When it's quiet
The sky is never still — a slow crackle of lightning at rest, and a camera that starts to drift after twenty-five seconds. What that is, and what stops it.
Stop touching the keyboard and mouse. Twenty-five seconds later, the camera starts to turn on its own. The lightning never stopped.
This is the one part of the 3D view that exists for no practical reason. It's worth explaining anyway, because software that starts moving by itself should tell you what it's doing.
The lightning#
A resting sky still fires. Every few seconds — somewhere between two and five — one orb lights, its bolts carry the charge outward, and its neighbours catch it a beat later. Chain lightning, jagged and forked, and then it dies. A moment later another orb picks it up somewhere else.
Never more than a strike or two at once. It's a slow crackle, not a light show, and it runs whenever nothing is selected and nothing is being lit — with an agent working or not. Click a node, or let the agent light something, and the ambient strikes pause until the sky is at rest again.
The cruise#
Leave the sky alone for twenty-five seconds and the camera begins to drift: orbiting the mass of your project slowly, about four degrees a second — a lap takes a minute and a half.
It starts from wherever you left the camera, so there's no jump — you look away, and when you look back the project is turning gently in front of you.
What stops the cruise#
Move the pointer over the sky. Press a key. Click.
Any of those stops it at once, and the camera stays exactly where the cruise left it — it doesn't snap back. Wherever it had drifted to becomes your new viewpoint, and you take over from there. The twenty-five-second clock restarts every time you touch anything, so it can only ever begin when you've genuinely stepped away.
While an agent is working, the cruise doesn't start at all. The sky will not begin sightseeing while there is real activity to watch — that would be the app competing with itself for your attention. The lightning, being cheap and quiet, carries on.
Note
There is no in-app setting for the ambient effects, and the sky does not read the operating system's reduce-motion preference. The one control is turning the 3D view off entirely — Settings → Graph & Explorer, or the icon in the menu bar — which is a real off switch.
That's an honest gap rather than a design position, and worth knowing before it puzzles you.
The sky draws while you can see it#
The 3D view draws every frame while it's on screen — idle or not. It goes quiet only when something covers it: under a file tab it stops drawing entirely, and under a surface tab such as Settings, or while the terminal has your keyboard, it drops to a low frame rate as a backdrop. It wakes the moment you come back.
On a laptop on battery, that's the number to know: a sky on screen is a sky being drawn. A file tab in front of it costs nothing.