Day/night cycle

Vanilla day/night is balanced for first-night survival pressure — long enough night to feel hostile, short enough day to keep the loop going. That's a great loop for first-week play, less great for the long-term player who wants to spend more time building, exploring, and brewing in daylight.

Sunday Market rebalances the cycle:

• Day is 5x longer than vanilla
• Night is 0.5x as long as vanilla

You spend most of your real-time in daylight. Night is a quick reset, not a long ordeal.

How long is each phase in real time

Vanilla day-night cycle: 20 minutes total (10 min day, 10 min night).

Sunday Market: roughly 50 minutes day + 5 minutes night = 55 minutes total.

So one full cycle is ~55 minutes of real play. You'll see daylight for most of an hour-long session.

Why this rebalance

Three reasons:

1. More time to do everything — long day means more time for big builds, mining trips, exploration, brewing, shop runs without losing daylight
2. Night is still meaningful — not eliminated, just shortened. You still need a bed or a light source for safety
3. Less interrupt — you don't have to stop building every 20 minutes to defend against night spawns

Sleep voting

If you don't want to wait through the (already short) night, you can sleep:

• Sleep skip threshold: 30% of online players
• AFK players count as sleeping for the threshold (we don't auto-kick AFK players, so this matters)
• Solo or small groups (1–4 online): 1 sleeper is enough to skip night

This is more permissive than vanilla's 50%. We want sleep-skipping to be the norm, not a coordination challenge.

When a player sleeps, the chat shows a "1/X sleeping" message. Once the threshold hits, night skips and morning arrives.

Phantoms

Vanilla phantoms attack any player who hasn't slept in 3 in-game days. On Sunday Market:

• Phantoms only attack genuinely AFK / insomniac players
• A player who's actively playing but hasn't slept doesn't get attacked
• Phantoms still spawn — they're just selective about who they aggro on

This removes the "I'm trying to mine but phantoms keep interrupting" frustration without removing phantoms entirely.

The intent: if you're playing, you're not being haunted. If you're AFK and sleeping wouldn't help anyway, fine, here's a phantom.

Mob spawn rules

Mob spawn rates are roughly vanilla. The custom layer makes minor adjustments for performance (mob caps per chunk are more aggressive than vanilla defaults), but the types and general frequencies of spawns are unchanged.

Hostile mobs still spawn at night. Caves are still dangerous. Underground exploration is still unguarded by daylight.

Sleep mechanics

• Right-click a bed at night — vanilla
• Skip night if threshold met — see above
• Bed sets your respawn point — vanilla
• Respawn point persists until you sleep elsewhere

The "sleep ignores nearby mobs" tweak is enabled — you can sleep in your safe-zone base even if mobs are technically in your detection radius.

Time commands (no, you can't)

Vanilla /time set requires admin permissions. Players can't fast-forward day or night themselves — sleeping is the player-side mechanism.

Some servers let players /time freely; we don't, because:

• It would trivialize sleep-voting
• It would make night meaningless
• It removes a small social mechanic ("hey can someone sleep?")

Practical implications

For builders

You'll have ~50 minutes per cycle to build in good light. Use it.

For miners

Underground, the cycle doesn't matter (caves are always dark). But surface mining trips have plenty of daylight to plan around.

For brewers

Brewing happens in real time, not in-game time. So the cycle doesn't directly affect brewing — but the longer day means you can finish a brew batch and bottle it without rushing into night-shift mob danger.

For PvP

PvP doesn't care about time. But night offers more cover for ambush; day offers visibility for combat scouting.

For travelers

Travel during day. Night travel is slower (mobs, less visibility). Set up your sign teleporters for fast same-dimension travel during night if needed.

Beds explode in the Nether and End (vanilla rule, still applies)

This isn't a tweak. Beds work in the overworld; they explode in the Nether and End. So sleep-voting is overworld-only.

If you're deep in the Nether at "night," you can't sleep your way out. Plan for combat or run for a portal.

See also

• Building & claiming — what to do with all that daylight
• Tools & Quality → Quality of life — the AFK-counts-as-sleeping tweak and others
• Combat — for when night does catch you out