Ideas · The pack

Show the time of day and the day number on screen

Open · 1 vote · proposed by ezomic

Another one I have built and not released, and I would rather know now whether anybody wants it.

It puts Day 43 17:45 on the screen, in the game's own typeface, top centre by default and in any corner you like.

Valheim already has a clock and it is a good one. The sun rises and sets at the same fractions of the day every day, and after a few hours nobody has to be told how to read it. You look at the light and you know roughly how long you have.

Then you go into a crypt. Or a mine, or a fog bank, or below deck, or a longhouse with no windows. There is no sun down there and no horizon, and the questions that actually turn on the time are the ones you ask in exactly those places. Is there enough light left to sail home. Is it worth starting one more corridor. Is it nearly dawn, so sleeping now costs nothing, or did night just start, so it is eight minutes of standing about. The game knows the answer. It just is not showing it to you at the moment you need it.

Midnight is 00:00 and midday is 12:00, which puts sunrise near 06:15 and sunset near 17:45. I did not pick those. They fall out of mapping Valheim's day straight onto twenty-four hours, which is also what makes the number agree with the sky instead of arguing with it.

The day number is the game's own, read from the same place it announces at dawn, so the clock and the message never disagree. The time comes off the world clock rather than the smoothed value the sun and the fog are drawn with, because that one lags a couple of seconds of real time, and on a twenty minute day that is minutes of game time. A clock that is minutes out at dawn is a clock people stop trusting.

It hides when the rest of the HUD hides, so cutscenes and the death screen are clean. Nobody else needs it, it is only drawing on your own screen, and a server does not know it is there.

Is a clock worth having when the sky already tells you, or is the half that matters the one you cannot see?

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