Veils and Animation Issues

When the Four Veils stop firing, fire incorrectly, or otherwise misbehave — the troubleshooting flow.

The four veil animations are the most visible piece of Celestial's UX polish — and the easiest to notice when something's off. This page covers the troubleshooting flow when veils stop firing, fire incorrectly, or otherwise misbehave.

"No veils are firing"

If you create a daily note, navigate between months, or click through the graph, and no animation plays — straight to the destination, no transition:

Step 1 — Check The Animations Toggle

Settings → Celestial Vault → Polish & atmosphere → Animations → make sure it's on.

This is the master switch for all four veils plus the journal widget burst. If it's off, every animation is suppressed.

Step 2 — Check That The Plugin Is Enabled

Settings → Community Plugins → make sure Celestial Plugin is enabled.

If it's off, the entire Celestial UX layer (veils, widget, shortcut bar) doesn't run.

Step 3 — Reload Obsidian

A clean reload (Cmd/Ctrl + P → "Reload app without saving") fixes most one-off animation glitches. Worth trying before deeper diagnostics.

Step 4 — Check Your CSS

If you've added a custom CSS snippet that targets .celestial-* classes or @keyframes celestial-*, you might be overriding the veil styling. Disable any custom snippets temporarily:

Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets → toggle off your custom snippets → reload → check if veils return.

Step 5 — Hardware Acceleration

Some Linux configurations have hardware-acceleration off by default in Electron apps. The veils use GPU-composited animations (opacity + transform only, no paint). On a system without hardware acceleration, they technically render but might appear janky or skipped.

To check on Linux:

Open Obsidian's Help → Show debug info
Look for "Hardware acceleration: enabled"

If it says disabled, enable it in your Electron / Obsidian config and restart.

"Only some veils fire"

If creation veils work but navigation veils don't (or any other partial pattern):

Tab-Header Click Veils

The Navigation Veil fires from many trigger paths — tab clicks, MetaBind nav buttons, native back/forward, keyboard shortcuts, calendar plugin. Some triggers might break independently:

Tab clicks: requires the tab title to be parseable as a temporal note name. If you've renamed a daily note (broken the YYYY-MM-DD format), tab clicks to it won't trigger the veil.
MetaBind nav buttons: require the MetaBind plugin enabled and the navbar template intact in 06 Templates/Components/.
Native back/forward: should always work; if not, plugin reload usually fixes it.
Keyboard shortcuts: see Customizing Shortcuts — make sure the shortcut bindings haven't conflicted with another plugin.

Graph Veils Specifically

Graph veils fire when you click a node in the local graph. If they don't:

The local graph view must be open in a sidebar pane
The clicked node must be a temporal note (clicks on category page nodes don't trigger the graph veil — they navigate without animation)
Plugin must have hooked into the graph view at startup; if you toggled the celestial-plugin off then on after starting Obsidian, the graph hook may not have re-registered. Reload Obsidian.

"Veils flash but don't complete (cut off mid-animation)"

If a veil starts but you see the destination note appear before the veil finishes:

If you click multiple navigation triggers in quick succession (e.g., click "next month" twice quickly), each new trigger replaces the in-flight veil. This is intentional — the rapid-fire-safe behavior is a feature, not a bug. (Karl's hardest-won UX fix.)

Cause: Conflicting Plugins

A plugin that hooks into active-leaf-change events early can break the veil's timing. The most common culprit: legacy "transition animation" plugins from older Obsidian versions.

Fix

Disable other plugins one at a time, reload, test. If a specific plugin is the cause, leave it disabled or report the conflict.

"Veils fire but the destination color is wrong"

The veil color is themed to the destination note type:

Daily veils: day-of-week color (Monday = indigo, Tuesday = teal, etc.)
Monthly veils: month color
Quarterly / Dreamline veils: quarter color
Yearly veils: annual accent

If your daily veils are all the same color regardless of weekday:

Check The CSS Snippets

The day-of-week colors come from celestial-daily-themes.css. Make sure that snippet is enabled in Appearance → CSS snippets.

If the snippet is enabled but colors aren't applying: the daily note's cssclasses frontmatter might be missing the weekday class. Check that your daily template (Time Garden/06 Templates/Parents/Daily.md) includes the monday, tuesday, etc. class injection.

(See Adjusting Templates Yourself if you've modified the parent template.)

The widget burst is gated by the same Animations master switch as the veils. Toggle it on if it's off.

If animations are on but the burst still doesn't fire:

Check that your streak actually incremented (the counter number bumped). If the streak counter didn't go up, the burst doesn't trigger.
Make sure your daily note was created via a Celestial-aware flow (the journals plugin command, the ⌥⇧D shortcut, or an explicit Celestial command). Notes created via other paths (e.g., directly via Templater outside the daily folder) might not increment the streak.

"Animations look choppy / stuttery"

If veils play but they feel laggy:

CPU / GPU Load

Other apps using significant GPU might cause stutter. Close heavy apps and retry.

Battery Saver Mode

On laptops, battery-saver mode often throttles GPU performance. Plug in or switch to balanced mode.

Many Open Tabs

Each open Obsidian tab keeps its renderer alive. Lots of tabs = lots of compositing work. Close tabs you're not using.

Hardware Limits

On older laptops (5+ years), some animations will simply be choppy. The recommendation: disable animations in Polish & atmosphere and accept the trade-off.

"I want to disable veils permanently but keep the rest of the UX"

The Polish & atmosphere section has a single Animations toggle that disables all four veils + the widget burst. Everything else (welcome, widget visibility, shortcut bar, Note Lock, theme, snippets) keeps working.

If you want finer-grained control (e.g., disable only the navigation veil but keep creation), that's not exposed in settings — you'd need to edit the celestial-plugin's setup methods or comment out specific veil setup calls. That's intermediate territory; reach out if you want guidance.

When To Reach Out

If a veil issue persists despite the steps above, send Karl a note with:

Your OS and Obsidian version
Which veil(s) are affected
A short description of when it happens (e.g., "always", "only on first navigation after vault open", "intermittently")
Whether other plugins are installed (and which ones)

Up Next

The Four Veils — what veils are supposed to look like
Atmosphere & Polish Toggles — the master switches
Welcome and Onboarding Issues — for issues that prevent veils from setting up at all