So, you're playing your favourite game. A rather addictive game. But you notice something weird. Even though you've been playing this game for months now (and you know that a similar amount of time has passed in-game), the day-night cycles always trigger at the exact same time or, in other words, the length of night and day doesn't change. It's convenient certainly but this obviously doesn't happen in real life —where there's a certain thing called seasons.
Congratulations! Your game's world uses an Eternal Equinox. This is when no matter what latitude or time of year it is, the lengths of night and day do not visibly change, no matter where you go or how much in-game time you spend.
However, notice this is not a prerequisite, nor does the game in question have to use real-time or clocks of any sort. All it has to do is to have the apparent lengths of day and night be constants.
If it's assumed that everything happens at equatorial latitudes, it can be considered Truth in Television. The length of the day in such places varies by much less than one hour throughout the year. This goes completely unnoticed by locals, unlike the actual climate variation, which is influenced by sea and wind currents among other things.
Can be best explained by the Law of Conservation of Detail, as making sure days vary in length according to a calendar is time-consuming (particularly, if the game has fictional seasons) and wholly irrelevant in some speculative fiction settings.
Compare and contrast Event-Driven Clock, when Plot Points determine the passing of time. It doesn't have anything to do with the game so you shouldn't think too much about it.
Compare Time Zones Do Not Exist, when the time of day is the same in multiple far-apart places when it should logically be zoned.
Examples:
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Films — Live-Action
- Star Wars: Kashyyyk has no axial tilt and a perfectly circular orbit, causing it to lack seasons and therefore have its day/night cycles remain the same all year round.
- The Truman Show: The fabricated town where Truman resides is implied to have a constant, instant day/night cycle even if the seasons are simulated.
Video Games
Action-Adventure
- Castlevania II: Simon's Quest: "The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night." Day always starts when the timer hits 06:00, night always starts when the timer hits 18:00. The timer resets at 24:00, making day and night equal in length. Even stranger, there is no twilight period. It goes straight from day to night or vice versa.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Averted given that it uses a day/night cycle, but takes place over only during an interval of three days, so there wouldn't be as much noticeable variation in times for sunset and sunrise.
- Played straight in Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Breath of the Wild, which also have day and night.
- Skyward Sword has both day and night, but you never see the transition from one to the other (since you can only change time by sleeping), so it's unknown if this is happening or not. The rest of the series takes place exclusively in daylight.
- Star Fox Adventures: The game applies this to both the main planet (Sauria) and the satellite regions that were separated from it.
- This War of Mine: Dawn (the end of the night phase) is always at 5 AM. The daytime phase always starts at 6 AM, and the night phase at 8 PM.
MMORPGs
- MUME (Multi Users in Middle Earth): Averted seeing that the length of day and night changes according to the season.
- Nexus Clash: Day and night last exactly one hour each regardless of the season. The in-universe explanation is that the cities that become Valhalla aren't really attached to their planets anymore and the day and night cycle are being faked by the Powers That Be. The real game-mechanics reason for this is that playing a Revenant usually depends on tracking the cycle to avoid the day and go out at night, and it'd be annoying if Revenant players had to keep track of a bunch of extra mechanics.
- World of Warcraft: It has day and night changing at the same time (sunrise is at 5:30 AM and sunset is at 6:30 PM; those are Pacific time for non-Oceanic realms and Australian Eastern time for Oceanic realms), regardless of longitude or latitude. That is to say, the days are equally long in every part of the world regardless of the time of the year, and the sun rises all over the world simultaneously. The reason is that some spawns and events are only available during the day or at night, and Blizzard doesn't want to change their availability depending on the time of year.
Platformers
- Jak and Daxter: The series doesn't actually have clocks, but the sun rises and sets in the same interval no matter where you are.
Role-Playing Games
- Avernum: For convenience's sake, days and nights last the same number of hours.
- Betrayal at Krondor: There is an in-game clock that eve looks like a sundial, but no in-game season changes that affect the transitions from day to night or back.
- Final Fantasy XV: In the world of Eos, the relative length of day and night isn't supposed to vary at all. While in Real Life shorter days and longer nights are a normal part of seasonality and the approach to winter, in the game it's a recent unnatural phenomenon that seems to portend a doomsday with The Night That Never Ends. This ultimately comes to pass.
- Planescape: Torment: Day and night always come at the same time. Justified because Sigil is mostly self-contained and doesn't even have a visible sky, so the day/night cycle runs on magic.
- Pokémon:
- Since Pokémon Gold and Silver, most entries have a visible day/night cycle divided into morning, day, and night.note Pokemon Heart Gold And Soul Silver onwards introduced evenings.
- Pokémon Black and White, as well as their sequels Black 2 and White 2, have the seasons mechanic affect the day/night cycle as well, such as night coming earlier and lasting longer when you're in winter.
Simulation
- Animal Crossing
- Most of the games have sunset and sunrise always occurring at a set time, regardless of latitude or time of year.
- Averted in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where sunrise and sunset times do vary with the season. For instance, 5 PM in the summer still has the sun up, while 5 PM in the winter will be dark.
- Endgame: Singularity: Surprisingly averted in the game if the day/night cycle is activated. It's a purely aesthetic choice, though; there are no in-game consequences.
- Euro Truck Simulator: The game averts it to some degree. It is always summer, but sunset time does change depending on your latitude: in Spain and Italy it happens around 9 PM, in Great Britain, it's around 10 and 11 PM, and in Scandinavia, it never happens and you get midnight sun.
- Farming Simulator: The base games are always treated as being in the middle of the Summer, allowing you to plant any crop that will grow overnight regardless of the supposed geographical location that would make it impossible to do so (e.g., cotton in the otherwise Germanic looking Felsbrunn in 19) and sheep will always produce wool as if it were Spring. The Seasons mod in many games avert this entirely with various "GEO" mods that simulate a geographical area and crops not only have a minimum soil temperature but also drought and frost resistances, making planted crops like corn and sunflowers more viable in areas like the Midwest U.S. while sown crops like wheat and canola are more practical in cooler regions such as Germany. Although it can be averted in 22 with the incorporation of seasons as an optional mechanic.
- The Sims: Despite taking place over a fairly long time in in-game days, the game uses a fixed day/night cycle throughout. This happens even in The Sims 2 Seasons. Even when in this expansion the seasons change —and player can choose the seasons desired— with heat, rain, and snow, Earth's position doesn't seem to affect the fixed day/night cycle duration.
- Story of Seasons: In every one of the games, sunrise is 6 AM and sunset is 6 PM, regardless of the season. Averted in Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness and Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands. In those, the times of sunset vary depending on the season. Sunrise is less clear-cut.
Strategy
- Battle for Wesnoth: On the associated fora, it was first justified as the result of the granularity of the turns, but then pointed out that at its apparent latitude and granularity, there should still be a noticeable change, but kept as an Acceptable Break From Reality.
- Hearts of Iron II:
- Day and night do vary with latitude, so days are shorter in the Northern Hemisphere. But they're always shorter in the North — apparently, it's always winter there.
- Hearts of Iron IV averts this, however, as the duration of day and night at different latitudes varies over the year.
Visual Novels
- Endless Summer: Averted. In Book 1 Chapter 9, the day/night cycle is out of whack on the mountain. For example, the team leaves at dawn only for it to get dark again three hours later. In the premium scene where Estela and Taylor go to fight the Giant Crab, the cycle changes again, but they later learn that the rest of the group didn't experience that extra cycle, suggesting that it's not only bizarrely timed but also is not consistent even across relatively short distances.
Wide Open Sandbox
- Don't Starve: Averted. Day/night times change according to the season. In summer days are longer than nights and nights are longer than days in winter.
- Gangsters 2: Averted. Nights are longer during the winter month stages.
- Grand Theft Auto: The games run on this trope. Every real-life second is 1 in-game minute and night/day cycles are always the same length.
- Minecraft:
- In the survival mode, a full day/night cycle lasts twenty minutes — days last ten minutes, nights last seven minutes, and they're separated by an intermediate period 90 seconds long. Since dangerous monsters come out at night, it's good that the passage of time is reliable day after day. Although the moon has different phases, the moon always rises as the sun sets and vice versa, behavior typically associated with a full moon.
- And not to mention, the sun rises and sets due east and west, respectively, and passes straight overhead (and is directly overhead at noon), which in real life only occurs at the equator during the equinoxes.
- Proteus: Day and night work on a fixed cycle, with each lasting about five minutes.
- Terraria: Daytime always starts at exactly 4:30 AM and ends at 7:30 PM, for a total of 15 in-game hours (or 15 real life minutes) of day and 9 hours of night.
- Valheim: The game has no seasons, and its day and night are of fixed length. Of course, since Valheim is a flat world floating near a branch of Yggdrasil with the sun and moon visibly orbiting around it, day length is the least of its issues.
Real Life
- Truth in Television for places on the equator, where days are always close to the same length and the four temperate seasons don't really exist.
- On the poles, the days and nights are always exactly six months long.
- Mercury has an axial tilt very close to zero, so you'd have to get extremely close to the poles to have a noticeable change in the length of a day.
- The same for Venus and Jupiter, with the bonuses of the former having fairly uniform temperatures all over, thanks to its dense atmosphere, and the latter having a lot of residual heat from its formation that is evenly distributed by its winds, producing the same effect.
