What is the Celestial Vault?

You've started a vault before. Fresh plugins, big plans. Three weeks later, the homepage is still blank, the typography never quite sits right, and the folders have rules you can't quite remember.

Here's what finished looks like.

That's the Celestial Vault. A thousand hours of design and code, already done. You unzip it, open it, and live in it.

No setup. No system to learn. No organizing — ever. Notes find each other.

It's not a course. It's not a framework. It's a finished product.

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Two Halves, One Vault

The Celestial Vault is built on two complementary ideas:

🌙 The temporal half — Time Garden

Daily notes that roll up into monthly notes that roll up into yearly notes. With Dreamlines (quarterly planning notes) sitting alongside as freeform horizon-setting space.

This is the Time Garden you've already met — but tuned and integrated specifically for Celestial's flow.

⭐ The categorical half — Self-organizing notes

A second-brain layout where notes live in the root of the vault, organized by wikilink categories instead of folders or tags. Books, People, Movies, Companies, Ideas — each one a category page that auto-aggregates the notes that mention it.

This is what makes the Celestial Vault feel less like a journal and more like a place where everything you encounter goes to live.

(Read The Self-Organizing Vault for the full philosophy behind this side.)

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What's Actually Inside

When you unzip and open the Celestial Vault, you get:

• A custom welcome experience that walks you through nickname, license, and a brief tutorial
• A pre-arranged workspace — local graph, journal widget, calendar — visible from the second you open the vault
• The Celestial theme — a moody, deep-space aesthetic with day/month/year color theming, gradient titles, and animated dividers
• Four signature transition animations ("veils") that play as you create, delete, navigate between, or graph-jump through your temporal notes
• A context-aware shortcut bar in the status bar that changes depending on whether you're in a daily note, monthly note, Dreamline, or vault note
• Custom banners controllable from any note's frontmatter
• A streak / Journal Widget in the sidebar with configurable image and counter
• Bundled local AI via Ollama — the same engine that powers Time Garden Eternal
• 36 category pages at the vault root (Books, Movies, People, Albums, Companies, …) ready to be filled
• 45 database views (.base files) auto-filtering by category
• 111 Templater templates for every kind of note you might create
• Note Lock — a frontend password gate for sensitive notes
• A bundled curated stack of community plugins, themed and pre-configured

Everything is set up. You add the content.

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Who It's For

The Celestial Vault is for someone who:

• Wants Obsidian to feel finished the moment they open it
• Wants to journal and keep a second brain — with both halves talking to each other
• Wants local AI that can summarize months and answer questions about their year, with no data leaving their machine
• Doesn't want to learn yet another framework or memorize a new vocabulary
• Cares about how their notebook feels, not just what it does

If that's you, here's how to get it.

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What It's Not

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The Documentation Layout

This documentation site has two halves that mirror the product:

• Time Garden docs (everything above the ✦ in the sidebar) — covers the journaling system. Most of it applies inside the Celestial Vault, with a few Celestial-specific differences laid out in How Celestial's Time Garden Differs.
• Celestial Vault docs (this section) — covers the flagship-specific UX, themes, settings, and the self-organizing categorical layer.

Most readers will land on a specific page from a search or link. Wander as needed.

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Up Next

• The Self-Organizing Vault — the categorical half of the philosophy
• The Three Layers You're Buying — what's free, what's bundled, what's exclusive
• Getting the Celestial Vault — how to install and open it