Planetary settlement local time

[Edwe]

Problem

With surface-based missions, especially in Odyssey where it is (realistically) extremely dark at night, it would be extremely useful to be able to see the local time of day for surface missions on the missions board. It would also add a great deal to immersion, since it's hard to imagine living and working on a world using a time system completely out of sync with the local day-night cycle (UTC).

Proposed solution

Introduce local times and time zones for settlements and show these on mission boards along with a little icon showing dawn/day/dusk/night.

The details

A relatively intuitive way to implement local time, is to declare that all bodies have the familiar 60-60-24 second-minutes-hours-days structure, with 86,400 seconds per day/night cycle (same as on Earth), but with each having its own "Local Second" that is proportionally shorter or longer than an Earth/Universal second according to the body's rate of rotation relative to that on Earth.

This will obviously become more or less useless on anything rotating faster than about 12x the speed of Earth, but if such bodies exist, I suspect they are few and far between and would be populated by madly dashing Onionhead-fueled NPCs.

Examples

• Delivery mission to an Odyssey settlement showing 13:00LT (x4.00) and a little "day" symbol. You know the days are four times longer than on Earth and it's only just after noon, so you have plenty of daylight left.
• Restore power mission to a settlement showing 17:30 (x0.25) and a little "dusk" symbol. Days are short on this world and it's almost dark. Might need to hurry up.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

 

[Nerix]

I like the idea. Not sure about the implementation, but great that you made a concrete suggestion.

It would be definitely useful to know when it's getting bright in a settlement or a specific spot on a planet.

 

[varonica]

I don't think time is super useful in all situations, it would be nice to know whether it was light or dark, but time not so useful, for instance a settlement may be on the dark side of tidal locked planet and local time is irrelevant to whether it's dark or light, morning or evening, it's dark all the time but you may think it's light because the local time says it's midday. The same with moons in tidal lock around around a gas giant, the time of day is not relevant to the lighting conditions on those, and really fast orbiting bodies, or bodies that are tidal locked with long orbits, a day may be a year long. A simple symbol telling you what the lighting conditions are and how long it's going to be light is the best idea.

Implementing local time for all planets and moons, not so useful, night/dark cycle yes useful.

 

[Edwe]

Thanks for the feedback.

Alternative idea: what about simply a symbol indicating daylight or night, with a "time to dawn"/"time to dusk" countdown underneath on the mission board? I would still love to see some form of local time at settlements, but that's more because I'm a nerd rather than it having any practical use in the game

If NPCs changed behaviour according to the day/night cycle, it would add some immersion and variety to Odyssey missions.

Examples off the top of my head:

1. At night there are fewer NPCs on duty to catch you trespassing, but they will immediately act aggressively (sneaking in at night is obviously suspicious), whereas in the daytime, there are more NPCs around to potentially spot you, but they will give a warning before opening fire (in the daytime, you might pass as a lost visitor).

2. Some heist missions might change depending on whether it's day or night. For example, when stealing a chemical sample, there are lots of (poorly armed) workers to witness the theft during the day, but the sample will already be unlocked (it is being used, of course), and there won't be too many heavily armed guards around. During the night, the workers will be gone, but the sample will be locked (2min timer) and a decent number of heavily armed guards will be patrolling. So do you go in loud during the day against poorly equipped NPCs (unnecessary killing), or do you sneak in at night and try to remain undetected?

 

[zikolach]

I like the idea of day/night icon and countdown (elapsed/remaining time).

I think it would be extremely difficult to make working shifts related to local day/night cycle due to variety of conditions for different planets and moons. It would be probably sufficient to show some counter (in the terminals) indicating remaining time until next shift and short pause in between, when part of workers go to work and another on to the bar or home. And I am totally for changing NPC behaviour depending on day and night time.

 

[metatheurgist]

If the system map actually showed the current lighting of the body that'd be more than good enough for me.