Length of Day and Year Config Settings?

[Omicron 62]

Okay, I'm not sure how much of this someone without insight into the code will be able to answer, but I figure, asking never hurts

I noticed in the TFC config options for configuring the length of the year in Minecraft days, and the length of the Minecraft day in ticks. Especially the latter of the two greatly intrigued me. Why? For no reason other than because no other mod I've played with before has allowed me to toy with this, and I loooove trying out new stuff!

So I began to wonder: what is the immediate effect of these settings, which game systems depend on these values, which are unintentionally affected?

Like, if I set the length of a day to a tenth of normal, would the sun actually zip across the sky in the span of a single minute instead of 10, or does it only affect how the internal calendar counts the days?

In Dunkleosteus' buil 76 preview video he mentioned that he made animal pregnancy time scale with the length of the ingame year. Are there other game systems that scale? Like, for example fruit trees. The fruit respawns constantly during the month(s) it is harvestable. If I increase the length of the year and/or the length of a day, does the fruit keep respawning at the same rate (thereby increasing output per season), or does it scale back so that you get roughly the same amount of fruit per season but spread out over a longer period of RL time?

If the days are longer but the year is on default settings, do animals still need the same amount of ingame days (and thus more RL time) to go through pregnancy?

How about trees and crops - how do those react to changing one or both of these settings?

Will the player consume food and water more slowly if the day is longer (fixed base consumption per day/night cycle) or do you need twice as much food to make it through a day that lasts twice as long (constant base consumption per tick)? If it's the latter, if you sleep through a night twice as long, does that instant-consume a chunk twice as big as normal on waking up too?

...and what happens if I make the day/night cycle so ridiculously long that sleeping through the night requires more food than the entire bar can hold?

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

Okay, I'm not sure how much of this someone without insight into the code will be able to answer, but I figure, asking never hurts

I noticed in the TFC config options for configuring the length of the year in Minecraft days, and the length of the Minecraft day in ticks. Especially the latter of the two greatly intrigued me. Why? For no reason other than because no other mod I've played with before has allowed me to toy with this, and I loooove trying out new stuff!

So I began to wonder: what is the immediate effect of these settings, which game systems depend on these values, which are unintentionally affected?

Like, if I set the length of a day to a tenth of normal, would the sun actually zip across the sky in the span of a single minute instead of 10, or does it only affect how the internal calendar counts the days?

In Dunkleosteus' buil 76 preview video he mentioned that he made animal pregnancy time scale with the length of the ingame year. Are there other game systems that scale? Like, for example fruit trees. The fruit respawns constantly during the month(s) it is harvestable. If I increase the length of the year and/or the length of a day, does the fruit keep respawning at the same rate (thereby increasing output per season), or does it scale back so that you get roughly the same amount of fruit per season but spread out over a longer period of RL time?

If the days are longer but the year is on default settings, do animals still need the same amount of ingame days (and thus more RL time) to go through pregnancy?

How about trees and crops - how do those react to changing one or both of these settings?

Will the player consume food and water more slowly if the day is longer (fixed base consumption per day/night cycle) or do you need twice as much food to make it through a day that lasts twice as long (constant base consumption per tick)? If it's the latter, if you sleep through a night twice as long, does that instant-consume a chunk twice as big as normal on waking up too?

...and what happens if I make the day/night cycle so ridiculously long that sleeping through the night requires more food than the entire bar can hold?

I'm glad you asked! Most time dependent things rely on a scale relative to days, months, or years

Crops for example, take the same time to grow in your game as they would relative to a full year. If you make your year longer, crops will take longer to grow. Animal pregnancy is dependent on months. Specifically, an animal will be pregnant for 4 in-game months and the baby will take 3 in-game months to reach maturity.

[Omicron 62]

Alright, and I assume that they don't care about length of day, because a certain number of days must pass no matter what, it's just a matter how much RL time that certain number takes? Makes sense.

But what about those game systems that are potentially affected by day length? Tree growth? Player food consumption? Fruit tree fruit output?

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

Alright, and I assume that they don't care about length of day, because a certain number of days must pass no matter what, it's just a matter how much RL time that certain number takes? Makes sense.

But what about those game systems that are potentially affected by day length? Tree growth? Player food consumption? Fruit tree fruit output?

No, those thins shouldn't be affected. Barrels will be though. The amount of time barrels seal for is relative to the length of a day.

[Omicron 62]

I wouldn't exactly say "not affected". All things should be affected somehow - even if it's a constant, changing the equation around it will produce a different result. It's only a question of how the result differs from the norm.

Now that I am finally home from work, I am finally able to run a test. I copied my SSP world and ran it for a while on a 60 second day/night cycle (that's 20x sped up compared to default).

Observations:

- Minecraft now looks like a timelapse video

- Trees couldn't care less. Despite going through some 30 ingame days, not a single one of the 40-50 saplings in my vicinity decided to grow. Not even those planted a long time ago. Trees, therefore, seem affected only by the passage of RL time.

- The same goes for wild grass regrowth.

- Fruit trees, on the other hand, did care, and quite a bit too. Their growth stages seem to depend on the passage of calendar days (unsure if that scales with year length or not), so I was able to watch them growing up on fast-forward.

- Fruits themselves, in return, were once again unfazed. Much like trees, they seem to depend on the passage of RL time to respawn. As a result, a full-grown red apple tree yielded a paltry 24 apples before going out of season, while on default settings it would give you at least 4 stacks if harvested religiously. Quite a difference.

- I did not have any pregnant animals or crops to observe, but as dunk said above they should behave exactly like fruit trees.

- A freshly lit charcoal pit finished in about 1-2 minutes. It is definitely dependant on the passage of ingame days.

- My food bar positively disintegrated in front of my very eyes. I had to eat almost constantly to keep it from emptying. That means that no matter how long or short the day is, you'll always need roughly the same amount of food from one sunrise to the next (barring extra consumption through player activity, of course, if that exists in TFC). As a result, playing with a fast day/night cycle is near-impossible because the player will quickly starve to death. You just can't procure enough food fast enough to keep up with the hunger bar, especially at game start.

Bugs spotted:

- Something goes wonky with the ingame calendar if you change the day/night cycle length. The date in my world at the time of copying was the 4th of september; logging in with the faster day/night cycle, the calendar shows me the 6th of october, and the fruit trees have very obviously jumped ahead a stage or two. Saving the world in that state and resetting the day length to default will revert the date to the 4th of september upon logging in again, but the fruit trees kept their advanced growth stage.

Other noteworthy things:

- Rei's Minimap continues simulating day and night lighting as if it was still a 20 minute cycle, no matter what the config is set to. Apparently the mod doesn't actually poll the light level in real time, but only pretends to do so while running off a fixed timer in the background