Time & Weather Commands

Setting the clock

A Minecraft day is 24000 ticks, roughly 20 minutes of real time. In Java Edition /time knows four words: day is 1000, noon 6000, night 13000 and midnight 18000. Any other moment you type as a number, and the argument takes units too, so /time add 0.5d and /time add 12000 land on the same tick.

Reach for add when the day count matters. /time set writes the clock directly, so the day count that /time query day repetition reports goes back to zero. Since Java 26.1 /time add also takes a negative number and winds the clock back.

World clocks since Java 26.1

Since Java 26.1, /time works on a world clock. The Overworld and the End each have one and the Nether has none, so /time set day typed in the Nether fails. Name the clock and it works from anywhere: /time of minecraft:overworld set day.

The clock can be stopped and sped up now. /time pause holds it where it is, /time resume lets it run again, and /time rate 2 makes it run twice as fast, with the rate going from 0.00001 to 1000. With the advance_time game rule off, the clock stays put even when it isn't paused.

What runs on the clock

Timelines read the Overworld clock and decide what happens at which tick. Java 26.2 ships four of them:

day

24,000 ticks. It carries the sun, the sky colors and the four markers, plus switches such as when bees stay in their hive (from tick 12,542), when eyeblossoms open and the creaking wakes (12,600 to 23,401) and when monsters burn in sunlight.

moon

192,000 ticks, which is eight days. It sets the moon phase, starting at full moon, and how likely slimes are to spawn on the surface: most at full moon, not at all at new moon.

villager_schedule

24,000 ticks. Villagers go to work at tick 2,000, gather at 9,000, wander from 11,000 and head to bed at 12,000. Baby villagers play from 3,000 to 6,000 and again from 10,000 to 12,000.

early_game

No repeating cycle. Pillager patrols can't spawn until the clock passes tick 120,000, which is five in-game days.

Two hidden markers sit on the day timeline as well. When everyone wakes up after sleeping, the game moves the clock on to wake_up_from_sleep, tick 0 of a new day, and at roll_village_siege, tick 18,000, it rolls for a zombie siege. Neither shows up in the command suggestions.

Reading the time back

/time query gametime counts every tick the world has run, and no clock changes that. /time query time gives the clock's own total, /time query day how far into the current day it is, and /time query day repetition how many days have passed. /time query daytime, which older tutorials use, no longer exists.

Weather counts in ticks

/weather takes clear, rain or thunder plus an optional duration. A bare number is read as ticks, and that catches a lot of people out: /weather rain 600 is a 30 second shower. Write 600s for ten minutes, or 1d for a whole in-game day.

Leave the duration out and the game rolls one for you. The ranges are far apart. Clear skies last anywhere from 10 to 150 minutes, rain 10 to 20, and a thunderstorm only 3 to 13.

Sleeping clears the sky but leaves the weather timers alone. A thunderstorm lets hostile mobs spawn at any time of day, and in Java it is the only weather in which a trident with Channeling calls down lightning. Since Java 1.20.5 /weather also works when you run it in the Nether or the End.

Making it stick

Both commands set a moment and then let the world carry on. To stop the clock for good, run /gamerule advance_time false; for the weather it is /gamerule advance_weather false. Those names arrived with Java 1.21.11. Older versions call the rules doDaylightCycle and doWeatherCycle, and that is still what most tutorials show. The rest of the rules are with the gameplay commands. Freezing the world with /tick freeze stops the clock as well, along with nearly everything else.

Both commands need permission level 2: cheats on in single player, operator status on a server.