Alert style, brand and variations

What each alert type says, whether it fires at all, and whether it waits for your approval is set per event type, and it is documented in Alerts. This guide is about the look: the presets, the brand appearance, the way those two resolve against a single type’s overrides, and the variations that let one event type say more than one thing.

Getting the alert box into your scene in the first place is Get alerts on stream.

Where the look is edited

Everything here lives on the Alerts tab of Alerts & Overlays, in two places.

The Customize ▾ panel in the card head holds the account wide settings: the style preset picker, the Customize style button that opens the Brand look editor, approval mode, and Gift bomb behavior.

A row’s Edit button opens one editor for that type, in four sections: Content, Presentation, Conditions and Variations. The per type look override sits inside Presentation, behind a Customize this type checkbox. Variations get their own section.

For the list of event types themselves, and the platform caveats on them, see Alerts.

The three style presets

A preset is your default look, and picking one is the fastest way to change every alert at once. The picker’s own line for it is Pick your default alert look. Customize any type below.

Preset	Its own description	Text size	Accent treatment	Corner radius
Polished	Clean card, accent glow, smooth slide-in.	M	Glow	14
Bold	Big type, accent wash, bounce, confetti on big moments.	XL	Wash	10
Minimal	Understated fade, restrained type, thin accent line.	S	Underline	6

Two things are true of all three. Bold is the only one with confetti, and even Bold only bursts on a high value event: a tip, a cheer, a raid, a gifted sub, a gift bomb or a Super Chat. A plain follow never gets particles, on any preset.

And all three tint the card by category rather than painting everything one colour. Follows and raids, subs and members, tips and bits, and everything else each carry their own accent, so you can tell what happened from the corner of your eye.

The Brand look

Customize style opens the Brand look editor, the account wide layer under every type. Its own summary of itself:

Set the look every alert shares. Pick a preset above as a starting point, then adjust colors, motion, font, size and layout.

What is in it:

• Keep per-category colors, on by default, and a brand accent colour beside it. See the note on how those two interact below.
• Card background with an opacity, and a custom text colour, each behind its own checkbox.
• Entrance and Exit animation: none, fade, slide, pop, wipe or bounce.
• Font, from a catalogue of around fifty faces.
• Size, as S, M, L or XL, plus a font size mode: Auto scales the text with the browser source and never drops below this size. Fixed keeps it at this size however large the source is. Leave the number blank to scale freely.
• Treatment: Glow, Wash, Underline or None.
• Position, one of seven: top, bottom, centre, and the four corners.
• Corner radius in pixels, 0 to 48.

This editor saves as you go, and it says so: Leave a control at its default to inherit your preset. Changes apply live to the preview and any OBS source. The per type editor is the one with a Save button, and its footer changes to match.

1. Pick a preset first. It is the starting point, not the finish.

2. Open Customize style and adjust only what you actually want different. Every control you leave alone keeps inheriting, which is what makes a later preset change still mean something.

3. Watch the preview. It resolves the same three layers the real overlay does, so what it shows is what plays.

Picking a different preset saves the preset choice and pre fills this editor with that preset’s values, so you can see where you are starting from. It does not by itself overwrite the brand look you had saved. The next edit you make in the editor does save what the editor is showing, so treat a preset change as a decision to start again rather than as a preview.

Three layers, and which one wins

An alert’s final appearance is resolved from three layers, in this order:

1. The preset’s defaults. The bottom layer, and never empty.
2. Your Brand look. The account wide layer, over the preset.
3. The type’s own override. The Customize this type editor on one row, over both.

The important part is that this happens one control at a time, not wholesale. If your Brand look sets a font and nothing else, that font applies and every other control still comes from the preset. If your Tip alert overrides the size only, its size is yours and its font is still your brand’s. A later layer wins for the controls it actually sets, and only those.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• An empty override inherits. Unticking Customize this type and saving the row clears that type’s override outright, so it goes back to following your brand look. It does not preserve a hidden copy.
• A value the engine cannot use falls through instead of breaking. If a stored setting is not one the current version understands, the layer below supplies that control rather than the alert rendering wrong.

The accent is the one exception, and it is deliberate. By default the per category colour wins over your brand accent, because that is what makes a tip look different from a follow at a glance. Your brand accent takes over only when you untick Keep per-category colors and set a valid colour. Both are true in the preview as well as on stream.

One layout detail: the per type Customize this type editor deliberately has no entrance or exit selects, because those live in the row’s own Presentation section, where the exit select’s Theme default option means “inherit”.

Variations

A variation lets one event type say more than one thing. Each one carries its own message, and can carry its own condition, image, sound and animation. Each asset field takes a pasted URL or a Choose from library pick out of your media library, which is covered in Widgets, media and themes. They live in the Variations section of a row’s editor, and the section states its own rules:

Optional. Each variation can carry a condition (like a minimum amount) plus its own image/sound; the most specific matching condition wins. Variations without a condition are picked at random.

Test uses a sample event, so conditions apply to it too.

The conditions on offer

The dropdown is scoped to the type you are editing, so a follow offers only the two that could ever apply to it while a resub offers the sub specific ones:

Condition	What it needs
Always (random)	nothing, this is the condition less pool
When amount is at least…	an amount
When amount is exactly…	an amount
When months subscribed is at least…	a whole number
When months subscribed is exactly…	a whole number
When the sub tier is…	a tier, suggested as Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 or Prime
On a gift of at least N subs	a whole number
When it's a recurring tip	nothing
When it's the largest tip this stream	nothing
Randomly (chance %)	a chance from 1 to 100

Amounts are typed in ordinary currency, so 10 means ten dollars, not ten cents. On a cheer that number is converted at one bit to one cent, so a condition of 5 on a bits alert matches a cheer of 500 bits and up. The separate Minimum amount field on the same editor has its own quirk, covered in the caution on Alerts.

Which variation actually plays

At most one variation plays per event, chosen like this:

1. Exact matches first. An exact amount, an exact month count, or a tier match. The first one in your list that matches wins.

2. Then thresholds, largest first. Among every “at least” variation that qualifies, the biggest threshold wins. A $50 tip with variations at 10 and at 25 plays the 25 one. A tie keeps the earlier one in your list.

3. Then the yes or no conditions, recurring tip and largest tip this stream, in list order.

4. Then the chance rolls. Each Randomly (chance %) variation rolls in list order, and the first successful roll wins.

5. Then the condition less pool, picked at random, which is also where a failed chance roll lands.

6. Nothing matched? The alert’s own base message plays. A variation is never a requirement.

Order your list the way you would read it, most specific at the top, and it will behave the way it reads.

A variation whose stored condition is not one this type offers renders as Always (random), and saving the row drops that condition. That is the honest outcome rather than a silent one: the engine already treats a condition it does not recognise as never matching, so a variation like that would have sat there never firing.

Each variation also has an Animation select whose first option is Default, meaning it uses whatever the alert itself uses. Set it only when you want that one variation to arrive differently.

Gift bomb behavior

A community gift, several subs at once, could reasonably announce itself in three ways, so the choice is yours. The select lives in the Customize ▾ panel and its options are:

• One Gift Bomb alert
• Gift Bomb alert plus one per recipient
• One alert per recipient

The default is the first one, a single combined alert. The full help under the select:

Combined: one Gift Bomb alert per bulk gift. Both: a Gift Bomb alert plus one alert per recipient. Individual: one alert per recipient. A bulk gift uses your Gift Bomb alert, so keep that alert enabled and set up.

And the reason the second and third options cannot always be honoured, in the pane’s own words:

How a community gift (several subs at once) shows on stream. Twitch does not name the recipients of a gift bomb, so per-recipient falls back to a single alert with the count.

Switching the Gift Bomb alert off silences bulk gifts

On the default setting, a bulk gift does not fire your Gifted subscription alert several times. It fires your Gift Bomb alert once, with the count.

So if you turn the Gift Bomb type off, expecting the individual gift alerts to carry the moment instead, the largest single act of support anyone can make on your channel arrives in silence. Keep that type enabled and set up, or pick One alert per recipient and accept that Twitch may still collapse it back to one alert with a count, because it does not always name who received them.