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Raid time: why one server is night and another is day

Time in Tarkov runs by its own rules, and knowing them saves real hours. Let us work out where the two figures in the raid list come from, why they are always different, and how to calculate the wait until dark. The clock runs seven times faster In game time is not tied to a server and does not come

Time in Tarkov runs by its own rules, and knowing them saves real hours. Let us work out where the two figures in the raid list come from, why they are always different, and how to calculate the wait until dark.

The clock runs seven times faster

In-game time is not tied to a server and does not come over the network — it is computed from the ordinary clock. The rule is simple: time in a raid flows seven times faster than real time, counted from Moscow time.

From which follows the part worth remembering:

• one in-game hour passes in **8 minutes 34 seconds** of real time;
• a full in-game day takes **3 hours 26 minutes**;
• over one ordinary evening at the computer, roughly two in-game days go by.

Left and right are the same day, shifted twelve hours

The raid list always shows two times, and they are exactly 12 hours apart. When one reads 23:40, the other reads 11:40. These are not two different worlds or two servers with different weather — it is one daily cycle shown twice with an offset.

The practical meaning is simple: you never have to wait longer for a night raid than for a daylight one, or the other way round. Whatever the clocks show, one of the two is always closer to the time of day you want. Choosing between "left" and "right" is exactly the choice between day and night.

How long the night lasts

It is dark in a raid roughly from 21:00 to 05:00 by in-game clocks — eight in-game hours. Converted to real time:

• **night — about 69 minutes** of real time;
• **day — about 2 hours 17 minutes**.

So the night window on a given side opens a little more often than once every three and a half hours and holds for a bit over an hour. If you came for a night raid and missed the window, the wait is noticeable: almost two and a half hours until the next one on that side — or check the other side straight away.

Why bother counting

Night in Tarkov is not "the same thing, only darker". Almost everything changes:

• without night vision or thermals, long-range fighting turns into shooting at muzzle flashes;
• but you are far harder to spot yourself, and quiet routes to distant loot become genuinely walkable;
• some tasks are easier in the dark, where by day every approach is covered.

Kitting up for night is worth planning ahead: if darkness is forty real minutes away, that is exactly the margin in which you can top up ammo, build a night-vision loadout and avoid walking into a raid at 6 a.m. in-game carrying a half-million-rouble thermal.

The clocks in the site header

We put both sides in the NORVINSK.SYS header — they run live, left to right: "left" first, then "right". The colour tells you the time of day: amber is day, blue is night.

Clicking opens a panel with something you rarely find anywhere: a countdown to sunrise and sunset in real minutes. Since in-game time is exactly seven times faster, the remainder until the hour you want divides honestly by seven and turns into a plain "25 minutes 09 seconds until dark" — a number you can actually plan an evening around.