Me and my friends rented a server and we didn’t change anything in the settings, so i should be all set to default. We are wondering what exactly happens in our gameworld while there are no players connected.
We noticed that after being offline for 1 day all our foals were ready-to-use grown-up horses in the stables after logging in the next day. Though it takes a long time usually to do so when playing actively. So it seems this breeding process is continuing, even if no players are connected. Also we saw a lot of the food was spoilt in the campfire.
Please could someone enlighten us about which events are continuing and which are paused in the time during empty servers? (stables, animal pens, thralls, food, furnace, workbench, etc.)
The short answer is, time will continue to flow in the game world even when no players are connected. This means that if you fill up and start a furnace before logging off, it will keep cooking bricks until it is either done or runs out of fuel*. Similarly, food that’s not in a preservation box will keep decaying, and the decay timer on any bases will continue counting down. Also, meteor showers will happen at their prescribed intervals, and resources and NPCs will respawn if they were harvested or killed.
The only thing that really “stops” without the presence of any players is the AI activities of NPCs and Followers. These really only come to life when a player is logged-in and near them.
Note: * In actuality, the server uses a catch-up timer to calculate how much smelting/ cooking/ decay should have taken place in the time that you were gone, but the amount of time it’s using is still tied to how many ticks of the server’s clock have gone by (not how much time has passed in the real world).
For example, if at midnight you start a process that would take 24 hours, but someone shuts down the server for 8 hours in the middle of the day, by the next midnight, 24 hours would have passed in the real world, but only 16 hours would have passed in-game.