As time goes by: Timescale in Skyrim

[Didz]

As I understand it by default time in Skyrim passes at 20x Real Time. So, 1 minute of play represents 20 minutes of Skyrim time, and a day lasts 1 hour 12 mnutes of player activity.

However, I found this annoying not least because it got dark so suddenly, a bit like someone switched off the light, and because with the Climates of Tamriel mod in place the weather was flipping back a forth like crazy.

So, I changed it.

In my game at the moment 1 minute of play represents 1 minute of Skyrim Time. In other words I am now playing Skyrim in real-time. What that means is that Skyrim days last longer and my character can get more done, but more importantly, I now get to see dusk and dawn, and weather changes tend to build gradually. So, a sunny day becomes overcast, I might begin to hear distant thunder, or the wind might start to pick up, it might turn cold, and then after a suitable warning it starts to rain.

However, there are other unexpected effects. For example: Garik doesn't need to eat, drink or sleep as often as he used to. So that whereas Imps More Complex Needs used to dominate my game, now I seem to have a inventory overflowing with excess food and drink.

I also suspect the respawn rate for animals and plants may become a problem. I think the default is 10 Skyrim days which will take an age to play, so I'm problably in danger of depopulating the world.

I also find myself getting up too early and then having to wait for the shops to open, although I notice Lucan tends to be an early riser too. I'm still pondering the possible long term consequences of tampering with time, and may decide to change it again if it becomes an issue.

For example: I seem to end up getting far too much done before breakfast and I may decide to change the timescale slightly to say 2x real-time just to make time in the game pass faster. But the negative of that will be that weather and darkness changes will be twice as fast as they were, and i really like the current arrangement.

[maidofmanynames]

There are mods that make cells respawn faster than in vanilla Skyrim. That might help with your hunting issue but keep in mind it will probably cause bandits and other enemies to respawn equally fast. I wish I could give you some recommendations by name but my memory fails me.

[Didz]

That's ok I actually saw one such mod in the workshop this morning which was partly what prompted me to start the thread. So, I have an potential solution to that problem, if it becomes one. What I'm more worried about at the moment is whether there are any other problems with this real time set-up that I haven't identified yet.

The benefits are pretty obvious, but I'm not sure what other game mechanic's might be time dependant other than respawns and the shops opening.

[maidofmanynames]

I think one negative could be the night itself. That is a long period of darkness. That is unless you have your character sleep as would be suggested by Imps.

Another issue, I would imagine that it would also be very easy to complete a lot of quests and other activities in a short amount of time. To avoid that, you'd have to do a lot of boring real life stuff in game to fill in time. Might be an interesting experience in some ways but it might get a bit boring after a while.

How you perceive the size of the world might be affected too. According to in-game time, it doesn't take all that long to run from one end of the map to the other. Now it will take even less.

[Didz]

Originally posted by maidofmanynames:

I think one negative could be the night itself. That is a long period of darkness. That is unless you have your character sleep as would be suggested by Imps.

Yeah! I tend to sleep at night. It starts to get dark at about 7:30pm, and by then I'm usually home sorting out my loot and doing any crafting I need to do.

Then I cook and eat dinner, and my Character is usually in bed before 9pm. So, after 8 hours rest my character is refreshed and ready to start questing again at about 5:30am. But first you have to have breakfast as Imps counts sleeping as a passage of time so your usually hungry and thirsty in the morning.

Originally posted by maidofmanynames:

Another issue, I would imagine that it would also be very easy to complete a lot of quests and other activities in a short amount of time. To avoid that, you'd have to do a lot of boring real life stuff in game to fill in time. Might be an interesting experience in some ways but it might get a bit boring after a while.

The questing doesn't seem to take very long in real time, even though I rarely use the fast track system and don't make my character run everywhere.

So, for example it might take an hour to clear a quest area like SnapLeg Cave. So, if you were using fast travel and rushing, you could get a lot done in one day.

Originally posted by maidofmanynames:

How you perceive the size of the world might be affected too. According to in-game time, it doesn't take all that long to run from one end of the map to the other. Now it will take even less.

Well yes, it takes as long as it takes now. It's actually quite funny, because it seems to take a long while when you are doing it, if you look at one of the video's I've posted you can see I get a bit embarrassed about how long it seems to take me to travel to a quest location, but when you check the clock it hasn't taken very long at all.

I'm using a horse though so my character is travelling faster than he would if he was walking everywhere.

[maidofmanynames]

I have to confess I am very curious to see how this affects your experience of the game. I hope you will continue to post about your play and the differences as they appear.

All things considered, I don't know if I could do it myself but it would certainly add to realism.

[Didz]

Well as I said my main motivation was to resolve the light switch effect for dawn and dusk, and that seems to have been successful. Dawn for example: is now quite a leisurely evolution which involves a period of about an hour of pale light which gradually brightens, the roosters in the village crowing, the usual dawn chorus of bird song, and the first stirrings of the NPC's opening their shops and making their way to work.

The weather changes are also a lot more sequenced rather than sudden, except when crossing regional boundaries when they can be quite dramatic. However, I've noticed there is a mod to correct the violent differences in weather patterns between regions which might resolve that.

It certainly feels more realistic and changes the pace of the game. I remember when I first started playing I always seemed to be rushing to finish stuff before it got dark, and found it hard to wander far from town to do anything. I even had to take shelter in a hunters tent one night because it got dark before I could get back to Riverwood, and that's like 5 minutes ride from town now.

[maidofmanynames]

The perception of distance would probably start to bug me. I have always felt that Skyrim needed to be larger. Not necessarily because I wanted more content but more to preserve the idea of a large and varied expanse of land.

I'm not sure where I read it but I keep thinking that there was a mod out there that slowed down the progression of weather effects. You'd still have short days but the changes in weather wouldn't be as many or as sudden.

[Basho]

i always have an interest in such mods, i also enjoy "darker nights" mods, since it gives you a reason to both sleep at night but also to actually use things like nighteye.

and i also found it rather disruptive in regards to immersion, with vanilla time scale, how you could arrive in a town during the day and then go into a shop or something, only to come out and the sun is down.

so this interests me.

[Didz]

Originally posted by Basho:

so this interests me.

Well it's not difficult to do.

There's a nice little article here on it:
http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Change-the-Timescale-in-Skyrim

I've only just read this and noticed that he warns against setting the timescale to 0 or 1. I can understand why setting it to 0 would be a bad idea, you would basically be like playing in a recreation of 'Groundhog Day.' the movie. But I can't say I've noticed any problems from setting it to 1.

He reckons it can muck up some of the quests, but so far I haven't had any problems. However, I can imagine if a quest included any sort of timed event sequence then it might seem broken if you got impatient waiting for something to happen in real time. I have used the Wait command once or twice when waiting for NPC's to open shops or get back from lunch, and sometimes it can create a challenge trying to work out where an NPC would be at 13:45pm. The first place to check is obviously the tavern, but some of them do have different personal schedules. Faendal for instance tends to visit Camilla at various times during the day, when he thinks Sven is busy in the tavern.

It's also worth checking the configuration of your mods if you change the game timescale. I didn't find any in my load set that didn't automatically adjust to the revised passage of time, but
Imps More Complex Needs for example has it's own timescale setting which I changed to match the game time. I think if I had left it then I would hardly ever have needed to eat or sleep.

[Zee_]

Sorry I haven't read the whole thread, but I've read from a few sources that you don't want to set the timescale lower than 6. Apparently it can screw up a few time sensitive quests if you set it lower than that.

In most Bethesda games I set the timecale to 2. However in Skyrim I have it set to 6 because of those possible glitches. 6 is still too fast imo, but I've learned to live with it.

[Didz]

Did they say which quests were affected?

The only one I've noticed so far that might have been affected was The Butcher quest, where it seemed to take ages for the Jarl's Reeve to turn up to arrest the culprit. I just thought he was taking ages to brief the guards, but it's possible that the event was on a timer.

[Odineado]

They said the best timescale to set with realistic needs and diseases is 8. Real time might be too much because you might end up spending a week playing skyrim and finally get to sleep for once.. That might even be immersion breaking.

[Zee_]

Unfortunately there was no mention of which specific quests may be affected, it seems to be just random quests in random areas (the NPCs will bug out and just stop reacting). The following thread also has someone who had issues with Dragonborn, where the sun would never rise in Solthsheim. http://www.loverslab.com/topic/14957-set-timescale-to/

As you mentioned, The Butcher quest was somewhat annoying due to the timescale settings. Theres actually 2 ways to do it, if you go after the real culprit it can seem to take forever for him to show up during your night time patrol of the stone quarter. In my game he just sort of appeared out of thin air right behind me along with his potential victim, that may have been because of messing with the timescale but I can't be certain.

[Didz]

Ok! well I'll keep monitorng this then, but so far everything seems to be working as well as it normally does. The game has enough weird bugs anyway, like flying mammoths and things.

But so far I haven't had cause to regret the timescale change, and it's relatvely trivial to change it back if I need to.

[Brandybuck]

I usually set my timescale to 8, and it feels about right to me.

For the best immersion however, get a dynamic timescale mod, that speeds it up when you're outdoors, and slows it down when you're indoors or in combat. Too slow of a timescale, and walking around the wilderness will make Skyrim feel like a tiny place. Two hours to walk across the entire province? Really?