Time & The Day/Night Clock

The campaign runs on a single global clock shared by the settlement and any active expedition - there is no separate dungeon calendar. Time is measured in ticks: 45 ticks make a minute, 60 minutes an hour, and 24 hours a day, so one full day is 64,800 ticks.

At normal (1x) speed the clock advances about 60 ticks per real second, which means one in-game day passes in roughly 18 real minutes. You can change the flow with the speed control (pause, 1x, 2x and 3x settings); pausing stops the clock entirely.

The day counter rolls over at midnight (00:00). The campaign begins at 08:00, so the very first day is only 16 hours long while every later day is a full 24. Day and night are a separate visual/vision layer: it is daytime from 06:00 to 20:00 and night otherwise (night reduces vision range). The calendar still turns at midnight, not at dawn.

Time keeps flowing while you are on an expedition, and the clock quietly governs much of the settlement loop - Depletion recovery, candidate refreshes and weather all run on it.

Dungeon Break and lingering too long

The data ships a Dungeon Break scheduler - GAMESYSTEM_PlayLoop_DungeonBreak_AccumBaseTimeCondition = [24, 48, 72, 96, 120, 144] cumulative campaign hours - but in the current build it is a dormant constant: the row is tagged Dev_NotUsed and nothing in the AlertTable, AffecterTable or EventTable consumes it (there is no Dungeon Break alert, debuff or event to fire). What actually punishes long expeditions is the Dungeon Stay ladder: each in-game day spent in the dungeon steps a unit up through the mood debuffs Dungeon Stay (D1) to (D4) (GAMESYSTEM_Dungeon_StayPenaltyTerm = 1,440-minute steps). The per-stage mood penalty scales with management difficulty - Easy -1/-4/-7/-10, Normal -3/-6/-9/-12, up to Downfall -6/-12/-18/-24 - and after the party returns a Dungeon Stay Aftermath debuff (Mood -2) lingers a while longer. On top of that, stalling without clearing floors fires the Into the Deeper Depths nudge event (3 stalled days, 72-hour cooldown), and the accumulated low mood feeds the Stress spiral described in Food & Mood.