How Celestial's Time Garden Differs
The complete delta between standalone Time Garden and the Time Garden inside the Celestial Vault.
Most of Time Garden is identical inside the Celestial Vault. The daily notes still aggregate. The galleries still auto-build. The AI still summarizes. The charts still chart.
But there are a few deliberate differences between the standalone version and the Celestial-bundled version. This page is the complete delta — useful when you read the Time Garden side of these docs and find a detail that doesn't quite match what you see in your Celestial Vault.
1. Four Layers, Not Five
Standalone Time Garden: Daily → Weekly → Monthly → Quarterly → Yearly
Celestial-bundled Time Garden: Daily → Monthly → Dreamline → Yearly
The weekly note layer is removed in Celestial. Instead, daily notes roll up directly into the month, and the quarterly note (renamed Dreamline) is positioned as a planning canvas, not a retrospective rollup.
Why?
In practice, the weekly note was the layer most users skipped. The week-shape was already visible on the monthly's daily-rating chart. The weekly summary tended to feel redundant against the monthly summary. And without a weekly note, the Dreamline could become its own thing — a planning surface — rather than just a "the week's bigger sibling".
So if you read Weekly Notes in the standalone Time Garden docs and wonder "where's mine?" — that's why. It isn't there.
2. The Wheel of Life Has 5 Dimensions, Not 8
Standalone Time Garden: 8 dimensions — Spiritual, Career, Relationships, Health, Growth, Recreation, Social, Finance.
Celestial Time Garden: 5 dimensions — Career, Fitness, Growth, Fun, Social.
Why?
Five dimensions render more cleanly in radar / polar charts at all zoom levels. The 5-dimension version is also explicitly enforced by JSON schema in the AI Wheel of Life prompt, so the AI can't accidentally output 4 or 7 dimensions.
The cost: less granularity. You don't get a separate "Spiritual" or "Finance" axis in your weekly wheel. The advantage: the chart is more readable, the AI is more reliable, and the dimensions you have are broad enough to absorb most of what the missing ones tracked (Finance loosely lives under Career, Spiritual loosely under Growth).
If you'd prefer the 8-dimension version, it's possible to swap (you'd be editing templates and the schema in the AI service file) — but most Celestial users find the 5-dimension version genuinely better.
3. The Wheel of Life Lives On Monthly Notes
Standalone: filled in weekly.
Celestial: filled in monthly.
Without weekly notes, there's no weekly Wheel. So the Wheel of Life is a monthly practice in Celestial — you fill it in once a month, looking at the past 30 days. That's a slower cadence than Time Garden's weekly default, but it pairs better with the 4-layer structure.
4. The Welcome Experience Is Owned By Celestial
Standalone Time Garden: you see the Time Garden onboarding modal on first launch.
Celestial: you see the Celestial welcome flow instead. Time Garden's own modal is suppressed at the source (the hasSeenWelcomePopup: true flag is pre-set in the shipping vault, so TG never tries to fire its modal).
This means:
- License entry happens in the Celestial flow, not the TG one
- TG model setup happens via Celestial's bundled-models flow (The Bundled Ollama Models)
- The 3 tutorial cards at the end of welcome cover Celestial, Kepano-philosophy, and TG — not just TG
5. Bundled Ollama Models
Standalone: you install Ollama yourself and pull whichever models you want.
Celestial: ships with a curated set of Ollama models for first-launch auto-installation: phi4, phi4-mini, deepseek-r1:1.5b. The vault is pre-configured to use them.
Full breakdown: The Bundled Ollama Models.
You can still pull additional models, swap defaults, or remove the bundled ones. But out of the box, the AI works without you running a single ollama pull command.
6. License Unification
Standalone Time Garden Eternal: separate license, entered in TG's own settings.
Celestial: the same license unlocks both the vault and Eternal's AI. Entering it once in welcome configures both plugins.
Full breakdown: License Unification & Your 3 Devices.
7. Default Root Path
Standalone Time Garden: assumes the vault root is /. Daily notes go in /01 Daily/, etc.
Celestial: Time Garden's rootPath is set to /Time Garden/ by default — meaning daily notes go in Time Garden/01 Daily/, monthly in Time Garden/03 Monthly/, etc.
This keeps Time Garden's temporal structure neatly contained, leaving the vault root free for the self-organizing categorical layer.
8. The "Quarterly" Folder Is 04 Quarterly/ But The Notes Are Dreamlines
Standalone: 04 Quarterly/2026/2026-Q2.md — a quarterly rollup note.
Celestial: Time Garden/04 Quarterly/2026/2026-Q2.md — a Dreamline freeform planning note.
The folder name stays the same to keep templates and plugin paths intact, but the note type inside is different. (See Dreamlines.)
9. The "07 Notes" Folder Is Empty At Ship
Standalone: contains a few user-facing extras (e.g., a "secret garden" letter, dev goals).
Celestial: 07 Notes/ ships empty.
The Celestial Vault has the 36 root category pages for general notes — there's no need for a separate "Notes" folder inside Time Garden.
What's The Same
Most things. To rapid-fire the unchanged parts:
- ✅ Daily notes: anatomy, banner, navbar, alias, body, rating, picture gallery, quick notes (highlights/ideas/progress), Q&A — all identical
- ✅ Monthly notes: rollup logic, summary, picture gallery, week overview (replaced by daily overview given there's no weekly), AI buttons
- ✅ Yearly notes: summary, top-days table, gallery, AI Year-in-Review, Q&A
- ✅ All the charts — bar, line, polar area, radar, progression
- ✅ The Quick Notes tagging system
- ✅ The picture gallery auto-aggregation
- ✅ All template editing approaches
- ✅ All AI prompt customization
- ✅ All chunking settings
- ✅ Everything in Dealing with useless AI answers and AI not responding or Ollama issues
In short: the Time Garden experience inside Celestial is Time Garden — with a few specific structural choices made for you, and the welcome/license layer handled by Celestial instead.
Up Next
- License Unification & Your 3 Devices — how the one-key system works
- The Bundled Ollama Models — what's pre-installed
- Dreamlines — the planning canvas that replaced quarterly rollups