Game time

Diaspora time was historically hexadecimalized and standarized around the time that humanity first populated worlds beyond Earth where a standard Earth-day ceased to be linked to home orbital mechanics for off-worlders. Humanity has never evolved beyond a roughly 24-hour day-night cycle so the new standardized time format needed a unit that was approximately 1 Earth day. The hexadecimal nature meant that it could trivially be converted to and from a single binary integer value by simply masking off bits. Computation has moved on since then and no longer uses binary integer values, but the convention has been retained after centuries of use as nothing better was found for a civilization-wide standard time. It is common for local time conventions to exist, particularly for those fortunate enough to find themselves on worlds with an approximately 24-hour natural day-night cycle that locals quickly become accustomed to.

For regular daily use, time is broken up into the following units of time:

  • Millans are the smallest unit used daily, where a single millan is approximately 5 earth milliseconds.
  • Secans are equal to 256 millans, or approximately 1.28 earth seconds.
  • Honem are equal to 256 secan, or approximately 5.4 earth minutes.
  • Dian are equal to 256 honem, or approximately 23.3 earth hours.
  • Yan are equal to 256 dian, or approximately 248.5 earth days.
  • Cen are equal to 256 yan, or approximately 174.3 earth years.

regular times are displayed in the format <cen>.<yan>:<dian>.<honem>:<secan>.<millan>

Your arrival in a cluster of stars in a new galaxy is a major event, so a new epoch is born as you arrive, with time starting at zero again

Of course, further units of time exist all the way down to planck time which are used by Souls, but beyond scope for daily use by humans.

Clock Controls

Clock controls can be found near the top of the cluster and system windows.

  •  increases the clock rate by a factor of 2 to a maximum of 16,384 (Hotkey Ctrl+=)
  •  decreases the clock rate by a factor of 2 to a minimum of 1 which equates to real-time (Hotkey Ctrl+-)
  •  pauses the clock
  •  restarts the clock

Some glitches can occur whilst running at high clock rates as the game does not simulate every instant. For example, fleets may miss rendezvous with each other at a high clock rate if one or both are travelling quickly, where they would have met at a lower clock rate. I hope to fix this at some point, but for now where fleet rendezvous is of critical importance (such as intercepting an attacking fleet) it is recommended to run at a lower clock rate as the fleets approach each other. The fleet rendezvous process is more forgiving of high clock rates when the fleets are not in the current system.