Bugged steam playtime?

[RavenWorks]

Every time I quit Animal Well, Steam either tells me that I've spent a plausible amount of hours playing it (~22 hours), or else it decides to tell me that I've spent over 30,000 hours playing it:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3245828871

This happens both on desktop and on Steam Deck. Has it been happening to anyone else? I've never seen this on any other game, though I haven't played much else since Animal Well came out, so it might be a new general Steam bug that I just haven't had a chance to run into anywhere else yet...

(Maybe relatedly, I've also been getting a lot of bugs where the Steam Deck UI crashes and needs to be rebooted, but I've seen other people online saying the same thing without Animal Well being involved...)

[RavenWorks]

Oh my god, I just realised what it must be, and it's a spoiler. I changed my system clock while I was playing in order to get all the groundhog upgrades in one go...

[Namdaets]

LOL I wonder if you can do this for any Steam game to spoof unimaginably high play times.

I'm curious if it's a bug limited to your local Steam client, or if it actually synced that play time to the Steam servers, but your profile is private so I can't check. Does putting the system date back to normal and restarting Steam fix it?

[RavenWorks]

I've already done that; at the very least, it's syncing between my steam deck and my desktop, so it's clearly hitting the network in at least *some* capacity...

Actually, I just saw one bizarre thing; in my list of games sorted by playtime, it displays the mistaken time, even though it still SORTS it by the real time??

https://imgur.com/a/8KDO4tk

[F7sus4]

This is local. Steam has a built-in hard sync for running applications, so you can't "cheat" the timer variables by adjusting your system clock, because they're counted by server side, not client side.