Shadowy Shadows

This mini-mini-mod contains shadow and shadow-adjacent VFX assets for virtual photography along with a few starry white glitter assets to bring a bit of hope to the darkness. For the full catalog and better images, see the Baldur's Gate Fashion Encyclopaedia.

A long while back, I proposed the contents of this mod in a low-effort trolling attempt. Unfortunately, I just ended up playing myself, and spent the long winter contemplating how nice it actually would be to have a mod that allowed for... something else. Not rays, but darkness. Not light. Its absence.

Shadows.

SHADOWY shadows.*

And thus this mod was born, its publication spurred on by serendipitous selections of themes for the 2026 Modathon. The majority are vanilla VFX made into spawnable/moveable/placeable items alongside custom animations/VFX built for this mod.

With many sincere apologies in advance, these assets currently need to be spawned with your favourite item-spawning mod of choice (e.g. Realm Builder or anything else that spawns root templates). I spent nearly nine hours straight trying to get Toolkit to put these into a container (ANY container) and it flatly is refusing to do so. Smarter and better modders than I tried to troubleshoot it to no avail. Long story short, I suspect something got corrupted in the stats files, but, since AllSpark decided that a lot of the VFX ceased to exist after compiling them, I can't repack it into a new Toolkit file without losing a lot of the VFX, either.

This does not (SHOULD not!) contain any non-vanilla virtual textures.

Complete item list (with UIDs for instant spawn):

A Cloud of Hope      VFX_GLIT_SparklesWhiteCloud      e017ad2e-68f7-4bdf-b38d-148bb2ffee66

A Glimmer of Holographic Hope      VFX_GLIT_WhiteSparklesHolo      88a94f6f-7124-4d45-942b-8084fc936900

A Glimmer of Hope      VFX_GLIT_WhiteSparkles      b2435591-f9f9-4aed-9fb1-89e1bdad5c62

Black Plane A (2x2)      VFX_SHAD_BlackPlaneA_2x2      e8095c10-330c-4eb5-abfe-4a1f0ec5c459

Black Plane A (2x4)      VFX_SHAD_BlackPlaneA_2x4      a2fd6b06-ac09-46fd-825b-00327213ce5d

Black Plane A (2x8)      VFX_SHAD_BlackPlaneA_2x8      782f8fbb-0ad8-4f6a-8b1b-53ff0e0d2c56

Rushing Shadows A      VFX_SHAD_RushingShadowsA      cd21fc24-daef-402b-85e9-5a351dbed72c

Rushing Shadows B      VFX_SHAD_RushingShadowsB      0d1ebe17-619c-49c4-a3df-797bff6354cb

Shadow A      VFX_SHAD_ShadowA           153b571b-34cc-4e0a-9a88-852e17290f63

Shadow Aura      VFX_SHAD_ShadowAuraA      43d2cf0b-c8d4-4c81-a9f8-9432d43daed3

Shadow Aura B      VFX_SHAD_ShadowAuraB      5f8a79cf-4e43-46aa-9a7b-9778d4939862

Shadow Black Hole A      VFX_SHAD_ShadowBlackHoleA      28b95eae-0e98-4c07-bd07-89d042de437f

Shadow Black Hole B      VFX_SHAD_ShadowBlackHoleB      720ad2f9-9a86-4b59-94c5-143