DayTime Counter

A lightweight, vanilla-style day and clock counter for the HUD. Uses the overworld clock time, so it always matches the visible day/night cycle — no drift, no guessing, no syncing issues in multiplayer.

The whole thing is built to blend into vanilla's own UI: the progress bar reuses Minecraft's XP bar sprites, the HUD icon shows the actual time of day (dawn, day, sunset, dusk, night), and the counter is placed exactly where a HUD element should live — including automatically staying out of the way of a boss bar.

🌐 Official website coming soon

We are preparing the official website for our mods, where you will be able to discover upcoming projects, report issues through the ticket system, and suggest ideas or new features. The link will be added to the mod descriptions as soon as the website is available.

The website will not host mod downloads directly: all mods will remain connected to Modrinth and will continue to be downloaded exclusively from this platform.

🆕 What's new in 1.4.3

This release is about playing nicely with other mods' HUD elements, plus another batch of public API for developers:

• This mod's automatic boss-bar avoidance (the shrink-and-duck behavior for the "top center" HUD position) already reacts to any boss bar shown through vanilla's own boss bar system — dragon, wither, a raid, or a server/datapack's own /bossbar command — which covers most OneBlock-style maps, since their "Level: X" progress bar is typically implemented exactly that way. If some other mod still overlaps this one (one that draws its own bar outside that shared channel), a new "Extra top clearance" setting (Settings → HUD → HUD Position) lets you nudge this mod's HUD clear of it with one click.
• Hardcore run recap: on a hardcore world's final death, a dedicated "You survived N days" screen now appears in front of the usual death screen, with a short recap pulled straight from your World Journal (era names, first Nether/End, the Dragon, raids/trades/advancements) and a one-click shortcut into the full journal.
• Day display format: a new setting groups the day counter into weeks, months, or years ("Week 36 · Day 1", "Month 9 · Week 4 · Day 1", ...) instead of just the plain running count — purely a different way to read the same number, with a toggle for whether the smallest unit resets each period or keeps counting up alongside the bigger label. The unit order follows what reads naturally per language instead of one fixed word order — English largest-to-smallest ("Year 1 · Month 9 · Week 4 · Day 1"), Italian smallest-to-largest ("Giorno 1 · Settimana 4 · Mese 9 · Anno 1").
• Three new bits of public API for developers: generic named counters (recordCustomCounter/getCustomCounterCount), a DAY_MILESTONE_REACHED event, and getHudBlockBounds() so another mod can draw its own HUD content anchored to this one's block — see For developers below.

✨ Features

• Current world day counter, with a brief pulse animation the moment the day advances (toggleable)
• Day display format: keep the plain running count, or group it into weeks, months, or years — purely visual, nothing this mod tracks internally is affected
• Hardcore run recap: a dedicated "You survived N days" screen, with a short recap from your World Journal, in front of the usual death screen on a hardcore world's final death
• 24-hour or 12-hour clock format
• Day progress bar drawn with vanilla XP bar sprites, with an optional day/night color tint — turns solid red instead while you're in the Nether, since there's no day/night cycle to track there
• Dawn/day/sunset/dusk/night HUD icon that follows the actual in-game time — replaced with a Netherrack icon in the Nether
• Compass direction shown in the HUD label while holding a compass
• Contextual HUD: shows how long you've been on your current Nether visit — in seconds for the first minute, then in minutes — with the clock itself rendering as an animated glitch effect there, since a time-of-day reading is meaningless in the Nether; or your current survival streak in a Hardcore world — only one shown at a time
• Vanilla-style toast reminder when it's getting late enough to sleep
• Small milestone sound on notable days (50, 100, 365...) — turn it off, or pick which sound plays, from the settings screen
• 9 HUD position presets (top/middle/bottom × left/center/right), with automatic shrink-and-shift when a boss bar (dragon, wither, raid, a server's own custom one, or most OneBlock-style level bars) would otherwise overlap it — plus an "Extra top clearance" setting as a manual fallback for the rare mod that draws its own bar outside that shared channel
• Custom HUD bars from other mods can appear stacked below (or above) this counter, if you have a compatible mod installed — toggleable in settings
• Quick Journal: a dedicated key opens a small popup to jot a note down without leaving gameplay or opening the full World Journal book
• Built-in Mod Menu settings screen, split into four tabs (HUD, Info & Alerts, World Journal, Keybinds) — no config file editing needed, and this mod's two keys can be rebound right from the Keybinds tab
• Fully client-side — safe to use on any server, vanilla or modded

📖 World Journal

Open the World Journal from the pause menu:

• Rename each dimension's era (Overworld/Nether/End) to whatever fits your playthrough
• Automatic milestones, logged for you: first Nether visit, first End visit, the Ender Dragon defeated, and world birthdays at 100/365/500/1000 days — if you'd already reached one before installing the mod, it's estimated retroactively instead of being skipped
• Every death, not just the first — the very first one is still called out specially
• Every raid you defend or lose
• Every villager trade, with exactly what you received
• Every advancement you complete
• A survival streak: how many days you've currently survived without dying, and your longest streak ever in that world
• Screenshot photos: press F2 (Minecraft's own screenshot key) in a world and the shot is automatically captured into the journal as a photo card, with the day, coordinates, and dimension recorded alongside it — click a photo to give it a title and description, or take one on the spot with the "Screenshot" button in the pause menu. Photos are laid out as a small, gently tilted, scattered cluster per day, like a real scrapbook page, with a large preview on click.
• Daily weather: whether it rained or thundered is recorded and shown on days it actually happened
• Add your own notes, tied to the current in-game day, either from the book screen or with the /journal add command (see Commands below)
• Entries from other mods, occasionally with their own icon, if you have a compatible mod installed
• See what you've collected each day — smart enough to not count items you already owned that you only dropped and picked back up, or that followed you through a game mode switch
• Automatic backups: a copy of your journal is kept every time you join a world (the last 5 are retained), so a corrupted file doesn't mean losing your whole journal

Journals are per-world (singleplayer) or per-server (multiplayer), saved locally on your own client — every player keeps their own. Automatic entries (advancements, deaths, raids, trades, milestones) always show up translated into whatever language the game is currently set to, including entries logged in an earlier session under a different language — nothing stays stuck in the language it was originally logged in. Notes you typed yourself, or entries logged by another mod through the public API, are kept exactly as written.

🎮 Controls

• H — open the Vanilla DayTime Counter settings screen
• J — open the Quick Journal popup, to jot down a note without leaving gameplay

Both keys can be remapped at any time, either from this mod's own Keybinds settings tab or from Minecraft's own Controls menu — both stay in sync.

⌨️ Commands

Client-side /journal commands, for quick edits without opening the book screen:

• /journal add <text> — logs a manual entry on the current in-game day
• /journal removeday <day> — shows how many entries exist for that day; /journal removeday <day> confirm deletes all of them
• /journal clear — shows a warning about what's about to happen; /journal clear confirm permanently wipes the current world's entire journal

removeday and clear are destructive and can't be undone, which is why both require typing confirm as a separate step instead of running immediately.

🛠️ Settings

From the settings screen (now split into HUD, Info & Alerts, World Journal, and Keybinds tabs) you can toggle:

• 12-hour / 24-hour clock format
• HUD position (9 presets), plus an "Extra top clearance" fine-tune (Off / +20px / +40px / +60px) for the top presets
• Day counter visibility, and its change-pulse animation
• Day display format (Default / Weekly / Monthly / Annual), and whether the smallest shown unit resets each period or keeps counting up
• Clock visibility
• Progress bar visibility, and its day/night multicolor tint
• Compass direction display
• Contextual HUD (Nether visit timer / Hardcore survival streak)
• Custom HUD bars — show or hide every progress bar added by other mods at once
• Era name display
• Sleep-time toast visibility
• Milestone sound, on/off and which sound plays
• World birthday toast
• Hardcore end screen (the "You survived N days" recap) on/off
• Screenshot photo capture into the journal
• Daily weather tracking
• Quick Journal key enabled/disabled

And, from the Keybinds tab, rebind this mod's own keys (with the same conflict warning vanilla shows for clashing keys) or jump straight into vanilla's full key-binding list.

vanilladaytimecounter.json

⚙️ Compatibility

Three separate jars are published, one per Minecraft version — download the one matching your game:

• Minecraft 26.1 — Fabric Loader 0.19.3+
• Minecraft 26.2 — Fabric Loader 0.19.3+
• Minecraft 26.3 Pre-Release 1 — Fabric Loader 0.19.3+ — 🧪 experimental, built against a pre-release (not the final stable 26.3),
• Requires: Fabric API
• Environment: Client-side only

❓ FAQ

🧩 For developers — the API keeps growing

Vanilla DayTime Counter exposes a small public API (dev.notesow.vanilladaytimecounter.api.v1) so other Fabric mods can build on top of it instead of reinventing their own day counter. This mod's source isn't public, so everything a developer needs is written out below, in full — there's no separate repo or docs site to link to.

New in 1.4.3: recordCustomCounter(Identifier)/recordCustomCounter(Identifier, int) and getCustomCounterCount(Identifier)/getCustomCounterCount(Identifier, long) — generic named counters through this mod's journal, for anything the built-in death/raid/trade/advancement counters don't cover. Also new: the DAY_MILESTONE_REACHED event (fires on this mod's own open-ended day-milestone set — 50, 365, every multiple of 100), and getHudBlockBounds()/HudBlockBounds, so another mod can find out where this mod's HUD block currently is and anchor its own HUD content to it (see "Locating the HUD block" below).

New in 1.4.2: HudBar / HudBarRegistry, letting another mod draw its own progress bar directly in this mod's HUD block (see "Drawing your own HUD bar" below). Also new: logCustomEvent(Identifier, String, Identifier icon) — the same as logCustomEvent but with an item icon shown next to the entry — and celebrateMilestone(Identifier, String, Identifier icon), which logs like that and also plays this mod's own configured milestone sound the first time that id is logged.

New in 1.4.1: read the player's current and longest survival streak, how long they've been on their current Nether visit, how many photos have been captured (and their day/coordinates/dimension/title/description), and each day's recorded weather. Also new: PHOTO_CAPTURED, WEATHER_CHANGED, and WORLD_BIRTHDAY events, plus the PhotoRecord/WeatherRecord DTOs.

New in 1.4.0: read how many times the player has died, defended or lost a raid (now with which ones were won vs. lost), traded with a villager (and what they got), or completed an advancement — each either as a world/server total or scoped to a single in-game day. Also new: JOURNAL_DAY_REMOVED/JOURNAL_CLEARED events, so a mod tracking journal data gets notified instead of holding onto stale state after /journal removeday//journal clear.

💡 What you can build with it

• A progression/RPG mod that draws its own mana/stamina bar right in this HUD, and rewards the player once they've collected enough of a given material, died too many times, survived a long enough streak, or completed a specific advancement.
• A horror mod that triggers a scripted event on a specific day, or the first time the player has been "out too long" after dark.
• A companion mod that logs its own milestones into the player's journal alongside this mod's automatic ones (first boss kill, first structure found, whatever fits your mod) — with its own icon, and a little celebration sound for the big ones — tracks its own progress with a named counter — or reacts to a captured photo/weather change.
• A boss/quest mod that draws its own HUD bar anchored to (or clear of) this mod's own block via getHudBlockBounds(), instead of hardcoding a screen position that might collide with it.
• Anything that just wants a reliable "what day/time is it" without re-implementing overworld-clock math.

🚀 Depending on this mod

There's no published Maven/Gradle repository or API-only artifact — this mod is built with Gradle/Fabric Loom, but only as a local build, not published to a Maven repository. To depend on it: grab the built jar (e.g. from a release download), add it to your own project's compile-time classpath the same way you'd add any other Fabric mod jar as a local file dependency, and declare it in your own fabric.mod.json:

"depends": {
  "vanilladaytimecounter": ">=1.4.3"
}

(>=1.3.7 is enough if you only need the material/journal/event methods, which shipped earlier; >=1.4.0 is enough for the death/raid/trade/advancement counters, getRaids(), and the journal-removal events; >=1.4.1 for the survival streak, Nether-visit timer, photo, and weather methods/events/DTOs; >=1.4.2 for HudBar/HudBarRegistry, the icon overload of logCustomEvent, and celebrateMilestone. recordCustomCounter/getCustomCounterCount, DAY_MILESTONE_REACHED, and getHudBlockBounds/HudBlockBounds were only ever released starting in 1.4.3.) No registration or init call is required on your side — import classes from dev.notesow.vanilladaytimecounter.api.v1 and use them directly, as soon as both mods are loaded. Because this is a client-only mod ("environment": "client"), your integration code should also live in your client-side entrypoint/package.

public static HudBar.Builder HudBar.builder(Identifier id, DoubleSupplier progress, IntSupplier color)

.icon(Identifier icon)            // optional 16x16 item icon left of the bar
.label(Supplier<String> label)    // optional text right of the bar
.visible(BooleanSupplier visible) // optional; defaults to always true
.build()

HudBarRegistry.register(HudBar bar)     // registering the same id again replaces it in place
HudBarRegistry.unregister(Identifier id)

HudBarRegistry.register(
        HudBar.builder(
                        Identifier.fromNamespaceAndPath("rpgmod", "mana"),
                        RpgModClient::currentManaFraction, // DoubleSupplier, in [0.0, 1.0]
                        () -> 0xFF3355FF)                  // IntSupplier, ARGB blue
                .icon(Identifier.withDefaultNamespace("lapis_lazuli"))
                .label(() -> "Mana")
                .build());

public static HudBlockBounds DayTimeApi.getHudBlockBounds()

public final int x, y, width, height; // GUI-scaled screen pixels; all 0 if !visible
public final boolean visible;         // false = this mod's block is drawing nothing right now

HudBlockBounds bounds = DayTimeApi.getHudBlockBounds();
int y = bounds.visible ? bounds.y + bounds.height + 6 : 8; // just below it, or a fallback
drawMyQuestBar(graphics, y);

package com.example.horrormod;

import dev.notesow.vanilladaytimecounter.api.v1.DayTimeApi;
import dev.notesow.vanilladaytimecounter.api.v1.DayTimeEvents;
import net.fabricmc.api.ClientModInitializer;
import net.minecraft.resources.Identifier;

public final class HorrorModClient implements ClientModInitializer {
    private static final Identifier SCREAM_DAY_13 =
            Identifier.fromNamespaceAndPath("horrormod", "heard_scream_day13");

    @Override
    public void onInitializeClient() {
        DayTimeEvents.DAY_CHANGED.register(day -> {
            if (day == 13 && !DayTimeApi.hasLoggedEvent(SCREAM_DAY_13)) {
                triggerScareEffect();
                DayTimeApi.logCustomEvent(SCREAM_DAY_13, "You heard a scream in the dark");
            }
        });
    }

    private void triggerScareEffect() { /* ... */ }
}

Identifier wolvesFed = Identifier.fromNamespaceAndPath("rpgmod", "wolves_fed");

// Every time the player feeds a wolf:
DayTimeApi.recordCustomCounter(wolvesFed);

// Later, anywhere:
if (DayTimeApi.getCustomCounterCount(wolvesFed) >= 10) {
    grantWolfWhispererTitle();
}

Identifier bossDefeated = Identifier.fromNamespaceAndPath("bossmod", "swamp_hag_defeated");
DayTimeApi.celebrateMilestone(bossDefeated, "Defeated the Swamp Hag",
        Identifier.withDefaultNamespace("golden_apple"));

DayTimeEvents.DAY_CHANGED.register(day -> {
    if (DayTimeApi.getCurrentSurvivalStreak() >= 50) {
        grantSurvivorPerk();
    }
});

DayTimeEvents.DAY_MILESTONE_REACHED.register(day -> {
    spawnCelebrationFireworks();
});

DayTimeEvents.WEATHER_CHANGED.register((day, weather) -> {
    if (weather.thundered) {
        spawnStormAmbiance();
    }
});

DayTimeEvents.PHOTO_CAPTURED.register((day, x, y, z, dimensionKey) -> {
    queueForGallery(day, x, y, z, dimensionKey);
});

// Later, once the player has had a chance to edit it in the World Journal book:
for (PhotoRecord photo : DayTimeApi.getPhotos()) {
    if (!photo.title.isEmpty()) {
        updateGalleryEntry(photo);
    }
}

Identifier firstBossKill = Identifier.fromNamespaceAndPath("bossmod", "first_boss_kill");
if (!DayTimeApi.hasLoggedEvent(firstBossKill)) {
    DayTimeApi.logCustomEvent(firstBossKill, "Defeated the Swamp Hag");
}

public final long day;            // in-game day (0-based) this entry belongs to
public final String text;         // already-resolved human-readable description
public final Identifier sourceId; // null if typed manually in-game; otherwise who logged it
public final Identifier icon;     // null unless logged via logCustomEvent(id, text, icon)/celebrateMilestone
public boolean isManual();        // shorthand for sourceId == null

// TradeRecord
public final long day;
public final Identifier itemId; // what was received, e.g. minecraft:emerald
public final int amount;        // how many, accounting for stack size

// AdvancementRecord
public final long day;
public final Identifier advancementId; // e.g. minecraft:nether/root

// RaidRecord
public final long day;
public final boolean victory; // true = defended, false = lost

// PhotoRecord
public final long day;
public final double x;
public final double y;
public final double z;
public final String dimensionKey; // DIMENSION_OVERWORLD / DIMENSION_NETHER / DIMENSION_END
public final String title;        // "" if the player hasn't set one yet
public final String caption;      // "" if the player hasn't set one yet

// WeatherRecord
public final long day;
public final boolean rained;    // rained (or thundered) at any point that day
public final boolean thundered; // thundered at any point that day

public final int x;
public final int y;
public final int width;
public final int height;
public final boolean visible; // false = drawing nothing right now; x/y/width/height are all 0

🚧 Rules & limits — what you can't do

• Namespace your own entries, bars, and counters. logCustomEvent/hasLoggedEvent/HudBar.builder/recordCustomCounter all take a Minecraft Identifier: always use your own mod id as the namespace (e.g. Identifier.fromNamespaceAndPath("yourmod", "your_event")), never vanilladaytimecounter — that's reserved for this mod's own entries and using it risks colliding with them.
• Each exact event id can only be logged once, ever, per world/server. There's no "log this again on a later day" — if you need a repeatable trigger, mint a new id per occurrence (e.g. suffix the day number into it, like "scream_day_" + DayTimeApi.currentDay()). Same rule applies to celebrateMilestone's sound: it only plays the first time a given id is logged. Custom counters are the exception — recordCustomCounter is not de-duplicated, call it every time the thing you're counting happens.
• Client-side only. Every call has to happen on the Minecraft client thread, same as any other Fabric client-side code — there's no server-side counterpart, and no way to read another player's data from a dedicated server; every player who needs this data must have the mod installed on their own client.
• No breaking changes within api.v1. New capability is added as new methods/events, never by changing what's already here. A hypothetical breaking change would ship as a new api.v2 package alongside (not replacing) api.v1. Only dev.notesow.vanilladaytimecounter.api.v1 is covered by this policy — internal implementation classes (journal storage, file format, HUD rendering) can change at any time.

📜 Licensing note

This mod's source is all-rights-reserved: you may download and use the mod, but its source is not licensed for redistribution or modification. Depending on the compiled jar at compile-time/runtime to call this public API — the normal way any Fabric mod depends on another — is ordinary use of the mod, not redistribution or modification of it. Players using your mod will need Vanilla DayTime Counter installed too, exactly like any other Fabric mod dependency.