GameBanshee Forums

As you may have heard from my previous posts, I’m fairly new to BG2, so forgive the question if the answer seems to be a bit obvious. My question today concerns the time of day in the BG2 world.

How do you know what time of day it is while you’re playing the game?
Does the time of day matter?
Will some events or options only be available at certain times?
Do vendors close their shops at night, or are they open 24/7?
If I’m tired of traipsing around at night, can I stop and rest until morning so as to have a full day’s worth of light to continue my exploration?
If I’m wandering around the city and night falls, should I head for an Inn to hunker down for the night?

What do you think, sirs?

If you look in the bottom left corner of the screen, you'll see what looks like gears turning (or stopped if the game is paused). Put the cursor over them, and it'll show you the current time. It's on a 24hr clock, so Hour 0 is midnight.

Although you can largely ignore it, time does effect some things. Certain (legitimate) merchants are only around during the day, and a number of shady merchants (AKA Thieves) are only around during the night. But a lot of merchants are open 24/7.

You're also more likely to get attacked wandering around at night. In particular, you'll quickly learn that two guilds (not to spoil anything ...) are fighting, and you'll see encounters between them at night. So at least early on, you may want to stick to daylight to be safe.

As far as resting until morning - anytime you rest it's for 8 hours, so you can't say for example 'rest until dawn'. But by all means, if you want to sleep through the night, go ahead - from a role-play perspective, that certainly makes sense. From a game perspective, there's rarely any harm in doing so.

Occassionally you'll get a time-critical quest, which you'll fail if you rest for 8 hours. Also certain quests require that you be somewhere at night. But in both cases, you'll be told that explicitly (or at least it'll be strongly implied!).

Thanks so much.

On a related note, is there any way to skip forward to nightfall? I was approached by the shady woman in the government district who proposed that I visit her mistress in the graveyard, but only during the night. I'm not sure now, but I think I got this message during the day. So was there a way to hang out at a tavern and wait for night to fall, other than sitting and watching the little clock tick away.

I guess I could have rested. That would have moved me forward 8 hours.

[QUOTE=Archon of SFL]I guess I could have rested. That would have moved me forward 8 hours.[/QUOTE]

Exactly

Your options are basically rest for 8 hours, go do something else until the time comes, or just let the game sit there for awhile (and you go do something else ... but you might want to make sure you set the auto-pause on enemy sighted just in case!). Unfortunately there's no way (that I know of) to make time pass quicker.

[QUOTE=glenfar]Unfortunately there's no way (that I know of) to make time pass quicker.[/QUOTE]
If you have cheat codes enabled, pressing Ctrl-T will advance the clock by one hour. It's a cheat code, of course, so it can be abused--for example, you can make your enemies' spell protections wear off--so it's up to you how you want to use it, if at all. Overuse of Ctrl-T might also cause problems with some of the timer-based quests which are dependent on real time as well as game time. I had some problems with Jaheira's quests when I first played the game because I paused the game by hitting the Space bar and left the game sitting there for several hours before I came back to play. So I try not to do anything that will mess up any timers.

Well, your could set the option - rest until healed, and smash up someone with alot hit points to 1, than rest until hjealed, witha bit luck youll be 24 hours further . I have to admin i rather be in outdoor areas (such as forests) in daytime, otherwise i dont see **** my screen is screwwed nyway. Might have to adjust the brightness

haha ! Sometimes I can't decide what task I want to accomplish, so I press the rest button until I decide. Goodbye 3 weeks of virtual life .

To answer your question, you can sleep forever for 99% of the game as I can think of only quest where you are timed in SoA (besides Jaheira's romance, never done it). You'll know what it is when you get there. Otherwise, sleep away!