Consistent Results: How to Use the Seed Command

Midjourney offers the ability to create complex and visually stunning images with just a few keystrokes. However, if you want more consistency in your projects, Midjourney’s default settings, which allow for quick-and-easy results, are more of a problem.

Look at the results of this prompt:

/imagine a black cat on a sofa

Pretty cool for accomplishing that with just a basic description, right? Now let’s just run the same prompt again:

/imagine a black cat on a sofa

Awesome. But completely different cats and sofas!

The reason for this: under the hood Midjourney uses randomness to generate your images. Think of it like this: by default, Midjourney selects a random seed value in each generation process that defines the type of noise pattern Midjourney uses to generate the image you want. This seed value is simply a number used to introduce a random but consistent element of “noise” into the process.

The number itself is not of particular importance, since it is used to make the results random. However, it does mean that Midjourney will use a different number at each prompt, which will produce different results unless you define a specific seed value. This is where the “seed command” comes in.

Seed Command to the Rescue

By using the seed command, we can force Midjourney to use a specific starting point for our prompt, so that if we use the same seed with the same prompt, we will get the same results.

To set the seed value, we use the “seed” parameter and add a random number:

/imagine a black cat on a sofa --seed 1234

same seed + same prompt = same results

Finding the Seed Value

Pretty cool. But what if you didn’t specify the starting value, but want to revise an image where you left off? Let’s go back to our first cat images

Since we didn’t specify a starting value with the “seed” command, Midjourney just took a random seed value and started from there. So what we do is ask the Midjourney bot for the seed value it used — it’s that simple. We scroll down to the Midjourney bot message that contains this image grid, click on the message’s reaction button, and then click on the envelope icon. Ta-da! (If you do not find the envelope in the reaction menu immediately, try typing “envelope” in the search bar within the reaction menu)

You’ll immediately get a direct message from the Midjourney Bot with the desired information:

DM from the Midjourney Bot showing Job ID & seed value

Alright, our seed value has been 4031079018. Now if we use this prompt:

/imagine a black cat on a sofa --seed 4031079018

We will get the same image we created before.