Appearance

The six themes, your own accent, the three glass figures, light and motion, and the HUD defaults, with every option's default and range.

Everything about how Vantage looks is on one page in the menu, and every change applies the moment you make it, to the screen you are looking at. This page is for anyone who wants Vantage to look different, read more easily, or move less. It explains the idea behind the look, then every option with its default and its range, as of 2.0.1.

Where it is

The options belong to the Appearance feature, in the menu under UI & Visuals, then Theme and colour. To go straight there from chat:

/vt config interface

Appearance is on by default and works outside SkyBlock, so you can change the look from the title screen. There is nothing to save: every change is applied live and kept in your config profile.

The idea

The look is called Obsidian Glass. Obsidian is volcanic glass: the canvas is a neutral near-black rather than a colour, and every surface on it is a slab of clear glass. It is translucent by an amount you choose, thick enough to bend light at its edge, and soft enough that buttons and fields are capsules. The accent colour is never the paint. It is the light: the glow of what you have selected, the tint on the far edge of a sheet, and the slow aurora behind the menus.

The rules behind it are clarity, deference and depth. Text and controls stay readable over whatever the game is drawing, and no effect is allowed to lower the contrast of type. The interface frames the game rather than competing with it. Hierarchy comes from materials and light, never from outlines drawn around boxes. The options below are the parts of that design you own.

Themes

A theme is two colours: a near-neutral canvas and an accent. Every sheet, edge and text tone is derived from that pair, so no combination can clash.

The canvases carry only a few points of the accent's hue on purpose: a saturated canvas is what makes glass look like painted plastic. The theme reaches every Vantage screen and HUD element at once, including what is already on screen.

Your own accent

Switch on Custom accent and the Accent colour below it comes alive. Vantage then derives the whole palette from your colour, not just the highlights. The accent colour is greyed out while Custom accent is off, and starts at Glacier's blue, #3D8BFF.

If you give your accent a chroma speed in the colour picker, the highlights cycle through hues while the glass itself stays anchored to the colour you picked, so the surfaces do not flicker.

When something else drives the accent

Audio-reactive visuals, off by default, can drive the accent colour from whatever is playing while it runs. Your theme comes back when it stops.

Glass

Three figures decide most of what "the theme" means. All three apply live, and the window you are looking at follows them as you drag the slider.

Glass opacity

How much of the world shows through every sheet, from 0 to 100 %, default 62 %. At zero the glass is clear and only its rim and bevel hold it together; at a hundred it is solid. Each kind of surface maps the figure onto its own range, so popups and menus barely move: they have to stay readable over anything.

Glass depth

How thick the glass reads, from 0 to 100 %, default 70 %. Depth is the bevel where light bends at the edge, the bright corner that faces the light, and the tinted one on the far side where the light leaves. At zero a sheet is flat, with a plain hairline round it.

Roundness

Every corner in the interface, from precise at 0 % to bubbly at 100 %, the default. At the top of the range, buttons, fields and tabs become capsules and icon buttons become circles.

Light

The interface is lit twice. A key light gives every sheet its bevel, its edge highlight and its shadow, and it sits where the aurora behind the menus is, so every sheet on a screen agrees on where the light comes from. The second light is your pointer.

Pointer light

The pointer is a lamp. Glass catches it with a soft highlight under the cursor and a lit edge on the side facing it, on every sheet within reach. The light exists only in the glass; nothing is painted on the world behind it. The figure runs from 0 to 1, default 0.8. Turn it down for a quieter surface, or to zero to switch the lamp off.

Glow

How much the interface is allowed to emit light, from 0 to 1, default 0.35. Glow is kept for things that matter: the main button, a live selection, an alert. Turn it up for a neon look, or to zero for none at all. HUD elements have their own glow switch, element by element, in the HUD editor.

Motion and the backdrop

Animated backdrop

Behind the menus is the blurred world, the dark canvas, one slow aurora in your accent colour and a vignette. Nothing else. With Animated backdrop on, the default, the aurora drifts slowly, and the key light moves with it. Switch it off and the light holds perfectly still.

Menu blur

On by default: the game world behind Vantage screens is blurred. Off keeps a plain dim instead.

Reduce motion

Off by default. On, every animation finishes instantly: menus, lenses, knobs, toasts and titles arrive and leave without moving, and the sweep of light a new toast catches is skipped. It is for anyone who finds the movement distracting, or who wants the interface to snap.

Reading comfort

Reduce transparency

Off by default. On, every sheet of glass becomes most of the way solid, whatever the glass opacity says. The tint and the light stay; only how much of the world shows through changes. Use it for reading over a busy scene, or if translucency is hard on your eyes.

Text and size

Interface scale

The size of every Vantage screen relative to Minecraft's own GUI scale, from 0.6 to 1.8 in steps of 0.05, default 1.0.

Clean typeface

On by default. Vantage's screens and HUD elements are drawn in Inter, a real typeface, instead of Minecraft's pixel font. Chat, item tooltips and the rest of the game keep the vanilla font. Inter ships inside the jar under the SIL Open Font Licence. Switch it off to have Vantage use the pixel font too.

Supersampling

Off by default. On, Vantage screens are drawn at twice the window's resolution and scaled back down. Panels, buttons and icons are already smooth at any resolution, so this does not change them; what it improves is text. It costs four times the fill rate while a Vantage screen is open, and nothing the rest of the time.

HUD defaults

Four options set what every HUD element wears until you style it yourself in the HUD editor. An element you have given an explicit colour there keeps it whatever these say.

The HUD background opacity is a figure of its own, separate from the menus' glass opacity.

Every option at a glance

The generated reference page lists the same options straight from the mod's source.

If you want it calmer

The options that make Vantage quieter on the eyes are spread over three sections. Together:

The same looks on this site

This site is built on the same design, and the six themes here are the mod's six. The appearance button at the foot of every page lets you pick a theme and move five of the same figures (glass opacity, glass depth, roundness, pointer light and glow) for this site. What you choose there stays in your browser. It changes nothing in the game, and the game changes nothing here. The site also follows your system's reduced-motion setting.

Related

• The HUD editor: styling elements one at a time, including their own glow.
• Config profiles: keep one look for streaming and another for playing.
• The menu: finding a page and resetting an option.
• The UI toolkit: the same design contract, for developers.