Day Cycle
| Day Cycle | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mechanic |
The Day Cycle is the twenty hours between waking at six in the morning and collapsing at two the next, and it is the frame every other system in the valley hangs on. The farmer always wakes at the same hour but can end the day whenever they like by climbing into a bed, which is also the only moment the game writes a save. Shops open and close on it, villagers walk their routes by it, fish come and go with it, and animals put themselves to bed by it. Staying up late costs energy in the morning and staying up past two costs gold, so the cycle quietly pushes a farmer towards a tidy evening. Time itself runs fast, with a full day passing in about a quarter of an hour of real time.
Overview
Ending the day is a deliberate act. Walking into the space a bed occupies brings up a prompt, and answering it starts the overnight sequence: the day's shipping is totted up, the profit screen appears, and only once that screen is accepted does the game save and roll on to the next morning. Nothing else saves, which is why a crash or a quit mid-day loses the day entirely.
Bedtime decides how the next morning begins. Asleep by midnight and not worn out, a farmer wakes with full energy and health. Past midnight the recovery falls away, down to about three quarters at one in the morning and half just before two. The next day still starts at six whatever time the farmer went to bed, so a long evening only costs energy.
Two in the morning is the hard wall. The farmer passes out there with energy still in the bar, and if that happens anywhere but a Farmhouse or a Cabin somebody carries them home: a JojaMart medical team, Linus, Marlon, or Harvey if he is not the farmer's spouse. All of them except Marlon take a tenth of the farmer's gold for the trouble, up to a cap, and the bill arrives as a letter in the post the next morning. Linus is the kind exception who does not mention what it cost. Falling asleep indoors costs nothing at all.
Nightfall moves with the season, and it is earlier than most farmers expect. Spring and Summer hold the light until eight in the evening, Fall until seven and Winter only until six. At nightfall the background sound shifts, lamps and sconces light themselves, windows go dark and interiors need a light source of their own. Outdoors the darkness arrives gradually rather than all at once. A room entered before nightfall stays lit until it is left and re-entered, which is a small quirk worth knowing in a long mining session.
The clock drives the valley rather than just the farmer. Villagers follow timed routes with the day of the week shifting them around, shops keep their own opening hours, and most of Pelican Town is shut until nine in the morning. Fish follow the clock too, and the game counts anything after six in the evening as night for the purposes of which fish are biting, which is two hours before it actually looks dark in Spring.
Animals run on a schedule of their own. If the weather is fine and the animal door is open they let themselves out in the morning to eat grass, start heading back to the barn or coop at five in the evening, begin settling at seven and stop moving around at eight. A sleeping animal cannot be petted, so friendship has to be built before then, with one exception: cows and goats gain hearts from being milked, and milking them after they have settled is actually easier because they no longer wander out of reach. Animals occasionally refuse to go inside and mill about at midnight, and leaving the farm and coming back puts them to bed.
The small hours run on a different clock for machinery. A twenty-hour day counts as twelve hundred minutes for processing, but each hour between two and six in the morning is worth a hundred minutes rather than sixty. The practical effect is that something started just before bed at ten to two is credited with far more time than it looks like: a batch of oil or a gold smelt that nominally needs five or six hours will be waiting, finished, at six in the morning.
Real time passes quickly. Ten minutes on the clock takes about seven seconds, which makes an hour about forty seconds and a whole day something like fourteen real minutes. The Skull Cavern is the exception, where the clock ticks a little more slowly against real time, so an hour spent down there takes longer to live through than an hour spent on the farm. In a single-player save the clock stops for cutscenes, menus and some animations such as reeling in a fish or mounting a horse. In a shared save it keeps running regardless, which is why co-op groups learn to shop quickly.
Notes
Napping is a multiplayer trick. A farmer can lie down during the day, decline the prompt to end the day and recover energy and health steadily, the same way the Spa does. The bed also reports how many other farmers are already waiting to sleep. Everyone has to be in bed or passed out before the profit screen appears, and everyone has to accept it before the save is written and the next day begins.
The pause is a real tool in a solo save. Opening the game menu, the quest journal or the billboard stops the clock dead, and the display greys out to show it, so a farmer can plan a route or reorganise a pack without spending a minute of the day. The same breathing space is not there in a shared save, where the clock keeps running while someone reads their mail.
All Mechanics
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
