Day/night cycle

[RikOz]

Has the day/night cycle in-game been speeded way up? I know it was always faster than a normal 24-hour cycle, but now I'm seeing shadows visibly moving at a walking pace. I don't remember seeing that before. Then again, the older computer I used to play on was much inferior to the one I have now, so I may have simply had shadows disabled or turned way down previously.

[Redlynne]

The day/night cycle has ALWAYS run at 60x real time speed.

This means that 1 second of real time equals 1 minute of day/night cycle movement.

A full day/night cycle completes every 24 minutes ... instead of 24 hours.

 

Owing to the fact that mob spawns CHANGE with the day night cycle, this means that if you're looking for something that only spawns during the day or during the night, simply wait up to 15 minutes and you'll have a fresh set of spawns to go to work on.  You can see this most obviously in Croatoa, where the Ghosts only spawn at night (for example).

[RikOz]

Aye, thanks! I guess I must have had shadows turned way down back in 2011/12 so that I wasn't even seeing this. It's something I definitely would have noticed back then.

[Stan The Man]

I believe the dynamic shadows were added with Going Rogue which came out in August of 2010.  So I think we only had it for about two years.  It's easy to forget it was important.  But yeah, if you usually kept your graphics quality low, there was a good chance you never noticed it then.