How events flow
What happens between a viewer tapping a gift and your model reacting, and which piece is responsible when it does not.
Understanding the path is what turns "it does not work" into "the third step is failing".
The path
TikTok LIVE room
A viewer sends a gift, taps like, follows, shares or comments.
The bridge
A background process Vfinity starts, or a connector you already run.
Vfinity
Matches the event against your enabled mappings, and checks each one's threshold, rate limit and count mode.
VTube Studio
Presses a hotkey, moves the model, or switches a VFX preset.
port 8001
The overlay server
Pushes chat lines, alerts, counters and thrown items to every OBS browser source.
127.0.0.1:21424
Step by step
A viewer sends a gift
TikTok's servers know about it immediately. Nothing on your machine does yet.
The bridge picks it up
Vfinity's built-in bridge is a background process watching your room. It forwards gifts, likes, follows, shares, comments, the viewer count, subscriptions, joins, emotes and treasure boxes.
If you chose a custom connector instead, this is where TikFinity or your own tool sits, and Vfinity is reading from it rather than from TikTok directly.
Vfinity matches it against your rules
Every enabled mapping on the Events tab is checked. A match still has to clear its threshold, its rate limit and its count mode before anything runs.
This is what the Triggers Fired counter on the Dashboard measures. It counts matches, not results.
The action goes out
A matched rule sends a request to VTube Studio over the plugin API on port 8001: press this hotkey, move the model here, switch to this preset.
Throwing is a separate path. It does not go through event mappings at all. A gift that should throw is turned into a physics object and broadcast to whichever OBS browser source is showing the throwing scene.
OBS draws it
The overlay server on port 21424 pushes to every connected browser source. Chat lines, alerts, counters, goals and thrown items all arrive this way.
Combos
TikTok does not send a ten-gift combo as ten events. It streams partial updates while the viewer is still tapping, then a final event with the total.
Vfinity acts on the final count and ignores the in-progress updates. That is why a combo fires your mapping once with the right number rather than ten times with wrong ones, and it is why Quantity Behavior has a meaningful "xN" to work with.
Where it breaks, and how to tell
| Symptom | Failing step |
|---|---|
| Event log stays empty on a busy stream | The bridge. Wrong username, or not live |
| Events appear but Triggers Fired does not move | The rule. Wrong gift, threshold not met, rate limit, or the mapping is off |
| Triggers Fired moves, model does not | VTube Studio. Not authenticated, or the hotkey does nothing |
| Model reacts, viewers see nothing | Only if the reaction was a throw. OBS has no browser source, or it is behind the model |
| Overlays blank | The widget is off, the port changed, or Vfinity is closed |
Working down that table is faster than changing settings at random.
What runs where
Everything except the TikTok connection itself runs on your machine. The overlay server binds to 127.0.0.1 and refuses non-local origins. VTube Studio is local. The trigger API connects to a server you run.