Time, the Day and the Year

This one is built, and so is everything it was waiting for. The clock is running, the date is along the top of your screen, the sun crosses the sky where it really does, night falls, and the weather is real. There are stars and a moon up there too. The only piece still to come is things growing.

A day is twenty minutes

A whole day and night takes twenty real minutes.

So three days go by in an hour of playing.

That is much faster than real life, and it is the one place where we bent reality on purpose. Everything else in this game is at real size — a metre is a metre, and the island is the real island. But a real Icelandic day would mean a December night that lasts twenty hours, and nobody is going to sit through that.

The date is on your screen

Top left, above everything else:

25. maí · 06:14

That is the day, the month, and the time of day. You always know where you are in the year.

The year has no number

The calendar is 365 days, and when it ends it starts again. There is no year 1, no year 2. Nothing counts up and you are never behind.

A new world starts on the 25th of May, at six in the morning. Late spring: plenty of light, and the growing season just beginning. A fair place to start.

Underneath, the game does quietly count the days, so it can work out things like how long ago a wood was cut. You are simply never shown the number as a year.

Time stops when nobody is playing

This is the part worth knowing.

The clock only moves while somebody is in the world. Close the game, and time stops. Come back in a fortnight and it is still the day you left.

The reason is arithmetic. Three days pass every hour of play — so a fortnight of real time, if the clock kept running, would be over five hundred days. A year and a half. Your animals would have starved through two winters you never saw, and your fields would have come and gone.

So the world waits for you. It is a family server. It is meant to sit idle most of the week.

One thing follows from that: it is one clock, shared by everybody. If someone else is playing while you are away, time moves for both of you. You are always in the same day as each other.

How long is a year, then?

About 122 hours of playing.

That is a long time, and it is meant to be. A year is the unit that matters here — you put hay up in the summer to feed animals through the winter, and you find out in February whether you cut enough.

What was coming, and what arrived

The clock is the first piece. Three more follow, and each one is built on it:

• ✅ The sky follows the clock — sunrise and sunset at the times they really happen at this latitude. In June you barely see night; in December you get about three and a half minutes of daylight out of every twenty.
• ✅ The weather follows the calendar — and each new year draws a different real Icelandic year to play through. See the next chapter.
• ✅ The night has a sky in it — stars, and a moon whose phase decides how much light you get.
• ⬜ Things will grow — warmth adds up over the days, and a crop is ready when it has had enough of it. This is the one still to come.