Everyone is probably tired of me asking questions about lighting mods. I hop from lighting mod to lighting mod trying to tweak them the way I like, but they seem to rebel against me....

I am currently using the lighting mod BrntWaffles Perfect Day 4.0 Roaring Heights Water. I would like to finally end the search and keep this one, but when I try to make nights dark it doesn't seem to obey. The nights will display to be just as bright as if I made no changes at all. Other nights, IF it starts to get dark when I expect the ground will only be dark and the sky will stay bright. Most of the time, the sky and ground won't be equally dark until almost 1 o'clock in the morning. > : (

Btw, I am using the darkest most possible black I can use! I like the realism of pitch black nights.

You can't see both sides of the colour ramp because I had it zoomed in, but I do this to both sides to every IMG file --> Export As to replace the original --> Replace the original IMG with the new IMG in S3PE.

Does that mod cover all sky types? What do your corresponding ini files look like? There are lots of values regarding light intensity and moon brightness in the ini files, so check those too.
These may also help:
https://modthesims.info/showpost.ph...7&postcount=194

https://modthesims.info/showpost.ph...2&postcount=198

This image shows the hours, but I think you probably know all this!
https://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img...8E2A9E6_IMG.jpg

I took a screenshot below of all the sky types it has. I'm not sure to be exact because it doesn't have a direct name.

These are the INI files - https://drive.google.com/drive/fold...3Zu?usp=sharing

That covers all sky types. Could you post a screenshot of each of the colour ramps? Also, definitely check your ini files, try playing with the settings in those for moon brightness etc.

Does moon brightest determine how bright or dark nights are? What other things can I tweak specifically? I just want to make sure before I go messing everything up. I'm not too confident.

There's a setting called manmade light intensity which I recall affects both artificial lighting and the moon brightness, which could affect how dark you perceive the night to be (how efffective the streetlights are for example). Also there's a setting HorizonLightMinimum which affects the terrain brightness. The sky colour is controlled directly from the DDS file though, so I'm not sure why your skies aren't looking black. Remember though that, the colour ramps are a very small size/ area, and are just giving a RGB colour which the game uses to paint the entire sky dome at any one point. So if your colour ramp is not true black, but is instead dark brown or dark blue, this can be more obvious when seen on the larger expanse of the sky dome.

Also check exactly what sky type your world is using when you are seeing it as beeing too light- some lighting mods (and the EA world defaults) use a very long duration between different sky types, so use the weather change mod so set your sky:
https://modthesims.info/download.php?t=481816
I never played much with the later EPs, but there is also a setting for full moon nights that could affect things, so check your moon phase too.

I figured it out. I looked at my colour ramps and used a website I bookmarked for military time. Then I tested it in game. I didn't color enough like I thought, silly me. :P

Well done! Glad you got it how you wanted it!