How long is night in Rust?

On a server with an 80 minute day, night lasts roughly 8 to 9 real minutes from sunset to sunrise. The other 71 or so minutes are daylight. Rust’s clock does not tick at a steady rate: it runs about nine times faster at night than at midday, which is why night feels so short.

Why the answers online disagree

Guides quote anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes of night, often against a one-hour cycle. The catch is that the in-game clock does not tick evenly, so no answer worked out by dividing the cycle up can be right. With sunset at 20:18 and sunrise at 06:51 there are about ten and a half dark in-game hours; at an even rate over 80 minutes they would take about 35 minutes. At the rates we measured, they take about eight.

What we measured

Rustconnect reads each server’s clock through Rust+ every 30 seconds, so we measured how fast in-game time actually passes, hour by hour, on two live servers: Rustoria US Low Pop (21 of the 24 in-game hours) and FreeFields (all 24).

An earlier run across a sunset on an official Facepunch server showed the same shape: the clock sped up steadily through the evening, and by midnight was running at about 40 to 46 real seconds per in-game hour.

One thing the measurements settle: the day length a server reports through Rust+ is the whole 24-hour cycle, day and night together, not the daylight part. Every server we have measured reports 80 minutes, and the cycles we timed matched it.

Dusk starts before sunset

Day and night do not switch at a single moment. The clock begins speeding up well before the sun is down and is still running slowly just after it rises. Fitted against every hour we measured, the change spreads across about four and a half in-game hours at each end, centred roughly an hour and three quarters before sunset and an hour after sunrise. That fit lands within about 12% of the measured rate in a typical hour.

It varies by server

Two things move the answer: the cycle length, which the server owner sets, and where sunrise and sunset fall. Holding the cycle at 80 minutes, our fitted model gives:

These three are modelled from the measurements above, not timed one by one. A server with a longer or shorter cycle scales roughly in proportion. Some servers are different altogether: creative and build servers often freeze the clock, and one we measured sat at 13:00 the whole time.

Knowing when it gets light

This is why a naive countdown to morning goes badly wrong at night. One that assumes the clock ticks evenly can say twenty minutes when the sun is six minutes away. Rustconnect’s !time command in team chat measures each server’s own clock as it runs, and says “about” while it is still estimating hours it has not measured yet.

More on what Rustconnect does is on the homepage, and what it costs on the pricing page.