How long is a Minecraft day?

Aakrit Sharma
Shining bright sun in Minecraft

Minecraft has a day and night system and surviving the night is one of the most important survival tasks in the game. For curious players, here’s how long a Minecraft day is in real-time minutes.

Minecraft is clearly based on a magical world that includes the Wither, the Ender Dragon, enchantments, and potions. At the same time, the sandbox game has a fair share of mechanics that are based on real life.

The majority of Minecraft biomes are inspired by real places in the world and similarly, you can witness day and night. Players are expected to work hard during the day and sleep during the night to avoid terrifying bosses.

If you want to know how long a Minecraft day is in real-time, we have you covered.

Evening in MinecraftMinecraft has a fixed day and night cycle.

How many minutes is a day in Minecraft?

Including the night, an entire day in Minecraft is just 20 minutes in real-time. The exact timings of different occurrences like sunset, dusk, midnight, dawn, and sunrise can be found in the table below:

Real TimeMinecraft Occurrence
0 secondsDay starts with sunrise
23 secondsSunrise ends
5 minutesAfternoon
9 minutes and 41 secondsSunset begins
10 minutes and 28 secondsSunset ends and it gets dark
11 minutes and 32 secondsNight begins
15 minutesMidnight
18 minutes and 47 secondsSunrise
19 minutes and 6 secondsDawn
19 minutes and 30 secondsMoon sets

How long is the night in Minecraft?

A night in Minecraft lasts for approximately seven minutes and the daylight lasts for 11-12 minutes. Having said that, there’s a high chance that the day won’t feel half as long as the night because of the enemies that constantly attack you during the latter half.

To ensure that you do not lose your progress, make a bed and sleep on it during the night.

How to change the time of the day in Minecraft

You can change the time of the day in Minecraft through the /time set 0 command. The default command sets the time to dawn (00:00). You can replace the 0 with 6000 to set the time to noon, 12000 for dusk, and 18,000 for the night.

Pigs in a grassland in MinecraftRoaming around at night is not a wise thing to do in Minecraft.

Commands to alter Minecraft’s day-night cycle

These commands can help you change Minecraft’s default day-night cycle:

  • Make it always day: /gamerule DoDayLightCycle false
  • Speed up time: /gamerule randomTickSpeed number. Instead of number, write any value higher than 1 to speed up time accordingly. 1 is the default speed.
  • Stop time: /gamerule randomTickSpeed 0. Entering this command will stop time in your Overworld and all natural activities like the flowing of water and growing of crops will be stopped.

To make the day and night in the game look more visually appealing, you can install a wide range of mods, texture packs, and shaders as well.


That was everything you need to know about the length of Minecraft’s day in real time. You’ll most likely be farming resources and crafting materials during the day time and we recommend checking out these crafting guides for a compostera booka mapBlast Furnacespyglassfireworkscakeboat, and TNT.

Image Credits: Mojang