The Welcome Experience

The first time you open the Celestial Vault, an animated overlay greets you. This is the Celestial welcome flow — the bespoke onboarding that walks you from "I just unzipped this" to "I have a working vault" in a few minutes.

What You See First

The vault content sits behind a soft, semi-opaque overlay. The center holds:

• A constellation flourish (animated stars)
• The greeting "✦ Welcome to Celestial ✦"
• A short message about the vault
• A Begin button

Click Begin to continue.

Step-By-Step

1. Greeting

The opening card. No input needed. A quiet line beneath the button links to the License Terms (clicking it shows the full text right in the overlay); continuing past this step counts as agreeing to them. Hit Begin.

2. License Entry

Paste your license key. (Your order confirmation email links to the Polar customer portal, where you can view and copy the key.)

The vault validates against the license server and writes the key to two places:

• The Celestial plugin's settings (unlocking the vault UX)
• The Time Garden plugin's settings (unlocking Eternal AI)

If you've previously purchased Time Garden Eternal and your existing key is still valid, the welcome flow detects this and skips the license step automatically.

3. Nickname

The welcome asks for a nickname. Use whatever you'd like to be called — your first name, an alias, an alter ego. It appears in:

• The empty-tab greeting (*Hello. <YourName>.*)
• Some settings labels
• A few interface accents

You can change it later in the settings tab.

4. Greeting Prefix

Pair the nickname with a salutation. The default is Hello, but you can pick whatever fits — Hi, Hej, Bonjour, G'day, Heya friend. The empty tab will display:

*<Greeting>. <Name>.*

5. Import Your Old Vault (Optional)

If you have an existing Obsidian vault and want your notes to come along, click Import. An OS folder picker opens. Pick the root of your old vault, hit OK, and Celestial recursively copies:

• All .md files
• All embedded images
• The contents of the old vault's Templates/ folder

Everything lands in /old vault/<name>/ inside Celestial. (See Importing Your Old Vault for the full guide.)

If the imported folder looks like an original Time Garden vault, you're offered a one-click conversion right after welcome finishes: your journal notes move into the Celestial tree with banners, theming, and charts intact. (See Coming From Time Garden.)

You can skip this and run it later from the settings tab instead. On mobile, welcome skips this step automatically; there's no folder picker on a phone.

6. The Three Tutorial Cards

Three quick links sit on this screen:

• 🎬 Celestial walkthrough — a video tour of the flagship-specific features
• 🎬 Kepano-style notes — a deep-dive on the categorical philosophy
• 🎬 Time Garden — a video tour of the temporal journaling system

Plus a link to these docs for everything else.

Watch them when you have time. They're not required for the vault to work.

7. Done

A final confirmation, then the welcome closes.

What Happens Next

The welcome dismisses, and the vault calibrates itself to your display before anything else. Celestial measures your window's aspect ratio and applies the matching reference layout:

• Wide displays (16:9-class, most external monitors): the wide layout, with sidebar proportions tuned for that format plus a higher default zoom, so the vault reads comfortably at monitor distance
• Everything else (the typical MacBook display, for instance): the standard layout at stock zoom

Both layouts were calibrated by hand against reference setups (Calendar, local graph, and Journal Widget stacked in the left sidebar, with the file explorer one tab away from the calendar), so the vault arrives looking the way it was designed to on your screen, with no pane-dragging needed. It's a starting point, not a constraint: rearrange anything you like afterwards and Obsidian remembers your arrangement.

Then the empty tab appears with your personalized greeting. Three seconds later, a small notice appears in the top-right:

"Start your journal: press ⌥⇧D for today's daily note."

(Alt + Shift + D on Windows / Linux.)

The daily-note shortcut in the bottom-left status bar shimmers gold for ~6.5 seconds — a one-shot nudge for your first daily note. After it fades, you're alone with the vault.

If You Want To Re-Run Welcome

You can reset the welcome flow at any time:

1. Open Settings → Celestial Plugin
2. Scroll to the Journal Widget section
3. Click Reset onboarding

The celestialWelcomeComplete flag clears. The next time you reload Obsidian, welcome runs again.

(Useful if you want to test a different nickname, change your greeting prefix from the welcome interface instead of settings, or just relive the flourish.)

License Already Active?

If you re-open Celestial later — having already gone through welcome once — the welcome flow doesn't fire. You go straight to the empty tab.

If you ever lose your license key, you can retrieve it from the Polar customer portal (sign in with your purchase email, Polar sends you a one-time code). To manage active devices (you get 3 device slots with your license), the same portal lets you remove old devices to free a slot.

Purchased before July 2026? Your license lives in the Lemon Squeezy orders page instead, for both key retrieval and device management.

Up Next

• Importing Your Old Vault — the deeper import walkthrough
• The Empty-Tab Atmosphere — what awaits you after welcome
• License Unification & Your 3 Devices — how the one-key system works