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[culwin]

Pretty straight-forward suggestion, and I'm sure it's been brought up and maybe even planned.
But I didn't see anything in the eternal suggestion list or search.

For realism and fun, there should be night as well as day.
At night, visibility should be limited (especially on moonless nights).
Goblin sieges that come at night should bear torches.
Different creatures/monsters should be more active at night.
And so on.

The big problem I see with this is that time, especially in fortress mode, moves pretty fast.  The time rate would have to be tweaked.

[NinjaE8825]

Day and night are already implemented (I'm not sure if it's just Adventurer mode, tho'). Lighting's effects on NPC vision (or fortress-mode vision), however, is not, nor are nocturnal creatures (except for human towns, where people go to bed at night).
In fact, the only thing it does* is limiting the adventurer's visible range, and lowering the temperature.

*That I've noticed, anyway.

[Capntastic]

This has been suggested before, and day and night exist in game WRT adventure mode.   It would be very hard to work into fortress mode as time passes darned quick.

[Cotes]

Yeah, can't really see how this could work without seriously slowing down the game's clock. Mind you, the option to play the game so wouldn't be bad for those who want to sink even more time into this game, but making the year pass at snail-pace by default would be.

[culwin]

Yeah, you can tell I've never played adventure mode 
The only other solution I can think of, without changing the game clock, is to say that there are 2 suns in the world, or something, so that dark "night" only happens like 1 week out of every month, or something.

[Footkerchief]

I posted this in a recent thread suggesting the same thing:

Here's a previous Suggestion thread about day/night cycles, including a comment from Toady:

Although you've mentioned it, I just wanted to emphasize that I hear nothing but negative comments about a uniform sleep time for all the dwarves (specifically of the starting 7).  Even if special things happened at night that built potential tension, it's still very important to keep in mind how dull it can be, especially if FPS have dropped a bit.

We've kicked the idea around a bit of course, partially because it makes things more homogenous with adventure mode, which eliminates some annoyances, but there's the sleep problem (which isn't that much of a problem if dwarves aren't made uniformly diurnal) and some other potential difficulties to overcome as well, or at least hurdles, with how it zooms to army battles or relates to adventure mode time.  Even with abstract day/night the accelerated abstract time for dwarf mode is always going to be a problem though, so those potential problems aren't a big deal in the grand scheme of things.  It would be nice to scrap dwarf time altogether, and it's very aggravating on many levels, since two systems have to be kept in place for the same mechanics, but it's not as if I can get rid of it...  unless people want years to pass reaaaaaally slowly.  There are various ways to try to change it, but the flow of dwarf mode is pretty nice now, so anything very radical would need careful consideration.

Also got some tangential discussion in these two lighting threads:
Light...
Lighting arc discussion

[Vattic]

I'd really like to see day and night. Unfortunately days are very short in fortress mode. One way around this problem would be to have it like when nearer the North and South poles where day and night last a lot longer. The only reason I'd like to see this is the image of goblins ambushing in the night or even ambushing foes in the night. It might not play well as Toady notes.

[MrWiggles]

How about it occupying only half a month of in game time? It'd be an abstracted time for night things to happen over a measurable amount of time in dorf mode.

[Pilsu]

I don't really see the problems Toady does. There's nothing forcing us to use days at all, could just devote a chunk of a lengthier month for sleeping. If you have things to be done at night, you could just allocate some dwarves to stay up. You certainly need the ability for guards and whatnot. Longer years could be quite hectic if we were allowed to interact with all civilizations at once.

[MrWiggles]

I don't really see the problems Toady does. There's nothing forcing us to use days at all, could just devote a chunk of a lengthier month for sleeping. If you have things to be done at night, you could just allocate some dwarves to stay up. You certainly need the ability for guards and whatnot. Longer years could be quite hectic if we were allowed to interact with all civilizations at once.

I doubt toady is erroneously stating things. Maybe the community has  changed its mindset.

I however don't like it. With how the game is now, there is generally something always going on. As Toady stated when frame rates start to get low, that might be half an hour or more when there is nothing happening in the fort, and there little in way the player could do about except editing the dwarf creature raw. (As presumably, it would be raw editable.)

[culwin]

I don't really see the problems Toady does. There's nothing forcing us to use days at all, could just devote a chunk of a lengthier month for sleeping. If you have things to be done at night, you could just allocate some dwarves to stay up. You certainly need the ability for guards and whatnot. Longer years could be quite hectic if we were allowed to interact with all civilizations at once.

I don't think sleep should, or needs to, have anything to do with night/day.
I currently sleep from about 6am-2pm.  I work night shift.
If humans can adjust to working/sleeping different shifts, then I figure dwarfs probably can too.
If the game clock stays the same, then I like the idea of having long periods of darkness/light, like near the poles.
What if 3 months out of the year were darkness continuously?  And the other 9 months were light (you could say sunlight or moonlight)?
The best option of course would be for all this to be adjustable, set by the player in the init.

[Cespinarve]

Plus, many dwarves live subterraneanly- there's less a connection to 'night' and 'day' when there's no sun. I used to work film shoots, it would be pitch black when you went into the studio at 7:00 AM, and pitch black when you stumbled out at 11:00 PM- trust me, night and day start to get pretty lost.

[alamoes]

Make years into months and months into days and days into hours.  It would seem to take longer, but if every thing stays the same, only one problem comes from that.  The winter would be harsher, but making wood burnable in small camp fires you can mine out ice, then melt the ice into boiling water, getting through winter.