Sleeping or Resting

Any time you find yourself with 'Nothing' to do except wait for morning is essentially a time where you failed to set yourself up for the evening.

You could be building, you could be planning out the shape of a base addition. You could be gathering clay, or stone, or wood. You could be carefully looting nearby low level POI, or dismantling things with a wrench if you have one. Upgrading blocks. Creating escape paths from your horde base, and more besides.

There's basically no time during the game where you 'should' be just sitting there doing nothing.

Even Day 1, the first thing I do is chop down a number of trees and craft them into blocks w/ some leftover so that I can later design my initial base layout at night when I feel endangered being out and about due to the nighttime feral spawns.

Making use of all of your time to prepare for the coming horde on day 7 is fairly important- Sleeping away that time because you left yourself with nothing to do shouldn't be the answer.

Originally posted by Desert Rat:

Originally posted by Boresight: I wish there was a way to speed time ahead. Sometimes you don't have much to do except wait for morning. Having something like in Fallout 4 where you can sit or rest would sometimes be appreciated.

This thread has a lot of great suggestions for things to do during the nighttime hours, but if you don't want to do that, and you're playing SP, there's always F1 and the settime command to roll the clock ahead. Or back. Whatever.

I've seen people post that it messes up the plant growing timer, but I've never had an issue with that happening.

It absolutely Can break alot of things; Plant growing timers, air drop timers, trader loot respawn timer, quest list reset timer, loot respawn timers, pretty much anything that requires a specific time of day/total amount of time to passed can Potentially be broken by messing with time.

And when any of these things gets broken in a save, there's no way to fix it in many cases.. Crops can be ripped up and replanted, but, air drops cant.

That said, It's a lot more stable now than it used to be in versions past. But if you want maximum safety, When messing with time do not accelerate or reverse time past 12:05 PM (just after noon) or past 22:00 (night fall), or directly to 24:00 (stop a few minutes shy and let it tick past 24:00 on it's own), nor past whatever hour is the morning time for you based on your daylight hours (IE, 4:00 by default, or 6:00/8:00 if you reduced daylight hours by 2 or 4 hours)

It requires fiddling with the timer bar a bit more, and a bit more carefully, but those are all the times where the game is doing a lot of things and where a lot of timers tick over; The Air Drop for example drops at 12:05pm. Nightspawn zombies all die at the morning chime of 4:00, etc. Always let it tick past those times naturally, and give it a good 3-5 seconds after to finish up.

Lastly, If you needs-must-wants to mess with time, Use the slider bar in the escape menu- Not the settime command. It's much easier to screw up using settime with, ie, a typo, and accidentally jump forward/back days or hours you didn't mean to, and opens you to bigger risk of broken timers.