How does time work in Minecraft?

Many aspects of Minecraft reflect those of the real world. For example, killing animals for meat, cooking that meat, and then eating it to satisfy hunger works in the game the way it does in real life. Building structures and crafting items are two other things that Minecraft players do that are also done in the real world.

However, that's where the similarity stops, though, because time in the game is very different from how it works in reality.

It's easy to sink hours of real-time into the game and not even realize it, especially because time works so differently in-game. Here's all there is to know about time in Minecraft.

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Minecraft time: A complete guide

In Minecraft, time is measured in ticks. The game normally runs at a standard rate of 20 ticks per second.

This means that one tick happens about every .05 seconds. Daytime lasts exactly 12,000 ticks or roughly 10 real-life minutes. Comparatively, night in Minecraft is shorter, lasting eight minutes and 20 seconds (real-world time).

After the daytime's 10 minutes, the sun goes down, and hostile mobs start spawning. If no one sleeps, then about eight minutes later, the mobs begin to die as the sun rises.

The day cycle is not the only thing that tick speed is related to. That said, changing tick speed does not change the day cycle. That is a fixed rate that cannot be changed without disabling it or using commands to continually set the day back to the beginning.

However, most other things that are affected by the passage of time can be edited by changing tick speed. Setting the tick speed higher than the default will increase the speed at which things occur.

For example, the default tick speed is three on Java Edition and one on Bedrock. Changing these values will make several things happen faster. Leaves will decay a lot faster after their tree is cut down. Crops will grow significantly quicker. Grass will take much less time to spread than usual. And Sculk spread, fire spread, lava flow, among other things, will also occur a lot faster.

However, messing with time can have adverse effects. It often slows the game down and can be detrimental to those playing on low-end consoles or devices.

In order to change tick speed, crafters need to visit World Settings. This can be done before or after world creation. The pause menu should have a Settings button, which will open up World Settings.

Tick speed command can change the speed (Image via Game Specifics)

At the bottom of that screen are tick speed and two options. One option is to change it, which can be done by entering any random string of digits instead of the default. And the second option is to reset it back to the default number in case gamers are done doing whatever they needed a different tick speed for.