Settings

Settings

In the Keystone window (the keystone button on the game's toolbar, or Option-K on a Mac, Alt-K elsewhere), on the Natural Light page. The page also says what the light is at the moment: how high the sun is, how bright and what colour the sky, the ground and the sunlight are, which other world is shining, what the engines are lighting and whether the floodlights are on.

Setting	Installed as
Natural light	on	Off: the game's own light again, all of it. Every part of the mod goes out, the lamps included.
Sky light	1	How strongly the sky lights what faces it. Only where there is air, and by day.
Ground light	1	How strongly the ground, or the planet below, lights what faces it.
Light found by rays	on	Rays are cast from the craft in every direction to find what is round it: the sky then lights it only from where it can be seen, and what the rays find lights it from there. Near the ground only.
Light thrown back	1	How strongly what the rays find lights the craft.
Inside the craft too	on	The cockpit, and the crew's portraits, lit from their windows by whatever the windows look at, with the light the walls throw back and the cabin's own lamps, instead of by the game's one flat grey; the game's own sun in the cabin dimmed by the clouds and reddened at sunset as the sun outside is.
Darkest	0.045	The least light there ever is. The game's own flat light is 0.24 in air and 0.06 in space, by night as by day: raise this towards that if nights are too dark to fly in.

The sun

Setting	Installed as
Sun through air	if nothing else does	A low sun is dimmer and redder (bluer through Duna's dust). Scatterer does this where it is installed and set to; this mod does it where nothing else does. "always" and "never" overrule that.
Shafts of sunlight	on	With the sun in view and something in front of it (a rocket, a tower, a building, the edge of a cloud), its light comes round in shafts through the air. Only where there is air; strongest with the sun low.
How strong	1	From 0 to 3.
Rain, snow, fog and dust in the air	on	With a weather mod installed (Natural Weather), what is in the air veils the distance by as much as the weather says one can see, up to the weather's top, lit as the sky and the ground light it and brighter towards the sun.
Low sun	0.7	How far the eye keeps pace with a sun that the air has dimmed. At 0 a sinking sun simply dims; at 1 it is turned all the way back up, so that the last light of the day is as strong as noon and only its colour and its long shadows say it is evening.
Depth of shadows	1	0: as the game has them, with a quarter of the sunlight coming through. 1: none comes through, and what is in shadow is lit by the sky, the ground and nothing else.
Finer shadows up close	on	On a Mac and on Linux: the game's finest shadows drawn in round the craft when the camera is close to it, as the game itself does only on Windows. One part of a craft then throws a clean shadow on another.

Other worlds

Setting	Installed as
Light of other worlds	1	The sunlight thrown back by every world in the sky. 0: none.
Night eyes	1	How far the eye opens up in the dark. At 0 a full Mun gives its true fifty-thousandth of daylight, which is nothing on a screen; at 1 it is enough to fly by, and cold and silver as moonlight looks.
Far worlds as points of light	on	A world too far off for the game to draw is a point of light as bright as it really is: from Kerbin by night Jool and Duna outshine every star. Dimmed and reddened low down, put out by daylight as the stars are; zoomed in, the game's own drawing of the world takes over.
Far craft as points of light	on	Craft too far off to be drawn catch the sun as points of light: after sunset a craft in a low orbit crosses the sky as a moving star and goes out in Kerbin's shadow. With far worlds as points of light only.

Engines

Setting	Installed as
Engine light	on	Running engines light what is round them.
How bright	1
Smoke takes the light	on	The game's smoke (an engine's trail, the cloud at a launch) is as bright as the light on it: gold at sunrise, dark at night but for the glow of the flame and the floodlights. By day it is as the game has it.

Lamps

Setting	Installed as
Lamps' beams in fog and rain	on	A craft's spotlights show their beams where the air is thick with fog, rain, snow or dust, as a car's headlights do in fog; by night most, by day hardly at all, and not in clean air.
Aeroplanes' lights	on	A winged craft shows what every aeroplane does: red and green lights at its wingtips and a white one at its tail by night, a flashing red beacon on top, and white strobes flashing at the wingtips whenever it rolls or flies, which light the wing round them.

Launch sites

Setting	Installed as
Floodlights by night	on	Four floodlights round every place a craft is rolled out to (xenon searchlights on posts, there by day too, beside a runway rather than on it), lit from dusk to dawn. Off: none, the searchlights themselves included.
How bright	1
Beams in the air	1	The floodlights' beams seen in the night air, slanting up over the site and crossing above it. 0: none.
Red lamps on tall buildings	on	By night the space centre's tall buildings carry red lamps at their tops, as anything tall enough to be in an aircraft's way does: steady at the corners of a wide roof, flashing on the tallest.
Runway lamps light the ground	on	The rows of lamps along the runway, and its big lamps at the corners, throw their light on the concrete and the grass round each one, and on whatever stands or rolls past them. They come on with the game's own lamps at dusk.
How bright	1
Light from windows	on	The lit windows of the space centre's buildings throw their light on the ground in front of them.
How bright	1

Kerbals

Setting	Installed as
Visors mirror what is round them	on	A kerbal's visor is a curved mirror with the world in it: the ground, the craft beside them, the sky, the planet below. Drawn from the head of the kerbal nearest the camera. Plainest with the dark sun visor lowered. Off: the visor as the game has it.

In the buildings

Setting	Installed as
The ground crew stand in the light they are in	on	In the assembly building and the hangar, each of the ground crew and each piece of their trucks is as bright as the floor it is on, and darkens in the rocket's shadow as the floor does. Off: as the game draws them, equally bright everywhere.

Deep sky

Setting	Installed as
Nebulae and a deeper sky	on	Nebulae, a few far galaxies and some hundreds of brighter coloured stars, laid over the game's own sky of stars.
How bright	1
Which sky	7	Another number, another sky: different nebulae in different places.
Stars come out at dusk	on	The stars come out as the sky darkens, the brightest a few minutes after sunset and the faintest at full night, and at night are as bright as clean air lets them be. Off: as the game has them (hidden until the sun is far down, and dim all night in air).

Film (done by the TUFX mod; nothing happens where TUFX is not installed, and the page says so)

Setting	Installed as
Film look	on	The picture developed as a film camera's would be: off, it is the game's own (and TUFX's profile's) again. In the editors too, at one exposure.
Contrast and colour	1	How strong the film's contrast is. At 1 the colours are left as the light makes them; above 1 colour is added as well, for a stronger look. 0: the film curve alone.
Glow	1	The glow round whatever is very bright: a flame, a lamp, sunlight on white paint. 0: the TUFX profile's own, if it has one.
The camera's eye	1	The exposure follows the view, as an eye or a camera does. In the dark it opens, slowly, and what could not be seen can be (up to a little over three stops, nine times the light). In the light it closes (though not for the sun itself, which burns out as it does in any photograph). And it opens no further than the brightest thing in view can bear: with a floodlit rocket or a sunlit planet in sight, everything dark stays dark, and the stars fade out. 0: one exposure always.
Grain in the dark	1	A picture pushed to see in the dark is a little grainy. It is faint as installed. 0: none.
Creases	1	The darkening of creases and of where one thing meets another. 0: none of this mod's.
Lens marks	1	Slightly darker corners and a trace of colour fringing towards them.