Gnome Ann has seen all 100K skies. It is Gnome Ann's sky after all...

Fractals Update (4.12)

About This Mod

Changes (only) the sky colours (which includes sky, clouds, fog, sunlight). This is a mod made with love and care, that Gnome Ann has shown before. Dozens of hours have gone in to carefully putting together a sky generation algorithm, that is calibrated and fine tuned to produce 100K skies that mean you never know what kind of world you are going to land on next, but isn't going to change the game drastically. It does this by:

• Generating 100,000 skies in various levels of "rarity".
• The most common skies are made in the bright, not overly vivid "pastel colours" style of vanilla, with white clouds, tame single colours and nice and bright. However, unlike vanilla, they can be almost any colour!
• There are progressively more rare and more interesting colours, all the way up to truly bizarre alien skies Gnome Ann has imagined.
• No type of sky is truly ruled out. Expect to find not just beauty on your travels, but the ugly, the harsh, the dim and the most alien skies imaginable. 
• Even among the different planet types produced by the algorithm, there are sub-types leading to almost endless variety. 
• Given that there are more skies than you can ever see, and anything is possible, this is truly in the spirit of the game - an explorer's dream mod. 
• Takes ideas from Exosolar's Stratos mod as well as the Atlas Alien Skies mod by moddinaccount, but is made from scratch with a unique, hand crafted generation algorithm. You might find the starry-daytime skies similar to Stratos, and the multicoloured vivid alien skies of Alien Skies, and sometimes both! 
  

Associated Mods

     

  

Gnome Ann's Dusks - adds 1,000 sunsets produced under the same method and philosophy
1,000 Gnome Ann's Nights - adds 1,000 nights produced under the same method and philosophy
NMS Collections Backup & Restore Tool - Want to be able to save planets in an easy way, bookmarked with thumbnails/descriptions, and revisit them at the click of a button, as well as share with a large NMS discord? This is the tool for you. Also lets you backup bases, companions, ships and much more!

Key points:

• By far the most skies - you'll never see them all, and very unlikely you'll see the same one twice - very NMSy.
• Simple - only uses 1 globals file, very compatible with other mods and only affects skies. 
• Author is committed to preserving skies per planet. You pick a home, I will do my best to make sure its sky never changes (if HG doesn't bork things).
• Designed in the spirit of NMS, using a calibrated algorithm to make procedural skies. 
• Contains the most variety of sky possibilities, yet aims to appeal to most with a majority of skies in the style of NMS (yet anything is possible, including starry day time skies and ridiculous alien skies!).
  
  

The other Sky mods are excellent too, and are made by very respected modders who I learned from and look up to. Do check them all out! Some are designed more deliberately with pallets and artistic talent, like Exosolar's Stratos, or are made in combination with more comprehensive biome changes like Dud's, or come with lots of options like Atlas Alien Skies. Whatever speaks to you, if it's not Gnome Ann's Sky, it's your sky.


Philosophy of Mod

This mod is born out of frustration. Since Next, the number of colours the sky can be in a game dedicated to exploring the infinite is a very finite 6. Anyone who is into their exploring and planet churning will know that this quickly proves fatal to the explorer's spirit. It is clear that HG intend to one day flesh this out, but until then, for those that can't wait, here is a mod that is designed to give your explorer's heart its beat back. Every planet you explore from now on will be utterly unique in its "feel" and "atmosphere". You never know what you are going to run into next.

Given that the mod is tuned to produce a majority of skies that are quite tame, very vanilla-esque, it won't ruin the game. It should appeal to most. However, there is a very good chance you will find...well anything. The algorithm has been tuned to rule out a fair chunk of nonsense skies and ones that are too dark etc. but otherwise, any colour and colour-combination is possible, and there are even some bonus styles that may pop up from time to time that are truly out there. 
All being said, this mod has been tuned to try to appeal to as many people as possible, and not be too niche. 

This mod was also made with the philosophy that almost any type of sky can exist. Any combination of chemicals in the atmosphere, any thickness/density of atmosphere is possible, even the clouds and fog can take on almost any colours. This is technically true, even in real life, but especially in the world of No Man's Sky. If this bothers you and you feel colours possibilities can't be too unrestrained, this is not the mod for you!

How the Mod was Made

This mod was made with a custom program to generate all the colour values the game accepts based on a very complex algorithm. A tool was used to visualise the results to help fine tune the algorithm. The result is infinite colours and combinations, but tamed to make Gnome Ann happy. Very personalised and unique. 



The mod will likely improve (while avoiding significant change). You should check for updates, and if you notice something bad, you can feel free to let me know.

This mod has been made by a colour and coding enthusiast, over the course of a week and dozens of hours, but certainly not made by a professional or expert in any of the relevant fields. Just think what HG can do if (and when) they invest the man hours to making their own colour variety!

Will be releasing the tool to help you generate your own skies eventually, once I've made it useful to the wider public as right now it's geared towards a specific design and will stifle your creativity. 

Things to Note (PLEASE READ)

• This mod will change your planets' skies (while installed, they will revert if you uninstall, even if you've saved). There's no way a mod can be set to keep the skies of specific planets but change others. For that reason, you might want to start a new save.
• This mod isn't perfect. There will be some colour combinations that suck. For example, some colours make the clouds look weird, but that's hard to predict. Recent update has drastically improved this, reducing the splotchy clouds by a lot
• You are not going to like some (hopefully rare) colours, that's just the way it is. People are very unique with what they like and dislike about colours. Some get a headache from a yellow sky, some from red. Some think too vivid = very very bad, some love the possibility. Take it as it is, but bear in mind it's been tuned with the philosophy to appealing to as many people as possible.
• Note that you might get unlucky. You might find your first 10 planets are all extreme skies. It might ruin all your bases with very alien skies. Do note that most skies are tame.
• The goal is to never ever change the sky colours in future (if it can be avoided, Hello Games will probably one day permanently break this mod as they update and improve the game). This is also why there is and will only ever be one core variation. Any change to the skies in the mod will mean all the planets get assigned (procedurally) another colour. So all your favourite planets and bases will change. This is why change will be avoided at all costs.
• This mod, unpacked, is over 250Mb. It may cause loading issues on slower rigs (tested on SSD). Please let me know if this is the case.
• If you wish to see this combined with any other mods that use the GCSKYGLOBALS.GLOBALS.MBIN, let me know and if enough people ask, I will add it.
• The aim is to always keep this mod maintained!
  

Change Log

As of 16-Feb-2020

• Adjusted the clouds so that there are far less pure white clouds
• Added more colour variation to the clouds
• Changed a setting to reduce the fog, to make distant mountains more visible and hopefully reduce the blow-out of the clouds a bit (see above) [removed]
• Added a variant that adds 1,000 custom nights over the single vanilla night. In this variant, the dusks are darker because the dusks become the night. It is recommended you try both, especially if you are a fan of the original dusks. Big thanks to Exosolar for discovering and explaining how to do this to me. 
• Fixed the lighting of some dusks that would make the ground pitch black (currently for the nigh-version only, a fix for the standard dusks is coming soon). 
  

As of Living Ship Update

• Made sure all Custom Nights versions had night skies that were transparent (i.e. can see stars at night)
• Brightened the extremely dark lighting on a small percentage of dusks in the standard (i.e. NOT Custom Nights) versions
  

As of 23-Feb-2020
MAJOR UPDATE. Splotchy blown out clouds reduced by a lot. Extremely white featureless clouds reduced >90%. Lots more colour added to clouds (feedback requested if it's too much).

CHANGES TO THE MOD WITH ORIGINS:

• Less Storms modules removed (for now). Less Storms is back! Storms will not be more frequent than every 45 minutes or less than every 60 minutes.
• Nights modules removed (for now).
• Still includes a version that retains the 4x length day/night cycle of the
  old Less Storms module (day is 1 hour, night is 1 hour real time)
• Vanilla game now has per-biome skies, although it seems limited to only about
  20, and only for Lava and Swamp sub-biomes (could be more complicated, but this is what I've been able to figure out so far). This mod removes all that and effectively allows any sky to appear on any planet. NOTE: this was necessary to prevent changing the per-planet sky colours the mod applied from pre-Origins.

COMING VERY SOON (ETA October - track this mod!):

• Will try to bring back Less Storms modules. ✅
• Will brighten the dusks again now that they don't need to also act as the night skies.✅
• Will make a new nights version that takes advantage of the new night skies file. ✔️ (test version available in misc files)
  

• Dusks were also moved to their own mod around this time. 
  

V2:
I have noticed that too many of the skies are overly vivid/saturated. More than I had intended. Some have complained. I have run a pass on all the skies to reduce the saturation where it is too high (although not all). I have done the same with the clouds, as some are just too saturated and it creates burnout.

Specifically, I have measured the saturation as a % of every sky colour in the list, and if it is over 70%, I reduced the saturation by 50% (which is less than it sounds), 85% of the time (i.e. I left 15% of very vivid skies untouched). I also did roughly the same thing with the clouds, but over 60% saturation. 

Note, all I've done is desaturate, so your favourite planets shouldn't look very different, a rather small percentage will look just a bit more pastel, but the same colour. If you are strongly against me replacing the main mod because this has actively ruined your base etc (very unlikely!), please let me know in the discussion. I will listen.

UPDATE To V3:



Too many planets had very thick, vivid fog. This was an unfortunate result to some changes HG made to the fog effects, back when Origins dropped, but it took me a while to notice. I've run a pass on 85% of all skies with overly saturated fog, and desaturated them by 70%. 

This is still subject to change, as I might need to increase or decrease the effect. If you wish to test another version that doesn't desaturate as strongly, please use the mod in the subfolder attached.

Also, I have run a pass on any skies that have very dark lighting, increasing it. There are some rare planets I baked in that are quite dark during the day, with very vivid clouds. On some of those, the lighting was way too dark, and so I've hopefully fixed that.

Please provide feedback on the discussion tab or by email: [email protected]

Thanks!
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Files Used By This Mod

METADATA\SIMULATION\SOLARSYSTEM\WEATHER\SKYSETTINGS\DAYSKYCOLOURS.MBIN
GCSKYGLOBALS.GLOBALS.MBIN

Will conflict with other mods that use these files!

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Made with love, by the modder who belongs to Gnome Ann. Gnome Ann's Kaii <3
If this mod ever breaks and I don't notice, please email me: [email protected] (I may be taking a break from the game).