AstralSkies
Animated astronomical skies, Sun and Moon, eclipses, meteors and blood Moons. Custom Deep North auroras with colour palettes, independent cloud layers, constellation guides and saved F8 presets. EN/FR/RU/ZH.Astral Skies — Zephyrfit
Give your Valheim nights a sky to explore: catalogue stars, moving planets, a coherent Sun and Moon, eclipses, a layered Milky Way and flowing northern lights. Press F8 to make the sky your own.
Explore the sky
- Watch Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn among catalogue stars, with adjustable brightness, size, colour emphasis and gentle stellar scintillation.
- Identify 178 stars by aiming at an object for a configurable delay. Follow fourteen constellation and asterism guides, plus a separate Summer Triangle.
- Shape the Milky Way with colour palettes, dark lanes, width, radiance and optional decorative particles. Find the diffuse glows of Andromeda and the Pleiades.
- Enjoy cosmetic meteors and periodic meteor showers.
- Follow lunar phases and a coherent Sun/Moon cycle, with adjustable apparent sizes and optional solar and lunar eclipses.
- Keep the current Sun or choose optional Astrophotography and NASA/SDO surfaces with subtle adjustable detail and a warm edge. Astrophotography uses a visible-light HMI observation; NASA/SDO uses AIA 171 imagery in false colour. These fixed decorative images are most useful on enlarged Suns.
- Set solar disc brightness and glare independently. Adjust lunar luminosity from 0 to 10, and refine each planet's brightness and colour emphasis.
- See copper blood Moons during nighttime raids, with personal controls for their appearance and optional native storm wind and waves for sailing.
Deep North auroras
Open F8 → Details → Deep North to customise the northern lights locally in that biome. Native weather and time still determine when auroras appear.
- Vanilla is selected by default and follows the game's animated auroras.
- Boreal curtains and Polar arcs provide flowing forms and colour palettes inspired by real auroras. Adjust their width, height and band density.
- Set intensity, luminosity, hue and saturation. Lower luminosity softens dazzling highlights; higher values strengthen the glow.
- Choose a solid colour or a gradient of up to three RGB colours. Click a colour square to open its palette, select a swatch or refine hue, saturation and value, then confirm for colour 1, 2 or 3. Hexadecimal entry is also available. Cancel keeps the current colour. Gradients follow the aurora pattern and animation; the aurora's hue and saturation controls still apply to the chosen colours.
- Each aurora design remembers its own settings, including after restarting. Saving a sky favourite includes every design and the selected design. Restore Vanilla aurora returns to the native appearance while keeping the other designs' saved choices.
Your sky, your controls
F8 opens with Stellar observation, followed by Sky, Details and Interface. Details groups graphics quality, Sun/Moons, Milky Way/Galaxies, Stars/Planets, Sky → Day/Night/Horizon and Deep North into separate pages.
- Control high clouds and horizon clouds separately in F8 → Sky. Keep either layer visible while hiding the other. A separate toggle controls the sky tree; native rain, weather and ground fog remain active.
- Choose from three grouped sky presets: Realistic from Rage Clan, Immersive from BETATEST, or Panorama. Keep two independent personal named favourites for your own skies. Export a visual preset to a local JSON, preview its changes and confirm an import from F8 → Sky. Panorama hides both cloud layers; use the individual cloud controls for another combination.
- Select one of seven quality levels, from 8 segments/10 Hz to 40 segments/90 Hz. Frequency is a maximum sky update target, not guaranteed game FPS. Moon definition reaches 2048 px; higher levels refine star halos.
- Use independent advanced controls for halo segments, update cadence, lunar definition and galaxy mesh detail in F8 → Details → Graphics quality. Stars and planets have separate light-profile detail; the Milky Way and Andromeda/Pleiades have separate procedural mesh detail. These controls refine light shapes and smoothness; they do not add photographic surfaces to unresolved stars or planets. Auto follows your chosen profile or manual dimensions. Apply quality to activate the selection. The fallback cube definition affects the static fallback renderer.
- Run an optional local performance capture on the graphics quality page and export its JSON report. Captures show CPU callbacks and frame intervals; GPU time is unavailable. Nothing is sent automatically.
- Pick Boreal Night, Nordic Bronze or Blood Moon as the interface theme. Drag the title to move F8 and use its size slider from 50% to 160%. Release the slider to resize. F8 or Escape closes it, including while editing a field. The cursor can stay confined to Valheim while F8 is open. Alt-Tab remains available; switching windows cancels drags and unconfirmed colour drafts while leaving the panel open.
- English, French, Russian and Simplified Chinese follow Valheim's language. Local settings and favourites are saved in your profile.
- Choose Manual, While aiming or While seated guides in F8 → Stellar observation. Adjust identification/highlight delays, aim tolerance, release hold and fade, marker size and altitude/azimuth captions. Seated mode follows the character's native sitting state.
- Refine star cores, decorative halos and planet halos independently. Restore one visual module from the advanced sharing/reset panel when desired.
- Choose Same sky everywhere for fixed celestial paths across the map, or Follow my position for a sky linked to your position in Valheim: a low northern Sun and a higher southern Sun, with smooth transitions and an optional longer northern stellar twilight. This is an artistic map model. It requires direct GPU stars and coherent Sun/Moon; the fixed reference remains available. The server can require the fixed model while your personal choice stays saved. World time, lunar phases, weather and shared events keep their normal authority.
Events and shared skies
Enable the console and use your normal native devcommands permission. Shared
commands also require the server's admin authorization. Use the same mod version
on the server and participating clients for shared events.
| Phenomenon | Local visual preview | Shared server event |
|---|---|---|
| Blood Moon at night | as_event blood 60 |
as_event_global blood 60 |
| Lunar eclipse at night | as_event lunar 60 |
as_event_global lunar 60 |
| Solar eclipse by day | as_event solar 60 |
as_event_global solar 60 |
| Stop forced mode | as_event off |
as_event_global off |
| Shared status | — | as_event_global status |
Duration defaults to 60 seconds and accepts 5–600. Shared events reach connected
clients and late joiners. Forced events expire automatically; a real raid blood
Moon takes priority. Local previews are visual only. Blood-Moon storm sea uses
native wind and waves and can be disabled with BloodMoonStormSea.
Shared events do not spawn raid creatures or change world time.
Installation
Install BepInExPack Valheim and AstralSkies with your preferred mod manager.
In Gale, use the Valheim catalogue or import a provided package as a local mod.
For manual installation, extract the package's BepInEx folder into an existing
BepInEx installation. Keep one active AstralSkies DLL per profile.
Preferences are stored in BepInEx/config/com.zephyrfit.astralskies.cfg.
Keep this file to retain your settings and favourites. Players sharing one local
profile share its settings; other players choose their own visual preferences.
A client-only installation supplies a personal sky. Install on a dedicated server
and participating clients for shared raid signals, admin events and storm sea;
see SERVER_INSTALL.md.
External language dictionaries can be placed beside the DLL in
Translations/AstralSkies. Embedded dictionaries provide fallback text.
Credits
Astronomy uses a simplified reference model and artistic brightness controls.
See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for catalogue, lunar-surface and chart credits.
Code is MIT licensed.
💬 Help, bug reports and suggestions
Discord: zephyrfit
User ID: 251341133085540352
I can help in English and French with installation, bug reports and suggestions. Contributions are welcome. For a bug report, include the game and mod versions, reproduction steps and BepInEx/LogOutput.log. Screenshots or a short video are useful for visual issues.