Vault Orrery

See your Obsidian vault as a living star system — and replay how it grew. Folders are stars, notes are the planets orbiting them, and every body on screen is a note you can be reading a second later. Keep a small one turning in your sidebar while you write, and share yours as a photo card. Works offline.

▶ Try it in your browser — no install, nothing uploaded  ·  Install in Obsidian  ·  中文 · 한국어

The demo is the same engine the plugin is built from. It opens on a sample vault; drop a folder of markdown on it and it draws yours instead. The folder is read in the browser and the page makes no network requests of any kind.

What makes it different

1 · Genesis replays your vault's history. Press G and the cosmos rewinds to empty space, then condenses forward to today, note by note, in the order you actually wrote them. It is not an animation of the finished graph — it is the vault's own history, and you can scrub it.

2 · Folders are star systems, not another colour of dot. Each folder is a lit system with its notes in orbit round its star, so the shape of the vault is the shape of the picture: a crowded folder looks crowded, and an orphaned note sits out on its own.

3 · It is wired into the editor. Click a planet and its note is in the inspector — properties, tags, an excerpt, every link and backlink — with the buttons to open it, map it or trace a route from it right under its name. Ctrl/Cmd-click opens the note beside the orrery, the note you are editing carries its own beacon, and Show in Vault Orrery is on every note's context menu — the camera flies there from wherever it was, so you see where the note sits in the vault. On Obsidian 1.10 and later every Base has an Orrery view beside Table and Cards, which draws just the notes the Base selects.

4 · It stays open beside your work. A mini orrery lives in the right sidebar: the whole vault, turning slowly about the note you are editing, with a ring of light on that note and its name at the foot. Click a planet to open it. It draws twenty frames a second at one pixel per pixel, with no panels and no sound, and stops while the sidebar is closed — and the full view drops to thirty frames a second whenever you leave it alone, so neither one is something you have to remember to close.

5 · It makes something worth posting. Press C for a photo card: your vault's own sky in the frame, its name above, and up to six numbers below — how old the vault is, how many notes and links, its biggest system, its most cited note, its longest streak, a constellation name of its own. 9:16 for a story, 4:5 or 1:1 for a feed, 16:9 for a header. Turn and zoom inside the frame, then save the image or record fifteen seconds of whatever you do with the camera as an MP4. And for the note you are writing, Insert the sky report puts the month's numbers in as a callout, with nothing drawn at all.

Getting started

1. Install — Settings → Community plugins → Browse → Vault Orrery.
2. Open it — the orbit icon in the ribbon, or Vault Orrery: Open in the command palette. A card names the four moves that are enough to get going. The mini orrery is already in your right sidebar.
3. Explore — drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, click a planet to read it, double-click for its mind map, and press G to watch the vault form.

If a large vault feels slow, press FAST at the top of the controls (⚙ on the rail). The first time a big vault opens on a machine that is struggling, the orrery does that for you and says so.

What it does

The tools sit on a thin rail and open as drawers, so the frame is all sky until you ask for one: search, the vault's numbers, star systems, controls, shortcuts, Genesis and the photo card, drawn in Obsidian's own icons. PIN keeps a drawer open beside the next; a click on the sky closes the rest. Drag the rail by its grip to put it anywhere; double-click the grip to send it back. The inspector appears when you select a note.

• Mini orrery — the same cosmos in the right sidebar, centred on the note you are editing, with its name at the foot. Open the mini orrery in the sidebar brings it back.
• Orrery view for Bases — on Obsidian 1.10 and later, in every Base's view menu. The notes the Base selects, and only those, drawn as their own cosmos; the Base's filters are how you carve the vault before it is drawn.
• Sky report — Insert the sky report for this month, from the palette, writes the month's numbers into the note at the cursor as a callout: planets, new and touched, links, systems, the biggest and the fastest-growing, the most cited note, rogue planets, broken links. Copy the sky report puts it on the clipboard instead.
• Photo card — C — an image or a fifteen-second MP4 of your vault, with the stats you choose, at 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 or 16:9.
• Mind map — M or double-click — one note's neighbourhood, two hops out, in place, with a reading rail beside it.
• Search — / — notes, controls and actions in one box. Front-matter properties are searchable, so status: blocked is a thing you can look for.
• Route — pick two notes and the shortest way between them lights up.
• Broken links, counted in the status panel and named in the inspector. Click the count to keep only the notes carrying them.
• Ripple — SPACE — a wave along the links from the selected note.
• Poster — P — a high-resolution PNG of the whole frame with no HUD.
• Quality presets — CINEMA · BALANCED · FAST — the eight light effects in one click, and every knob still there under ADVANCED.
• The sky has events. A comet lands on the note you just touched; a note deleted while you watch goes out as a supernova and says its name.
• Sound — U — every note has a pitch; off until you ask. The sound tab has five moods to try with one press, a live trace, and a music box that lets the orbits play the vault's notes as they go round.
• A real night sky — STARFIELD brings the stars up first, then the Milky Way and the gas, like walking away from town lights.
• 한국어 · English · 日本語 · 中文, switchable without reloading.

The graph is Obsidian's own. Links, backlinks and tags come from the index Obsidian already keeps, so a link written through an alias resolves rather than counting as broken, an embed counts as a link, and a #tag in a paragraph counts alongside the ones in the front matter.

Moons are a note's sources. A note that nothing links to and that links to nothing is raw material: a clipping, a transcript, a scan. Name it in another note's sources property (source and 출처 work too) and it orbits that note as a moon:

---
sources:
  - "[[Lecture 3 transcript]]"
  - "[[Smith 2021]]"
---

A raw note no one cites joins the archive, one system per year. If your vault already keeps raw/ and wiki/ folders, the folders decide instead: anything in raw/ that a wiki/ note links to or lists in sources is a moon of that note. The inspector counts MOONS, a note's own, and FAR MOONS, the moons of the notes it links to.

The vault stays current. Notes written, created, renamed or deleted while the view is open re-derive the cosmos — camera and selection left where they were, and no loading curtain over a view you are using.

Controls

The first time a vault loads, a card names the four moves that are enough to get going. Any key dismisses it. ? — or the [ ? ] in the title bar of the SHORTCUTS drawer — opens the full guide, which explains each of the above and the three things that have no key: the broken-link filter, the route, and BRIDGE. The four-move card is one click away at the bottom of it. Escape closes an open drawer before anything else.

Privacy, in one paragraph

No network access at runtime. At all. No server, no telemetry, no analytics, no update check, no remote font, no CDN — the plugin makes zero outbound requests. The shipped main.js has no fetch, XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket or atob in it at all, and npm run check fails the build if one ever appears. It reads every markdown file in the vault, because the shape of the vault is what is being drawn and a graph of a subset is a different vault's picture. Reading goes through Obsidian's own cache, and your excluded-files patterns are applied first, so a note you have hidden is never opened at all.

→ The long version, and how to verify it

Large vaults

If a big vault runs slowly, press FAST at the head of the controls drawer: it turns the bloom, the lens, the halo and the sky's light off in one go, and CINEMA puts them back. The first time a vault of 600 notes or more opens, the orrery watches the frame rate for a few seconds and switches to FAST on its own if the machine is plainly struggling — once, and with a line saying so.

The MAX NODES ceiling ships off: a cap that silently drops half a vault is worse than a slow first minute, and the slider is right there. Rendering stops entirely when you are not looking at the view, so an orrery in a background tab costs nothing; a view on screen that nobody has touched for twenty seconds draws at half rate, and the sidebar's mini orrery always draws at a third.

→ Performance in detail

Installation

From the community plugin browser: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → "Vault Orrery" → Install.

Manually: copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/vault-orrery/, then enable it in Settings. Those three files are the whole plugin — the parts of three.js it uses are bundled into main.js, so nothing is fetched at runtime.

Desktop only: the renderer needs WebGL.

Going deeper

• How the picture is made — the grade, the glow, and the two knobs that decide how tightly the cosmos is packed.
• The astronomy is not decoration — what is actually simulated, and what is deliberately not to scale.
• The hub, and hearing the vault — how the central star is chosen, and what the sound is playing.
• Privacy and excluded files
• Performance on large vaults
• Development — the engine is a single openable HTML page; this is how it becomes the plugin.
• Contributing
• Changelog

中文

Vault Orrery 把你的 Obsidian 库画成一个 3D 星系：每个文件夹是一颗恒星，笔记是绕着它运行的行星，链接在它们之间划出光弧。文件夹拥挤，画面就拥挤；没有人链接的笔记，会独自漂在外面。

• Genesis（G）：宇宙先回到一片虚空，再按照你真正写下笔记的顺序，一篇一篇重新形成。可以拖动时间轴。
• 检查器：点击行星即可查看笔记的属性、摘要、链接和反向链接；Ctrl/Cmd 点击在旁边打开笔记。
• 思维导图（M 或双击）：一篇笔记两跳以内的邻居，旁边附阅读栏。
• 路径：选两篇笔记，点亮它们之间最短的路线。坏链接会被统计并可筛选。
• 侧边栏迷你星系：以你正在编辑的笔记为中心。
• 海报（P）与照片卡（C）：高清 PNG，或 9:16 · 4:5 · 1:1 · 16:9 图片 / 15 秒 MP4，方便分享。
• Bases 视图（Obsidian 1.10+）：在任意 Base 的视图菜单里选 Orrery，只画该 Base 筛出的笔记。星空报告：一条命令把本月的数字写进正在写的笔记。
• 界面支持 中文 · English · 한국어 · 日本語，可随时切换。
• 完全离线：不发出任何网络请求，没有遥测，没有 CDN。仅限桌面端（需要 WebGL）。

▶ 在浏览器中试用，无需安装，什么都不会上传 · 安装：设置 → 第三方插件 → 浏览 → 搜索 “Vault Orrery”

한국어

Vault Orrery는 옵시디언 볼트를 3D 은하로 그립니다. 폴더는 항성, 노트는 그 둘레를 도는 행성, 링크는 그 사이를 잇는 빛줄기입니다. 붐비는 폴더는 붐벼 보이고, 아무도 링크하지 않는 노트는 바깥에 혼자 떠 있습니다.

• Genesis(G): 우주가 빈 공간으로 돌아갔다가, 실제로 노트를 쓴 순서대로 하나씩 다시 생겨납니다. 시간 축을 끌어 앞뒤로 볼 수 있습니다.
• 인스펙터: 행성을 누르면 속성·발췌·링크·백링크가 보이고, Ctrl/Cmd 클릭으로 옆에 노트를 엽니다.
• 마인드맵(M 또는 더블클릭), 두 노트 사이 최단 경로, 깨진 링크 필터, 사이드바의 미니 오러리.
• 포스터(P)와 포토 카드(C): 고해상도 PNG, 9:16 · 4:5 · 1:1 · 16:9 이미지나 15초 MP4로 공유할 수 있습니다.
• Bases 뷰(옵시디언 1.10 이상): 아무 Base의 뷰 메뉴에서 Orrery를 고르면 그 Base가 고른 노트만 우주로 그립니다. 하늘 보고서: 명령 하나로 이번 달 숫자를 쓰고 있는 노트에 콜아웃으로 넣습니다.
• 네트워크 요청이 전혀 없습니다. 데스크톱 전용(WebGL).

▶ 설치 없이 브라우저에서 써 보기 · 설치: 설정 → 커뮤니티 플러그인 → 찾아보기 → “Vault Orrery”

More from the same author

• Vault Pet: a pixel cat that lives at the bottom of your workspace and levels up as you write.
• Class Timetable: a weekly class timetable for students, with each class's lecture notes one click away. Desktop and mobile.
• Tag Graph: a graph view for Bases where tags, folders and properties become hubs. Tag, retag and merge by dragging.
• Download Pulse: download stats for plugin authors: every plugin's downloads, rank and milestones in one dashboard.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

This plugin bundles three.js (MIT) and nothing else, and does not fetch it from a network at runtime. Full notice and licence text in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.