Day Length Messages

The mod shows notifications when you land on a planet, or use a specific custom item, with a few pieces of information depending on options and location:

• how long the day is and/or approximate* time until sunrise/sunset
• if the planet/moon is tidally locked

The mod also adds an aid item called the 'Universal Sundial' which can trigger similar messages at will. (You should start with one; there's an over-engineered dispenser in the lodge basement if you need a replacement.)

And that's about it - all the mod does is show messages. Check out the screenshots and you'll get the idea. I can't add captions so:

1. Landing at a regular rotating body with the sun toggle
2. A regular rotating body with sun toggle & using real minutes (I spawned outside for fast-travel reasons)
3. Using real minutes & total day length (it's not in the changelog but I think minute values are always rounded off now, by the way)
4. Total day length with UT hours
5. Initial message on a tidally-locked moon, while it figures out a reasonable number to show
6. An example "wrong" location where the game thinks it's daytime but the sun is below the horizon - I left the ship after taking the screenshot and confirmed the solar radiation hazard was present anyway.
7. The only message you'll see on a tidally-locked planet.

Pick what kind of messages you want in the Gameplay Settings - they're prefixed DLM:

• Landing: sunrise-sunset, day length, tidal locking messages only, or none (if you prefer the sundial)
• Sundial: sunrise-sunset, daylength, or both.
• Message unit: game time - "hours (UT)" - or real time (minutes or hours depending on the duration) If you use real time, the mod accounts for custom timescales.

Bonus irrelevant chatter from here on... Like all my mods, I made this for myself, because unlike most planetary data the game doesn't really expose this one (unless the first thing you do after landing is to get out of the pilot seat and sit down in another chair). I would like to have added it to the planet information panel in the galaxy view, but that's way beyond my abilities, so once again I resorted to notification messages. I prefer the sunrise/sunset information. It's handy for waiting for nice screenshots, or when playing on settings where solar radiation can be a threat. It also means that if you're hopping around a single planet to complete a survey, or returning to one location regularly, you're not getting the same message over and over again.

*The sun times are "approximate" because it works in the same simplistic way as the solar radiation check where sunrise & sunset are considered to happen at exactly 6 AM and 6 PM, regardless of where the star actually is. For most locations on most planets it will match pretty much perfectly but if you land near a pole on a sufficiently-tilted body it might be more obviously wrong. I'm just copying how the game does it...

💁‍♂️ There is one special case worth mentioning. Tidally-locked moons don't have a useful day length in the game data, but they still experience a day because they rotate relative to the star. (Like Earth's moon! That's why it has phases.) The correct value shows up in the wait/sleep menus but I can't directly retrieve it. I could have tediously hard-coded the exact values for every relevant moon, but instead the mod just checks how much local time passes in five seconds and does a tiny bit of math. In my testing it's like 98% perfect, usually very close to the 'real' number.

(If you want to get really pedantic, look up "lunar day" or "synodic period" and find out why the length of a day on the moon isn't exactly the same as the time it takes to actually rotate 360 degrees. I don't know if the game bothers to simulate this and for the purposes of this mod it luckily doesn't matter.)