DayZ Day & Night Cycle Calculator

What the time settings do

DayZ servers set the speed of the in-game clock in serverDZ.cfg, the server's main config file. Two settings control it, and two more decide where it starts after a restart:

serverTimeAcceleration

How fast in-game time runs compared with real time, all day and all night. 1 is real speed, 6 is six times faster. The BI community wiki lists it as a multiplier from 0.1 to 64. The comment in many serverDZ.cfg files gives 0 to 24, so 24 or below is the safe choice.

serverNightTimeAcceleration

An extra multiplier that only applies at night, from 0.1 to 64. It is multiplied by serverTimeAcceleration: with time acceleration 2 and night acceleration 4, nights run 8 times faster than real time while days run 2 times faster.

serverTime

The in-game time the server starts at. "SystemTime" uses the local time of the machine. A fixed value in YYYY/MM/DD/HH/MM format, such as 2015/4/8/17/23, also sets the in-game date, and the date changes how long days are.

serverTimePersistent

1 saves the in-game time, so the next start carries on from it. 0 starts from serverTime again after every restart.

How the numbers are worked out

Daylight in real time is the hours between sunrise and sunset divided by serverTimeAcceleration. Night in real time is the remaining hours divided by serverTimeAcceleration times serverNightTimeAcceleration. For example, with sunrise at 06:00, sunset at 20:00 and the values 6 and 4, the 14 hours of daylight take 14 ÷ 6 = 2 h 20 min, and the 10 hours of night take 10 ÷ 24 = 25 min. A full in-game day then lasts 2 h 45 min.

Make nights shorter without speeding up days

Leave serverTimeAcceleration as it is and raise serverNightTimeAcceleration. Days keep their length and only nights get shorter. At 1 and 1, a 10-hour night takes 10 real hours. Set the night value to 4 and it takes 2 h 30 min, while daylight still runs at real speed.

Because the night value is multiplied by the time acceleration, changing one changes the other's effect. If you double serverTimeAcceleration and want nights to stay the same length, halve serverNightTimeAcceleration.

The trade-offs

• Faster time lets players who log in at the same hour every day see different times of day. The sun also moves faster, so dawn and dusk pass quickly.
• Very short nights take away the dark that makes night play tense, along with the reason to carry night vision, flares and chemlights. Some groups prefer that, others want proper nights.
• Very long nights, at real speed, keep players who can only play in the evening in the dark for their whole session.
• Short days with long restarts show players everything. Long days with short restarts may not, especially with serverTimePersistent = 0 and a fixed serverTime: every restart starts at the same hour.

Change the time settings on a Nitrado server

1. Stop the server in the Nitrado web interface.
2. Open your server's settings and find the time acceleration options. The labels may not match the setting names exactly. On a server you host yourself, edit serverDZ.cfg instead.
3. Enter the values from the calculator and save.
4. Start the server. The server reads its time settings when it starts, so the new speeds apply from then on.

Most servers restart every few hours. The restart schedule guide covers restarts on a timer and an in-game countdown with messages.xml, which the messages.xml generator builds for you. On Xbox and PlayStation servers running Law's KillFeed, the dashboard's Server Files page opens, checks and uploads mission files such as messages.xml, keeps the last 15 versions of every file, and edits them in place on the paid plan.

Questions