Moku Realtime

Minecraft days which take an actual day.

This is a small time mod I made because I wanted a Minecraft world to feel a bit more like somewhere you actually inhabit. The time of day follows the real time in a broad region of your choice, and a complete Minecraft day takes twenty-four real hours.

It also adjusts sunrise and sunset over the year. Summer days are longer, winter nights are longer, and places in the Southern Hemisphere get the seasons the other way around, as you would probably hope.

There is no accelerated calendar, alternate sleep system, or particularly elaborate simulation involved. The sun just comes up at roughly the right time and then takes the day getting on with it. It does mean sleeping essentially does nothing, and you are indeed stuck with the night time. Log off and go to actual bed is an idea. Maybe it'll even fix some of our sleeping habits. Or not.

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Choosing roughly where you are

The first time you join a singleplayer world, the mod asks you to choose a broad nearby region. These are deliberately vague things like North England, Central Europe, Eastern United States, or Pacific Northwest.

You can search using a somewhat more familiar place name - South Yorkshire finds North England, for example - but the mod only saves the broad region.

It does not:

• Detect your location
• Contact a location service
• Send the selected region anywhere
• Collect analytics or telemetry

Each region simply comes with an approximate latitude, longitude, and normal timezone. That is enough to work out a reasonable sunrise, sunset, and daylight-saving adjustment without needing to know precisely where anybody lives. Can't speak for people working out your general region based on your server's time but like, y'know, IPs are locational anyway so what are we talking about here?

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What happens to Minecraft time?

Sunrise is Minecraft tick 0, solar noon is 6000, sunset is 12000, and the middle of the night is approximately 18000.

The amount of real time between those points changes with the date and selected region. A British summer morning therefore takes longer to reach sunset than a British winter morning, while the whole cycle still lasts one real day.

The clock quietly checks itself every five seconds by default. This is not a heavy calculation, and it only writes a new world time when the integer tick has actually changed. It also derives the answer from the current time rather than hoping the server has run perfectly since startup, so restarts and lag do not gradually make the sky drift.

Beds still set your spawn and can clear bad weather. They do not skip the real night, because that would rather defeat the point of the mod.

Only the shared Overworld clock is managed. The Nether and End are left alone.

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Multiplayer servers

The server defines what time it is. Everybody sees the same time regardless of where the individual players live, and a player's personal Moku Realtime settings cannot change a multiplayer world's sky.

On a dedicated server, install the mod on the server, start it once, and choose the server's broad region in config/moku-realtime.json or with an operator command:

/mokurealtime location North England

Useful server commands include:

/mokurealtime status
/mokurealtime locations
/mokurealtime locations england
/mokurealtime convert 6000
/mokurealtime reload
/mokurealtime sync

The location catalogue prints the config-ready region IDs, and convert shows the approximate local date and time represented by a Minecraft tick under the current seasonal day length.

Players do not need Moku Realtime installed on their clients to join a server using it. Minecraft's normal time synchronization handles that already.

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Serene Seasons

Serene Seasons is optional, but Moku Realtime knows about it.

When both are installed, the real calendar can control Serene Seasons' season progress as well as the sky. March begins in early spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and the calendar shifts by half a year in the Southern Hemisphere.

This means the longer summer daylight, shorter winter daylight, changing foliage, and the rest of the seasonal cycle can all broadly agree with one another rather than running on separate clocks.

If Serene Seasons is not installed, the ordinary real-time day and night cycle works by itself.

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Requirements

This is for Fabric on Minecraft 26.2.

The required mod is:

• Fabric API

Serene Seasons is optional. On a dedicated server, Moku Realtime itself can be installed server-side only. For singleplayer, just install it normally with the rest of your client mods.

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That's about it

This does mean that if you always play at eleven in the evening, your world will generally also be dark at eleven in the evening. That is either the atmosphere you were after or a fairly compelling reason not to install it.

It is mostly a small immersion mod for the sort of world you return to over a long time. Morning is morning, winter evenings draw in. Why not spend the entire real afternoon building a roof?