How Long Is a Minecraft Day and Night? [In-Depth Answer]

How Long in Real-Time is a Minecraft Day?

A whole day in Minecraft is 20 minutes. In particular, your day in a Minecraft world starts the moment you and the villagers wake up from your beautiful bed. From that point on, for the day and night to pass, it will take approximately 20 minutes until the next day comes.

How Long Are the Day and Night Cycles in Minecraft?

Many players consider that the time of a Minecraft day and night are the same, which isn't actually the case. The Minecraft daylight cycle lasts 11 minutes until the sun goes down completely which lasts a minute longer than the night. So yeah, Minecraft time is nothing similar to a real world time, not at all. 

One thing to keep in mind is that the beautiful sunset starts at the 10-minute mark. This means your world will go completely dark in around a minute when you notice the sunset's orange color and the light getting dimmer! 

On the other hand, a Minecraft night time lasts only 9 minutes if you didn't guess already. That's when all the hostile mobs like the spiders start to spawn and wreak havoc.

They start despawning when the sunrise starts, which also lasts around 1 minute. You'll notice the sunrise once the world starts getting more lit bit by bit. It closely resembles the sunset, but the lighting itself is different.

When the sunrise ends, it marks another new day continuing the Minecraft day-night cycle again! These cycles are short, making it easy to guess what part of a Minecraft day you're in. But sometimes you'll need to be certain when's the day going to start for your daylight detectors to work.

How to Determine the Minecraft Daylight Cycles?

There are 2 main methods by which you can know or at the very least guess the time in Minecraft:

• Looking up the time by using a clock
• Watching out for where the sun and moon are positioned

The main method of knowing the time in Minecraft is by using a clock. It will help you out tremendously when you need to know whether it's day or night when you're mining deep in a cave. You can see how to craft a clock here.

Another way of guessing what part of the day you're in is by the sunsets and sunrises. We saw how long they were above, but what players often forget is that you can see where the sun and moon are positioned.

So if you point your head upwards and the sun's directly above you, it means there's around 5-6 minutes until the night comes with a sunset. The same goes if you see the moon above you, except for the time which is around 4-5 minutes until the day comes with a sunrise. You can make calculated guesses of the Minecraft daylight cycles based on the position of the sun and moon and these timers.

The hard part about this method is that you'll be guessing the time. And to do it, you must be outside in the open. So if you're deep mining somewhere in a lush cave, you won't be able to tell the time by watching the sun and moon's position.

Why Should I Know The Time of the Minecraft Days?

One of the main reasons you'd want to know about the Minecraft daylight cycles is for mob farming. There are lots of resources zombies, creepers, and other hostile mobs drop for brewing potions and crafting materials like TNT.

A mob you'd like to farm that's directly affected by how many days and nights have passed is the Phantom. This mob appears after you haven't slept for 3 or more days, which means you'll have to keep track of the passed in-game time!

That's everything you'll need to keep in mind when it comes to knowing the real-time of Minecraft's day and night. If you think this set time is slow, you should check out how to make Minecraft's time go faster!