BigSky

Big Sky

Welcome to the beta of a gentle, atmospheric, perhaps deeply unnecessary alteration to backdrop of our walking.

The sun sets with fresh twilight. An actual moon rises. New stars come out. Clouds drift by. Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it thunders. Where did all these ambient cricket sounds come from?

Of course, you can be a dark trickster god with an F11 menu. The world turns whatever shade and tint you want. The time of day is your decision. How many stars, how many clouds, how much rain? Micromanage the heck out of that atmosphere.

The F11 menu has four tabs: General (time of day), Sky (sun, moon, stars, clouds), Weather (rain, thunder, sound) and Grading (colour).

But how?

• Install BepInEx 6 (IL2CPP build) for Big Walk and run the game once.
• Drop the mod folder into BepInEx/plugins.
• Start the game. That's it.

Want to fiddle? Press F11. Sliders either apply instantly or don't actually do much yet, depending on how the game felt about the attempt of a hostile takeover of the heavens.

What you get

• Sky: a procedural sky that tracks the time of day, with a nice blue-to-pale-horizon gradient.
• Sunsets and sunrises: a glow band hugging the horizon on the sun's side, plus the whole world getting tinted by the moment. Most dusks should be golden orange, most dawns should be yellowish. Occasionally you roll pink or crimson. You can compel the one you like.
• A moon with actual phases. Full moons should be brighter than new moons.
• Stars, with twinkling, for the nights when you wanted to feel small.
• Clouds: low, puffy, procedurally generated, and drifting with the wind. They tint at dusk and go dark at night.
• Rain, with a proper build-up and clear-up instead of popping on, plus sometimes a bit of fog, dimmer light, and a cooler colour grade.
• Lightning, which is a flash of light, and thunder, which is a sound if you give it one (see below).
• Colour grading through the game's own URP post-processing, so you can nudge temperature, contrast, saturation and exposure, and turn off bloom, vignette and other things to make your walk look like a mid 90s music video fever dream.
• An in-game F11 settings menu, because nobody wants to edit a.cfg file while a thunderstorm is happening.

But what do the buttons do?

| Key / Input | Action |

| --- | --- |

| F4 | Reload the config file from disk |

| F5 | Toggle the custom sky on and off, for A/B comparison |

| F6 | Toggle the colour grade on and off, same idea |

| F10 | Start or stop rain right now |

| F11 | Open or close the settings menu (Esc also closes it) |

F10 F11 can be changed in the config. F4, F5 and F6 are hardcoded right now because I got tired and don't use other things that take the buttons.

But the game already has a fine day and night cycle

It does. By default the mod reads the hour from the game's own SkyManager and decorates around it. The game still owns the sun and the lighting. The mod adds the sky, moon, stars, clouds, weather and colour on top.

If you would rather the mod be in charge of the clock:

• Clock mode 1 makes the mod push its own cycle into the game. Set Cycle minutes to decide how long a full day takes. 60 means a day per real hour. 1440 means it follows your actual clock, so walking at 3 AM gets you an actual 3 AM.
• Hold time of day freezes the clock. Set Time to hold to whatever hour you like: 12 is noon, 18 is sunset, 0 is midnight. Turn it off and time resumes from where the game had it.

If you want the mod to also rotate and dim the sun light directly, turn on Drive sun light directly. Be warned: the game may disagree with you about where the sun is, and they will fight about it in public.

But the moon is out at the wrong time / the sunset is at noon

The mod assumes hour 12 is noon and hour 0 is midnight. If the game's idea of dusk is a little off from that, use Visual hour offset (General tab) to slide the mod's sunsets, moon and stars earlier or later until they line up with the game's lighting.

We'll maybe work on t