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Downloading models

NobodyWho needs a model file to do anything useful. Model paths are accepted everywhere a model is loaded — NobodyWhoChat.create(), NobodyWhoModel.create(), NobodyWhoEncoder.create(), and so on — and all of them accept the same set of formats.

Supported model path formats​

  • Local file path: "./model.gguf", "C:/models/model.gguf", etc.
  • Godot paths: "res://models/model.gguf" (shipped with your game) or "user://models/model.gguf" (writable per-user directory). NobodyWho resolves these to real filesystem paths for you.
  • Hugging Face repos: "hf://owner/repo" — a model from Hugging Face, downloaded and cached on first use. Examples:
    • "hf://NobodyWho/Qwen_Qwen3-0.6B-GGUF" (chat, GGUF)
    • "hf://onnx-community/whisper-base" (speech to text, ONNX)
  • llama.cpp-style references: "owner/repo:quantization" — no prefix, and the repo name must end in -GGUF, which is how the model file is worked out. "ggml-org/gemma-3-1b-it-GGUF:Q8_0" fetches gemma-3-1b-it-Q8_0.gguf. Both the -GGUF suffix and the quantization are required; without them the string is read as a local path. Unlike llama.cpp, NobodyWho fails with an error when the quantization isn't in the repo instead of taking the first file it finds.
  • "auto": pick a chat model that fits the machine's available memory.
var chat = await NobodyWhoChat.create("hf://NobodyWho/Qwen_Qwen3-0.6B-GGUF", {})

Downloads go to a per-user cache directory: $XDG_CACHE_HOME/nobodywho/models on Linux, the equivalent ~/.cache location on macOS, and %LOCALAPPDATA%\nobodywho\models on Windows. The cache survives restarts, so each model is downloaded once. If you ship a model inside your game with res://, nothing is ever downloaded.

Downloading a gated model​

Some Hugging Face repositories require accepting a license. After accepting it on the model page, export a Hugging Face access token as HF_TOKEN in the environment before starting your game:

export HF_TOKEN=hf_...

Inspecting the model cache​

The cache mirrors the Hugging Face repo layout, so you can look around it with any file browser:

~/.cache/nobodywho/models/
└── NobodyWho/
    └── Qwen_Qwen3-0.6B-GGUF/
        └── Qwen_Qwen3-0.6B-Q4_K_M.gguf

Deleting a folder makes NobodyWho re-download it on next use.