The Settings Tab

The Celestial Vault has its own dedicated settings tab alongside Obsidian's standard settings. This is your single panel for everything Celestial-specific: identity, widget, banners, updates, atmosphere, shortcuts, sharing.

How To Open It

1. Click the gear icon in the bottom-left of Obsidian (or Cmd/Ctrl + ,)
2. In the left sidebar of Settings, find "Celestial Plugin"
3. Click it

You're in. (There's also a Command Palette shortcut: "Open Celestial Plugin settings" jumps straight there.)

What You'll See — Top To Bottom

1. Four Tutorial Cards (top)

The top of the settings panel shows four quick-link cards:

• 🎬 The Celestial Vault tutorial — YouTube tour of the flagship-specific features
• 🌿 The Kepano vault philosophy — deep dive on the categorical philosophy
• ⏳ Time Garden journaling basics — tour of the temporal journaling system
• 📖 Celestial Vault documentation — these docs

These are the same cards shown at the end of The Welcome Experience. Settings keeps them around in case you want to revisit later.

2. Identity

Two fields:

• Nickname — the name shown in the empty-tab greeting
• Greeting prefix — how the greeting opens (Hello, Hi, Heya, etc.)

Together these produce *<Greeting>. <Name>.* on the empty tab.

(More: Identity & Greeting.)

3. Journal Widget

Nine controls for the journal widget in your sidebar:

• Vault mode image — dropdown of every image in the Widget Images folder; the background when you're not in a journal note
• Streak background overlay — dropdown for the image that shows while you're in a journal note
• Counter mode — toggle between "Streak" (consecutive days) and "Total" (lifetime days)
• Counter icon — any Lucide icon name (default: star)
• Streak completes when: what marks a day complete. Naming your day (the default), writing anything in today's daily note, reaching a word goal, creating any note, creating a unique note, or manual (a Complete today button in the streak calendar)
• Word goal: the word count that completes the day when the word-goal mode is selected
• Open history file: opens Time Garden/Streak History.md, the plain-text record of your completed days. Hand-editable; the widget follows
• Open Journal Widget — manually open the widget (in case it's hidden)
• Reset onboarding — replays the welcome flow + first-launch shimmer

Want your own widget art? Drop any AVIF, GIF, PNG, or WEBP into the Widget Images folder (one click away via Banners & images below) and it appears in both dropdowns.

4. Journaling & Hotkeys

One real setting, then four signposts. The setting:

• On startup, open: what greets you when Obsidian launches. Pick last session's notes (the default: everything reopens where you left it), today's daily note (opened, or created on the spot, every launch), or empty tab (a clean slate with the Celestial scene and launch animation)

Then four one-click buttons that jump you to the settings panels Celestial builds on:

• Journaling logic → opens the Journals plugin settings, where folder layout, filename and date formats, note templates, and calendar behavior live
• New note location → opens the Unique note creator options (folder, filename format, template), so it's obvious where the notes you make with the new-note shortcut (⌥⇧N) land, and how to change that
• App hotkeys → opens Obsidian's core Hotkeys settings for rebinding any Obsidian command
• Time Garden AI → opens the Time Garden plugin settings, home of AI models, prompts, and Wheel of Life dimensions

The buttons are signposts, so you never have to remember which plugin owns what.

5. Banners & Images

One row per image surface, each with instructions and (on desktop) an Open folder button that opens the right folder in your system file manager:

• Daily banners — one image per weekday, named MondayBanner through SundayBanner
• Monthly banners — twelve images, MonthlyBanner01 through MonthlyBanner12
• Yearly banner — a single YearlyBanner image
• Widget images — the free-for-all folder feeding the Journal Widget dropdowns

Plus one slider:

• Banner fade — the vault-wide default for how strongly banners melt into the page (-100 = fully melted, 0 = hard edge). Notes with their own banner-fade keep it.

(Full guide to replacing banner art: Custom Banners.)

6. Migration

A single button (desktop only; it uses the OS folder picker):

• Import an existing vault — opens a folder picker, then copies your old vault (notes, images, PDFs, canvas files, audio, and every other attachment, folder structure preserved) into /old vault/<name>/. Nothing already in your vault is ever overwritten, and a summary reports exactly what was imported. If the import looks like a Time Garden vault, you're offered a one-click conversion.

(Full guide: Importing Your Old Vault.)

7. Updates

Three rows that keep your vault current:

• Celestial Vault v… — shows your installed version, with a Check for updates button
• Automatic update checks — the quiet once-a-day check. Nothing ever installs without asking you first
• Install update from file — offline fallback for update packs downloaded from the store

(Full guide: Keeping Your Vault Up To Date.)

8. Perks

A small thank-you for owning the vault:

• Time Garden source snippets, free: the discount code U1NZU2MG makes the Time Garden source code snippets on timegarden.store free for Celestial owners. They're the Templater scripts, dataviews, and CSS that power the journaling layer, sold individually there; the code brings them home at no cost.

9. Sharing & Feedback

Two controls for the periodic sharing popup:

• Show occasional sharing prompts — the on/off switch
• Sharing prompt frequency — every 3rd, 5th, or 10th launch

10. Empty Tab & Launch Animation

Every layer of the empty-tab scene gets its own switch, plus the launch intro:

• Launch animation: the once-per-launch metamorphosis on your first empty tab (a purple black hole breathes in, the Celestial star dives into it, and the gradient black hole is born). Off skips straight to the finished scene
• Replay launch animation: watch the metamorphosis again right now (also available from the Command Palette as "Replay intro animation")
• Black hole: the animated black hole, its glow, and the soft shadow pool that keeps the greeting readable
• Infalling stardust: pixel grains spiralling into the event horizon along the accretion plane
• Stars & constellations: the twinkling starfield scattered across the empty-tab sky
• Action buttons: the command-panel and go-to-file pills beneath the greeting

Every toggle live-applies: flip one and any open empty tab rebuilds instantly, no reload.

11. Polish & Atmosphere

The visual / experiential layer, plus Note Lock's configuration:

• Theme appearance: a one-click jump to the Celestial theme's Style Settings catalog (colors, fonts, sidebars, tabs, headings, tables, and hundreds more controls). The vault ships pre-calibrated; everything there is optional fine-tuning. (Full guide: The Celestial Theme.)
• Animations (master switch): gates all four veil animations, the widget burst, the launch intro, and the black hole click pulse
• Animation speed — fast, normal, or slow pacing for the veils
• Dynamic shortcut status bar — shows the context-aware shortcut bar at the bottom (desktop only)
• Note Lock — enables the password gate on locked notes
• Note Lock password — set or replace your password (stored only as a hash, never as plain text)
• Locked category — which category page marks a note as locked (default: Locked)
• Show journal frontmatter — one toggle to peek at the hidden properties on journal notes (banner crops, ratings, journal plumbing) and hide them again. It automatically matches Obsidian's "Properties in document" mode, so you never have to touch CSS snippets

(More: Atmosphere & Polish Toggles.)

12. Shortcut Bindings

A list of 12 capturable rows, one per rebindable action (desktop only; the shortcut layer assumes a physical keyboard).

Each row shows:

• The action's name (e.g., "Open today's daily")
• The current key combo (e.g., ⌥⇧D)
• A small revert icon

Click the binding to capture a new key. Click revert to restore that one row's default. Above the list:

• Reset all bindings to defaults — restores every default

(Full guide: Customizing Shortcuts.)

How Changes Take Effect

What's Not In This Tab

A few related settings live in other tabs of Obsidian Settings:

• AI models, AI prompts, Wheel of Life dimensions, chunking → in the Time Garden Plugin tab (because they're TG-side, not Celestial-side)
• Journal folders, date formats, calendar behavior → in the Journals plugin tab
• CSS snippets, themes → in the Appearance tab
• Celestial theme customization (colors, fonts, layout) → in the Style Settings tab, one click away via the Theme appearance button in Polish & atmosphere
• Plugin enable/disable → in the Community Plugins tab
• Hotkeys for non-shortcut-bar commands → in the Hotkeys tab

The first two and the last one are one click away via the Journaling & hotkeys section described above; no hunting through the settings sidebar.

Backing Up Your Settings

If you want to save your specific settings configuration (e.g., before updating) — you can copy the file:

.obsidian/plugins/celestial-plugin/data.json

This contains every setting in the Celestial tab. Save it somewhere safe. To restore: paste it back, reload Obsidian.

(Your streak history is not in this file: since v2.1.0 it lives in a regular note, Time Garden/Streak History.md, so any backup of your notes already covers it.)

Up Next

• Identity & Greeting — the nickname and greeting in detail
• Customizing Shortcuts — the 12-row shortcut binder
• Atmosphere & Polish Toggles — fine-tuning the visual layer
• The Celestial Theme: the full Style Settings catalog behind the Theme appearance button