AstralSkies

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.

• Keep optional galactic sparkles in daylight, with separate visibility, quantity and radiance. A separate artistic daylight selection offers bright catalogue stars, the seven Big Dipper stars and planets, without automatically enabling guide lines. Day and night brightness remain independent, with gradual dawn/dusk transitions.
• 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.

• Choose Coherent cycle v1 for phase-dependent moonrise, or v2 for an

artistic Moon above the horizon from dusk through dawn. v2 keeps calendar phases and adds restrained earthshine to the dark body. Eclipses and events take priority; terrain, clouds and your brightness controls still apply.

• Use the coherent cycle for the NASA lunar surface and optional lunar atmosphere.

The native cycle uses the game's dynamic Moon texture, trajectory, size and colour, with a local blood-Moon tint and relative raid growth. Stellar observation shows the coherent Moon's altitude and observing conditions.

• 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.

• Choose a separate near-totality corona colour and an optional thin red chromosphere, with the Moon naturally obscuring the solar layers.
• Choose the existing NASA lunar surface, a subtle cool tone or enhanced terrain contrast. Surface style, definition, phases and luminosity have separate controls.
• Set solar disc brightness and glare independently. Adjust lunar luminosity

from 0 to 10, and refine each planet's brightness and colour emphasis.

• Add an optional soft lunar glow and a broad atmospheric ring, with independent

opacity and size controls, including a ring radius of 1–30°. Keep these separate from source-restricted Moon beams, their colour, intensity up to 15 and radial extent up to 10, and landscape lighting.

• Keep native daytime solar rays, customise their tint/intensity/extent, or hide

them independently. Ray controls use Valheim's screen-space image effect; that effect must be enabled in the game's graphics settings.

• 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, horizon clouds and low clouds / mist banks

separately in F8 → Sky. A separate toggle controls the sky tree; atmospheric fog, native rain, weather and Mistlands mist remain active.

• Choose Current horizon, an adjustable Soft fade, or a local **Altitude

extension in F8 → Details → Sky / Day / Night / Horizon**. Set the fade, maximum downward extension and height response. The background follows the main camera's altitude while Sun/Moon paths and events remain independent. Native atmosphere and auroras follow the extension with the supported native sky shader and AstralSkies' coherent discs. Choices are stored in sky favourites.

• Choose from three grouped sky presets: Realistic for a cloudy sky,

Immersive, or Observation balanced. Keep two independent personal named favourites for your own skies. Export a named visual preset to a local, timestamped JSON, open its folder in Explorer, preview changes and confirm an import from F8 → Sky. Use the individual cloud controls for your preferred high, horizon and low-cloud combination.