Place the alert widget
- Open Overlays in your dashboard.Alerts needs Twitch connected before it shows real events. You can design and time everything first - the editor plays sample alerts on a loop.
- Open a scene, or make one with New scene.
- In the left rail, stay on the Add tab and find the Alerts & Events group.
- Click Alerts.It lands at 720 x 320 and will not go below 260 x 140.
- Drag it where you want it on the canvas.The box is the room an alert is allowed to take, not a box that gets painted. Each alert shrinks to its own content and centres inside the box.
- Set the seconds, the skin and the motion in the settings sidebar on the right.
What each event needs from Twitch
Almost every alert type rides on a Twitch subscription, and most of those need a permission you opt into under Connections. The settings sidebar shows a banner when Followers, Subscribers or Bits is missing. The other two on this list it does not check for, so grant those yourself.
- Follows - the Followers permission.
- Subs, resubs and gifted subs - the Subscribers permission.
- Cheers - the Bits permission.
- Raids - nothing at all. Incoming raids need no permission.
- Channel point redemptions - the Channel points permission.
- Hype trains - the Hype trains permission. The alert fires when the train ends, carrying the level it reached.
- Tips - not a Twitch permission. Connect Streamlabs or StreamElements instead.
Skins
Skin sits under Style. Five of the six lay out the same four things - the art, the name, the line and the message - and differ in the frame around them. Minimal line is the exception, and puts the lot on a single line.
- Clean - the default. A round tile for the art, no box behind the text.
- Notification card - a toast: tinted background, rounded corners, a thick accent bar down the left edge.
- Achievement - a game unlock ribbon, with a hexagonal art tile and the event name in small uppercase type above the line.
- Retro game - a hard-edged arcade box with a solid border. The headline goes uppercase.
- Ticket - a stub, with a dashed perforation between the art and the words.
- Minimal line - one line of type and nothing else.
How long an alert stays
Seconds on screen runs from 3 to 20 and starts at 6.
Only one alert is ever on screen. The rest wait in a queue and play in the order they happened, with a half-second gap between them. Raising the seconds on a busy channel makes the queue longer, not the alerts louder - four follows, a cheer and a raid at 20 seconds each is over two minutes of backlog.
Motion
- Slide up - the default. Rises into place and drops back out.
- Slide in - arrives from the left.
- Pop - scales up from 85 per cent.
- Fade - opacity only, no movement.
Each one runs for 360 ms in and out. If the machine running the browser source asks for reduced motion, Slide up, Slide in and Pop drop the movement and fade instead.
Gift bombs
Group gift bombs into one alert sits under Behaviour and is on by default. A gift bomb reaches pulz as one event carrying the total, so ten gifted subs fire one alert with %amount% of 10 - not ten alerts in a row burying everything behind them.
An anonymous gifter has no name to show, so the alert reads Anonymous. The same goes for an anonymous cheer.
Showing the viewer's message
Show the viewer's message is under Behaviour and is on. When an event carries a message, it is drawn in quotes under the line.
Fire a test alert
- Open Stream Control in your dashboard.
- In the Actions card, pick an event under Alert type.
- Click Test alert.The test reaches every open source carrying your overlay key. The scene URL pulz hands you in the editor already has it on the end as &k=.
A test alert jumps to the front of the queue rather than interrupting whatever is mid-animation, so it plays the moment the current alert finishes.
FAQ
Can two alerts show at once?
No. One plays, the rest queue, and there is a half-second gap between them.
Do I need one browser source per alert type?
No. One Alerts widget covers all nine event types, and one scene covers your whole overlay in one browser source.
Can I put two Alerts widgets on one scene?
You can, but both fire for the same events, so you get every alert twice. If you want them in two places - say cheers bottom left and subs centre - turn the events you do not want off in each widget's per-event settings.
Why did an alert not fire?
Work down this list: that event is switched off in Per-event settings; its Only above number is higher than the event's; the Twitch permission for it was never granted; it happened in the first few seconds after the source opened; or it was an ad break, which the Alerts widget never draws.
Where do I change what an alert says?
In the same widget, under Events. See Alert text and tokens.