The Three Layers You're Buying
A Celestial Vault purchase is three layers stacked into one: Time Garden, Time Garden Eternal AI, and the Celestial-exclusive UX.
A Celestial Vault purchase isn't one thing. It's three layers stacked into a single product. Worth understanding what each layer is and where it came from — so you know exactly what you have.
Layer 1 — Time Garden (the free vault)
Everything documented above the ✦ in this site's sidebar.
This is the Time Garden system — the temporal journaling vault that's been around for a while and is freely available at timegarden.store. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly notes. Wheel of Life. Auto-aggregating galleries. The whole framework.
Inside the Celestial Vault, Time Garden is already installed and configured. You don't download or set up anything — it's there from the moment the vault opens.
A few things differ between standalone Time Garden and Celestial-bundled Time Garden — most notably, Celestial uses a 4-layer hierarchy (no weekly notes) and the Wheel of Life uses 5 dimensions instead of 8. The full delta is on How Celestial's Time Garden Differs.
Layer 2 — Time Garden Eternal (the AI bundle)
Everything in the Time Garden Eternal section of these docs.
This is the license-gated AI layer that powers:
- AI-generated daily aliases
- AI rollup summaries (daily → monthly → yearly)
- The auto-rated Wheel of Life
- The Q&A system on every layer ("ask your past")
- Year-in-Review
Eternal is normally a separate paid upgrade. A Celestial Vault purchase includes it. The same license key unlocks the vault and unlocks Eternal's AI features — see License Unification & Your 3 Devices.
Time Garden Eternal runs entirely on your own machine via Ollama. No cloud. No API keys. No data leaves your computer.
Layer 3 — The Celestial Vault flagship (the exclusive layer)
Everything documented in this (✦ Celestial Vault) section.
This is the layer that only exists inside the Celestial Vault. It's not available in standalone Time Garden, not available as a separate purchase, not open-source. It includes:
- The bespoke welcome experience that walks new users through onboarding
- The empty-tab atmosphere — animated stars, looping background, personalized greeting
- The four veils — creation, deletion, navigation, graph transition animations
- The journal widget with streak counter and configurable image
- The context-aware shortcut bar in the status bar
- Custom banners controllable from frontmatter
- Note Lock — frontend password gate
- The Celestial theme — moody deep-space aesthetic with gradient titles, day/month/year theming, animated dividers
- The self-organizing categorical layer with 36 pre-built category pages and 45 database views (see The Self-Organizing Vault)
- A curated, themed plugin stack
- Bundled assets — widget GIFs, looping background video, custom icons
This is the layer Karl built specifically for the Celestial product, and the layer that justifies its existence as a flagship.
A Visual Summary
| Layer | What it is | Where it came from |
|---|---|---|
| Time Garden FREE | Temporal journaling system | Free download — also bundled in Celestial |
| Time Garden Eternal | AI bundle (rollups, Wheel, Q&A) | Paid upgrade — included with Celestial |
| Celestial Vault | UX, theme, atmosphere, categorical layer | Closed-source, exclusive to this purchase |
The Bonus Layer — Source-Code Snippets
Buried inside the Celestial Vault (and inside Time Garden Eternal) is a fourth, quieter inclusion: the Time Garden source-code snippets.
These are the same Templater scripts, JS dataviews, CSS snippets, and base files that power the rollups, the Wheel of Life, the gallery aggregations, the auto-generated aliases, and the structural CSS that makes Time Garden look the way it does. Sold individually on timegarden.store, they represent months of iteration each — and they're yours to read, modify, and reuse the moment your vault is unzipped.
If you've ever wanted to understand how something in Time Garden works under the hood — or borrow a piece of it for your own vault — you already own the source.
About timegarden.store — the premium Obsidian template marketplace where Time Garden, Time Garden Eternal, the Celestial Vault, and every standalone snippet ship from. Run by Karl von Gagern; also home to community-creator templates, demo vaults, and code snippets. If you want any single piece of the Time Garden machine without the full vault, that's where it lives.
How To Read These Docs
If something is described in the Time Garden part of these docs (above ✦ in the sidebar), it works in your Celestial Vault — with the few exceptions noted on How Celestial's Time Garden Differs.
If something is described in the Celestial Vault part (this section), it's specific to Celestial and won't be in standalone Time Garden.
If something appears in the Eternal section, it's the AI side — and your Celestial license unlocks it automatically.
Up Next
- Getting the Celestial Vault — installing and opening it
- How Celestial's Time Garden Differs — the 4-vs-5-layer differences
- License Unification & Your 3 Devices — how the one-key-two-products thing works
The Self-Organizing Vault
The categorical half of the Celestial Vault: a way of working with notes where wikilink categories replace folders and tags entirely.
Getting the Celestial Vault
How to buy, download, and open the Celestial Vault for the first time. License, nickname, vault import — the whole onboarding.