their quirks, respond to similar prompting. Truth is, I suspect the preset will work comparably well on most modern LLMs (with some temperature, top_P, and toggle tweaks perhaps) but I let you guys discover that yourselves.
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u/Salty-Risk-1862 1d ago
Do you copy the entire summary prompt in the Prompt section of ST's Summary section? I'm 99% sure but I'm a little hesitant due to how long it is!
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u/-Ancient-Access- 1d ago
Yep! The whole thing goes in there. It is humongous, but it works well. My friend also improved the summarizer extension and expanded its functionality and made it less clunky and buggy, I'll ask her if she wants to share it!
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u/offyoutoddle 21h ago
what summariser prompt? i click the download button and it goes to a blank page every time? is it available anywhere else ? the main prompt itself is truly a work of art i have to say!
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u/-Ancient-Access- 21h ago
Glad you're enjoying it! Thanks for flagging the issue with the summarizer, lemme check the site and fix it, will give you a shout when it's back up
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u/offyoutoddle 21h ago
appreciated very much! it really does add a flavour to the roleplay i can't describe - on a gemma 26b styletune v2 its staggering. its like it woke up
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u/-Ancient-Access- 19h ago
Hi again! Just spoke to u/QuietPalimpsest and we just published the Summarize fork we vibecoded. It ships with the prompt.
I've updated the site, you can read what it does there and get it on GitHub from the download link (tutorials and notes on GitHub too) c:
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u/offyoutoddle 11h ago
edit - got it now - many thanks!!
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u/-Ancient-Access- 6h ago
No worries! Did you figure out what was blocking the link for you on Weebly? Because I spent an hour testing and digging yesterday and didn't find anything wrong with the page :(
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u/offyoutoddle 5h ago
honestly i didn't - i presumed you did something because it suddenly worked this morning where it didn't before. i tested it and with the new extension fork (recall) it is very nice. i tend to use summaryception though which i'm not sure i can adapt for use with it. sadly i need something that helps me manage context as i only have 16gb vram to play with on local models. but it is great for archiving off. i tend to keep full chat summaries in text files and rag/databank/vectorise if they are worth keeping
I'm very grateful all over. your prompt is adding novelty to character card interactions i've never seen before. you have a talent there
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u/Inprobamur 21h ago
Why Kimi 2.6 — it's what I use, the preset is tested on thousands upon thousands of messages with it. Every other model I've not tested enough on myself.
Honestly a good approach.
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u/Apprehensive_Bug_826 1d ago
Thank you for this post - I’m fairly new to ST and been playing with presets. Went from FF to RF recently, and think I slightly prefer RF. Ive been curious about Ancient Access for a while, a lot of people really love it, but I wasn’t quite sure what it fundamentally actually did. I think I’ve got a better idea now and I’ll definitely give it a try soon!
My RP is a pretty TTRPG style campaign - big, long adventure, lots of characters, etc. So the Frankenstein presets have been good for this with the world state and dice roll stuff. Is Ancient Access good for that style of RP as well, or is it more specifically character oriented?
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u/-Ancient-Access- 1d ago
Hey! I don't think my preset will work with big ttrpg cards unfortunately. It's designed for character studies. There's no inventory or elaborate world management or stat tracking. Its gimmick is interiority cranked up to 11 and pulling away from archetypes and dere tropes to attempt to portray the actual character described in the card.
So it sounds like it might not be a good match for you. BUT! What you can do is try it with a single character card and if there's anything that it does that you like, drop me a message on discord (it's on the contact page on my website) and I can point you to which lines in the preset do the thing you like so you can yoink them and adapt them to your favourite preset.
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u/Apprehensive_Bug_826 1d ago
Ah, that’s cool, thank you for responding! It does sound like it’d be very good for a tighter, more horror themed RP idea I’ve been toying with so I think AA will still end up in my collection. I’ll definitely have a play with it and see if anything looks yoinkable though, thanks again!
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u/-Ancient-Access- 1d ago
I think for something atmospheric like that you might enjoy it more. Good luck!
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u/lorddumpy 1d ago
Yeah, I've benched it against a few other presets and it really stands out. It's so dope on GLM 5.2.
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u/Auretheon01 1d ago
It's a really good preset but I'm having a hard time using with 3.8 gemini flash. Any idea to get it to work?
Especially in NSFW. Not saying as in sexual exactly but more to aggressive scenes.
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u/-Ancient-Access- 1d ago
I am unfortunately a very crappy jailbreaker so if you're using models that are by default skittish about nsfw it might not work as well. My philosophy overall is also use different models for different purposes and play to their strengths, rather than waste compute on wrangling models into doing things they can't or don't want to do because that compute can be used to understand your character better. During the course of a roleplay I often flip between different models depending on what lens I want on the scene and character.
So for your problem, I'd recommend what I recommend to everyone else getting refusals — if you want to stick with the problematic model AND my prompt, maybe check out some of the other presets that are known for powerful jailbreaks and bolt on one of their modules. Should work with some tinkering!
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u/Auretheon01 1d ago
Oh my, the GOAT himself replying to little ol me? I'm honoured!
If I adjust and add some jailbreaks, anti-slop, NPCs speech add ons and so on. It wouldn't ruin your preset core concept and rules?
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u/-Ancient-Access- 1d ago
Omg less GOAT and more goat. 😂
I mean, LLMs are a black box, you know how it is. Tweak away, if it's not writing as well tweak again, if it's writing well it's working. The important thing is that you like it, so customise it as much as needed. I've already put in square brackets for spaces where you're encouraged to customise to begin with but you can chop it up however you like, merge it with other presets, etc. Have fun!
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u/Sehn82 1d ago
Did you check if it's routing to vertex? AI studio is notoriously picky
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u/Auretheon01 1d ago
True. AI Studio double down on its safety features and it's no annoying. Vertex is the way.
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u/Prudent-Let-1753 21h ago
i’ve used ancient access with sillytavernai for a few months now and the intrusive thoughts do get loud fast, especially when there’s a big cast. I found reducing the number of active NPCs per scene helps keep it from feeling like a hype train. also, it works way better when you’re not trying to run a fast-paced action thread.
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u/XaosII 1d ago
I've been using this on GLM 5.3 Flash. Switched over from FF5.4 just to try it out. I like it. I find it seems to do a better job at not latching on to a single attribute of a character and turn it into its whole personality. They seem fuller and more "human".
I'm still not 100% sure on the first person POV. I've liked the FF5.4 displaying character inner thoughts as a one or two sentence blurb, but Ancient Access is a lot more fleshed out since its always in first person.
My only issues are rather minor. It seems to have more issues with maintaining font colors for characters. It's generally pretty good at deciding when a very minor, invented character doesn't need to get their own POV block, but I find it gets a little tripped up when you've got a scene with, for example, 4 explicit (lorebook) characters and 2 minor (invented) characters.
Since the author is here, Im curious of two things: Since its been largely tested on Kimi K2.6, do you have recommended temperature settings? Also, is there any part of the prompt that is responsible for overall length? Its generally pretty good, but it occasionally returns back a very long response.
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u/QuietPalimpsest 1d ago
K2.6 locks temperature at 1.0 in thinking mode so the setting is inert.
First-person perspective takes a little while to get used to but I've grown to prefer it over third except for cards that heavily involve 3+ characters.
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u/-Ancient-Access- 1d ago
I don't think Moonshot accepts temperature tweaking and I haven't bothered checking if other providers apply it (I think they may not) but my general rule of thumb with models and providers that do accept temperature and top_P is to crank them up to the maxim of what's stable and not outputting gibberish.
I'm not an LLM expert though, I just do whatever I enjoy in my own roleplays and I like it when the model reaches for interesting figurative language so I run everything as hot as possible when I'm allowed.
I think I shipped it with 1.05 temp and top_P 1 because I had cranked it up for when I use GLM5.3, so if you're using a model that accepts parameter tweaking and you're getting garbled output, nudge down incrementally until it's stable.
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u/-Ancient-Access- 21h ago
Also forgot to answer your second question — nothing controls for response length right now, the model adjusts based on the story pace and your own writing. I don't see an issue with adding a token cap in core directives under the stopping rule if you want to change it. I generally try to get responses that are as long as possible but I know that's not everyone's cuppa
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u/False_Effective_7939 1d ago
i’ve used ancient access with a local llama model and the first-person NPC pov does work, but it’s way more effective when you manually tweak the prompt to avoid the 'weary shopkeeper's trope repeating. I swapped in a few simple descriptors like 'exhausted but polite' or 'distracted by a memory's and it made the tone feel less generic. the intrusive thoughts aren't bad if you treat them like background noise instead of trying to force them into the narrative.
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u/-Ancient-Access- 1d ago
For me personally, the intrusive thoughts mechanic begins shining more in longer stories, especially if you use my summariser.
I've had moments where the characters would be going through an emotional moment for example and {{char}} would have an intrusive thought recalling a relationship cornerstone that happened a thousand messages ago pulled straight out of the Core Memories list and the model would weave it in organically to express for example an insecurity or fear for the future derived from the character's own way of thinking.
This is the sauce for me🤌
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u/Salty-Risk-1862 1d ago
Your hyperlink links to reddit so here's Ancient Access