Day/night cycle in game server settings

I quoted this from official EA forums to somewhere in between the 235.863.498.743 pages for the Offline topic, but I guess this info should be in a separate topic for easy finding purposes instead. So here it goes:

"It appears that the actual cycle time is 5 hours 40 minutes, with a pad at 00:00 of 1 hour 20 minutes by switching from day back to dawn, so that the first night occurs at 04:35 instead of 03:15 and shifting each day. If I remember correctly, a few years ago, the day / night cycle was 5 hours 40 minutes without a pad, so that when night time occurred varied from day to day with the pattern repeating every 17 days.

Start of night in game times based on entering and exiting garage. If going through a tunnel, or teleporting, the switch to night mode may occur about 1 minute earlier.

04:35
10:15
15:55
21:35

During a night period, the game may switch to a bright moon or even dawn like lighting at around 20 minutes after the start of night mode, then back to night mode 30 minutes after the start of night mode. The night mode lasts about 40 minutes."


Thanks to this info, you should know that if you want to start the game in nightmode, you should set the in-game time of the servereditor to 4:35 or 10:15 and press Save before you launch the server+game.

Times after 12:00 won't work, since 15:55 will appear as 03:55 in systeminfo.xml, same for 21:35, it gets noted as 09:35.