MCRealTime 4.9 — Real-World Time in Minecraft

Bring the time of the real world into Minecraft. MCRealTime synchronizes Minecraft's day/night cycle with either your chosen time zone or the solar day of a real location.

Dear community,

MCRealTime began with a simple idea: if it is evening outside, it should also feel like evening in Minecraft. Version 4.8 introduced a major rewrite with two time modes, built-in location search, safer configuration handling, and a new updater. Version 4.9 corrects solar-event date calculations near the International Date Line. Whether you run a survival world or want your server's atmosphere to reflect a particular place, MCRealTime gives you control over how real-world time becomes Minecraft time.

Two time modes

CLOCK: Follows the civil time of a configured time zone. Approximately 06:00 corresponds to Minecraft sunrise, 12:00 to noon, 18:00 to sunset, and 00:00 to midnight.

SOLAR: Uses a selected location's coordinates and time zone to calculate a solar day. It maps sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and the following sunrise to the Minecraft day/night cycle. For polar conditions where a conventional solar cycle cannot be calculated, it falls back to CLOCK mode.

Use /mcrt mode set clock or /mcrt mode set solar to switch modes.

Features

• Built-in GeoNames place search with command tab completion; location lookup works without an online geocoding service.
• Global synchronization or a configurable list of worlds.
• Configurable synchronization interval.
• Safe management of time-related game rules, including compatibility with older and newer rule names.
• Restores the original world state when MCRealTime releases control of a world or the plugin stops.
• Versioned configuration migration that archives the complete previous configuration before migration.
• Asynchronous GitHub Releases update checks and optional manual or automatic downloads for installation after a restart.
• Java 8 bytecode and no NMS/CraftBukkit dependency in the core synchronization implementation.

Dimensions without a mutable world clock are skipped safely on modern Paper versions.

First installation and updates

First-time installation: Stop the server, download MCRealTime-4.9.jar, rename it to MCRealTime.jar, and install it under plugins/. Do not leave two MCRealTime JARs in the plugin directory. Start the server and configure the plugin or use the commands below.

Updating from 4.8: Use the built-in GitHub updater. Check using /mcrt update, then stage the update with /mcrt update download, or enable automatic downloads in the configuration. Restart normally after staging. There is no need to replace the JAR manually when the updater works.

Updating from 4.1: The legacy BukkitDev updater was successfully tested and downloaded version 4.8 when automatic updating was enabled. During testing, the old manual update command incorrectly reported that the plugin was up to date while automatic updating was disabled. To upgrade, enable the legacy automatic updater, allow it to download version 4.8, and restart the server. Verify that version 4.8 is running before using its GitHub-based updater to obtain version 4.9. If the legacy updater fails, a one-time manual upgrade remains possible.

For an existing installation, MCRealTime can migrate an older configuration. A full copy of the previous configuration is retained as config-legacy-v*.yml, including values no longer used by the current version. Backing up your server before major-version migration is still recommended.

MCRealTime is a server-side Bukkit/Spigot/Paper plugin, not a BungeeCord/Velocity proxy plugin. Install it on the Minecraft server whose worlds you want to synchronize.

Commands

Permissions: mcrealtime.use for user/status commands and mcrealtime.admin for administration, configuration and update commands.

Basic configuration

config-version: 3
enabled: true
mode: CLOCK
timezone: Europe/Berlin
global: true
synchronization:
  interval-ticks: 20
behavior:
  prevent-sleep: true
  disable-insomnia: true
updater:
  enabled: true
  check-on-start: true
  auto-download: false

For SOLAR mode, switch the mode and select a place using /mcrt location set <location> and tab completion. The plugin stores its coordinates and time zone for you. Set global: false and configure worlds to restrict synchronization to selected worlds.

Update checks use GitHub Releases, regardless of where you downloaded MCRealTime. Automatic downloads are disabled by default. Updates are staged for the next restart; the running plugin JAR is never hot-swapped.

Tested compatibility

MCRealTime is compiled for Java 8 bytecode. The Java runtime required to start the server depends on the server version.

These configurations were verified during 4.8 development. Version 4.9 additionally passed automated date-line regression tests; the table does not claim that full 4.9 server integration testing has been repeated. These are tested combinations, not a claim that every intermediate server version has been tested. To preserve 1.8.8 compatibility, MCRealTime deliberately omits api-version from plugin.yml; a legacy-plugin startup warning on modern Paper is therefore expected.

Support, source code and release notes

• Source and issues: https://github.com/AppleCrafting/MCRealTime
• Official GitHub releases: https://github.com/AppleCrafting/MCRealTime/releases
• Version history: See CHANGELOG.md in the source repository.

Please report issues and share suggestions through GitHub Issues. When reporting a problem, include your server version, Java version, MCRealTime version, and the relevant server log.

Licensing and location data

MCRealTime source code is distributed under the MIT License. The bundled location database is based on GeoNames geographical data, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The data is used for offline location search. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES in the repository for attribution and licensing details.

• GeoNames: https://www.geonames.org/
• CC BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Thank you for using MCRealTime and for helping improve it over the years!

— Gabriel (Sapentiae)