Setting up a solid roblox time script is one of those small changes that instantly makes a project feel more professional. Think about it—when you jump into a high-quality survival game or a detailed roleplay map, the world doesn't just stay static. The sun moves, shadows stretch, and eventually, the moon pops up to change the whole mood. If your game is stuck at 12:00 PM forever, it can feel a bit lifeless, even if your building skills are top-tier.
The good news is that creating a day-night cycle isn't nearly as complicated as some people make it out to be. You don't need to be a math genius or have years of Luau experience to get a functional cycle running. It's mostly about talking to the Lighting service and telling it how fast you want the clock to tick.
Why bother with a time script anyway?
It's all about the atmosphere. Imagine a horror game where it's always bright and sunny—not exactly terrifying, right? Or a farming sim where the crops never have a "night" phase. A roblox time script gives your world a sense of progression. It tells the player that time is passing, which keeps them engaged.
Beyond just the visuals, you can hook other game mechanics into the time. You could make certain enemies only spawn at night, or have shops close their doors when the sun goes down. Once you have the basic script running, the possibilities for gameplay mechanics start opening up like crazy.
The basics of Lighting and ClockTime
Before we actually write anything, we should look at how Roblox handles time. If you look into the Lighting service in Roblox Studio, you'll see a property called ClockTime. This is a number between 0 and 24. 12 is noon, 0 (or 24) is midnight, and everything in between represents the hours of the day.
You'll also see TimeOfDay, which is a string (like "14:30:00"). While you could script using the string, it's a total headache. It's much easier to just increment the ClockTime number. If you add 0.1 to 12.0, it's way simpler than trying to do string manipulation on "12:00:00".
Writing your first roblox time script
Let's get into the actual work. You'll want to put this in a Script inside ServerScriptService. Why the server? Because you generally want the time of day to be the same for everyone in the game. If one person sees it's midnight and someone else thinks it's noon, things get weird fast.
A basic script looks something like a loop that keeps adding a tiny bit of time to the ClockTime property. You might start with something like this:
```lua local lighting = game:GetService("Lighting")
while true do lighting.ClockTime = lighting.ClockTime + 0.01 task.wait(0.1) end ```
In this setup, every tenth of a second, the game adds a tiny fraction to the hour. It's simple, it's lightweight, and it works. But honestly, it's a bit "choppy." If you look closely at the shadows, you might see them jumping slightly. To fix that, you'd want to make the increment smaller and the wait time shorter, or better yet, use a different approach for smoothing.
Making the transition smoother
If you want that buttery-smooth sun movement, you have a couple of options. One is to use TweenService, which is great for moving things from point A to point B smoothly. However, for a constant loop like a day-night cycle, simply using a very small increment in a fast loop usually does the trick without overcomplicating things.
The real trick to a "pro" roblox time script is finding the right balance between speed and performance. You don't want the script running so fast that it eats up resources, but you don't want it so slow that the sun "teleports" every few seconds. Using task.wait() instead of the old wait() is also a better move because it's more accurate and optimized for the engine.
Customizing the length of your day
Not every game needs a 24-minute day (where 1 minute in real life equals 1 hour in-game). Depending on what you're building, you might want a very long day and a short night, or vice versa.
To control this, you can set up a variable at the top of your script. Let's say you want a full day to last 10 minutes. You'd have to calculate how much ClockTime to add per second to make that happen. There are 24 hours in a Roblox day, so if you want that to span 600 seconds (10 minutes), you'd do 24 / 600. That gives you 0.04 hours per second.
By keeping these numbers in variables, you can easily tweak the "vibe" of your game without digging through lines of code every time you want to change the speed.
Adding "events" based on time
Once you've got your roblox time script moving the sun around, the next cool step is making the world react. A classic move is turning on streetlights when it gets dark.
You can do this by adding an If statement inside your loop. For example, if lighting.ClockTime is greater than 18 (6 PM) or less than 6 (6 AM), you can tell the game to find all the parts tagged as "StreetLight" and turn their Material to Neon and enable their PointLight.
It sounds like a lot of work, but it really adds that extra layer of polish. Players notice when the world feels "alive" like that. You can even change the FogEnd or Ambient lighting values to make the nights feel colder and the days feel warmer.
Dealing with the "Jump" at Midnight
One thing that trips people up is what happens when ClockTime hits 24. Luckily, the Roblox engine is pretty smart. If you set ClockTime to 24.1, it usually just wraps around back to 0.1 automatically. You don't typically need to write a complex reset script to handle the loop.
However, if you're using more advanced math or trying to sync specific events, it's always good to keep an eye on that transition point. If you ever notice the sun doing a weird 360-degree flip, it's usually because of how the engine handles the wrap-around.
Client vs. Server: Where should the script live?
I mentioned earlier that a roblox time script usually belongs on the server. That's true for 90% of games. But there's a case to be made for local (client-side) time scripts.
If you're making a game where the player can manually change the time for their own view—maybe a photo mode or a personal setting—you'd put that in a LocalScript. Also, some developers prefer to run the visual movement of the sun on the client to make it perfectly smooth regardless of server lag, while just syncing the "official" time from the server every now and then. This is a bit more advanced, but it's a cool way to optimize things.
Final thoughts on implementation
Don't feel like you have to get it perfect on the first try. Start with a basic loop, get the sun moving, and then start playing with the colors. Roblox's Lighting service has a ton of properties like OutdoorAmbient, Brightness, and ColorShift_Top.
When you combine a functional roblox time script with some clever lighting tweaks, you can turn a basic baseplate into a place with a real mood. Whether it's a bright, cartoony simulator or a dark, moody mystery game, the way time passes is going to be the backbone of your world's atmosphere. Just keep experimenting with the numbers until it feels right for your specific gameplay loop!