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[compsognathus]

I can not understand the difficulty of adding the day-night cycle in the fortress mode.
Have you ever played with minecraft single player survival mode?
It would be enough to slow down the passage of time and at a certain moment all the dwarves go to sleep.
When all the dwarfs sleep they start working again immediately, simulating all the night time in a sec.
If something like an attack happens, all the dwarves will be awake at night.
Any nocturnal sentinels will be like a sleeping dwarf, they will not make the player wait.
All this is not boring, a new player would not even notice. it would add nighttime suspense.
To make it more realistic it could slow down the construction time of the walls and other structures. if this is boring at the beginning of the game it would be enough to insert the possibility to scroll the time faster, maybe setting the hours that have to pass in a few seconds.
At this time building a wooden cup and a wooden wall does not have a real time difference.

Is all this a technical problem?

[therahedwig]

The technical problem is slowing down time. In fort mode, the yearly scedule is more important than the daily one, so if time was slowed down as much as in adventure mode, it would take forever(read: weeks of playing) for the first dwarven caravan to arrive.

[compsognathus]

The night that lasts a second and the possibility of passing time with a click must compensate for the slowdown,
playing 2 hours a day with a 3-minute day length, running a year in ten days (one day for breaks and night attacks).
This without calculating the fast progress (if technically possible)
I would also do 5 minutes

[Shonai_Dweller]

I imagine the issue is whether the outside world can run at those speeds. Dorfs being asleep in a fortress is irrelevant to the few million other inhabitants (and their armies, travelers and so on speeding their way towards your fortress).

Not to mention the dwarves who are not sleeping. Why on earth would you build a fantasy fortress prone to attack at any moment without guards night and day? Can they rush about at the speed you're hoping for? Not likely.

[Starver]

Minecraft does (or used to, it was still in apparent-Beta when I last played) implement day/night mostly as a pressure upon the player that the player can ignore. Turtle oneself in with torches covering not just the underground but a sufficient extent of overground and (except for Slenderman damage, or whatever they were again) you never ever needed to sleep your character. I never ever bothered with a bed except as decoration, it just ate into the (in-game) time I wanted to just keep mass excavating everything, or do the things needed to keep mass excavating.

(Food was half necessary, with plenty of options (further expanded as apparently they now are) that for me tended to be just bread, unless I decided to fish or had pigs/cows wandering along, but health never dropped below half through starvation, IIRC, only making it dangerous if some other danger came at you (like the ground you fell towards from the top of your big pile of gathered sand you inadvertently stepped off of) and finished you off.)

Probably all changed now?

DF Fortress, mode, is currently such that day/night cycles would happen like HG Wells's time-traveller's early parts of the journey. Day turns to night turns to day, remarkably fast while they sit there. Back to fishing, if I've forgotten to stop any fishing happening dejob the Fisherdwarf assignments on immigration (the main one to stop catching fish, the others because you can't process fish you never catch, etc) the bugger will dangle his beard in a pond for time far in excess of a dwarven calendar-day, and there are plenty of other jobs you could interrupt, but if you don't you know they'll be slogging away at it almost relentlessly (and asynchronously deciding to snooze, whether in a bed or where they had been stood; except naturally, when they're all off satisfying needs when there's that thing that vitally needs doing). And a journey from a job-site to a bed could easily take more time than would please players, if they have to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before they go to bed, just to get anything done.

So to change that to a situation where diurnalism ruled (or, because there would be need for at least military shifts/watches, nocturnal or crepuscular for key individuals who might resent it or even be happily cathermal at need) would add a severe new game-function and likely wouldn't "skip the sleeping hours" because someome would likely be a late-owl or an early-lark by circumstance (if not personality) and have to deal with things still happening whilst zeds were being pulled by almost everyone else.

[compsognathus]

I imagine the issue is whether the outside world can run at those speeds. Dorfs being asleep in a fortress is irrelevant to the few million other inhabitants (and their armies, travelers and so on speeding their way towards your fortress).

Not to mention the dwarves who are not sleeping. Why on earth would you build a fantasy fortress prone to attack at any moment without guards night and day? Can they rush about at the speed you're hoping for? Not likely.

it would not change much as it is now... it would only change that every 3 minutes everyone would run into bed or a place to sleep. The sentinels will not sleep well, the night will last the same 3 seconds, if there will be an attack you can play at night.
 The external events are easily movable, everything takes place on the day but if an attack was decided for the night will happen at night.
The same time of day in fortress is equivalent to day time night in the outside world

During a night attack the time of external events is stopped until 7.00 am of the fortress mode

[Dorsidwarf]

But what does this accomplish, other than making everything happen slower and completely cutting any semblance of the outside world time corresponding to Fortress time (currently you get about a day a minute in Fortress, so a day every 6 minutes would make the year six times longer

[Ninjabread]

There is also the question of why dwarven sleeping patterns would even sync up with the sun when they're predominantly subterranean. What would be causing the dwarves to rise and set with the sun when the majority have spent 90-100% of their life underground, away from the light and the nighttime bogeyman threat?

[FantasticDorf]

It could be just that during the 'night' or any time that isn't the normal activity time (for humans, the day) dwarven sleeping factor speeds up their tiredness and replenishes by x2 in recovery for sleeping.

Dwarves are dinural in the raws anyway, so would be awake in the day like humans because they're a lot like them with the sun and its adverse blue light making them tired away from brief unscheduled naps in the underground.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Also you've forgotten @compsognathus there is another cruicial factor, equatorial timezones further distort and are already fully ingame to create long periods of darkness, of which eternal darkness can reign for a guranteed month of very tiring night watch circulations.

Goblins are nouctournal according to their raws.

[Shonai_Dweller]

There is also the question of why dwarven sleeping patterns would even sync up with the sun when they're predominantly subterranean. What would be causing the dwarves to rise and set with the sun when the majority have spent 90-100% of their life underground, away from the light and the nighttime bogeyman threat?

While a valid question, it's the current behaviour of dwarves outside of player fortresses.

I imagine it wouldn't synch up exactly, especially for deep dwarves. But they'd probably have the same waking/sleeping cycle as everyone else. Just that, for outsiders, stepping into a dwarf fortress would be like entering a different time zone.

[FantasticDorf]

Just that, for outsiders, stepping into a dwarf fortress would be like entering a different time zone.

Dwarves are dinural in the raws anyway, so would be awake in the day like humans because they're a lot like them with the sun and its adverse blue light making them tired away from brief unscheduled naps in the underground.

See above, tiredness would have to be intertwined with the current day state exposure and go across a different tangent depending on how cavern adapted you are, with a slight malus to how quickly other races can recover their sleep in subterrean rather than 'inside' aboveground built modifiers.

Having the sun is as nessecary to waking up as having it blocked out to help easy you into going to sleep in the first place, without natural sunlight waking up can be very forced.

[compsognathus]

There is also the question of why dwarven sleeping patterns would even sync up with the sun when they're predominantly subterranean. What would be causing the dwarves to rise and set with the sun when the majority have spent 90-100% of their life underground, away from the light and the nighttime bogeyman threat?

While a valid question, it's the current behaviour of dwarves outside of player fortresses.

I imagine it wouldn't synch up exactly, especially for deep dwarves. But they'd probably have the same waking/sleeping cycle as everyone else. Just that, for outsiders, stepping into a dwarf fortress would be like entering a different time zone.

True, the dwarves must have a different time zone within the fortress.
But then everything is easier:
Create only one minute for the day and one for the night. Double the times but why should not it? the game has the save!
(it would also be good two minutes in the day and two in the night but ok.)
Nothing would change
They will sleep when they want, all with their timezone, they are dwarfs.
This is an alpha game, change game times will be normal.
To see the dangerous night in the fortress would be nice (even fog)
it's not a problem if the month lasts 1 hour, for me