How to Set Time Acceleration and Weather on Your DayZ Server

DayZ lets you speed up or slow down the day/night cycle using acceleration multipliers in your server config. Weather defaults require the cfggameplay.json file, which must first be enabled on your server.

Steps

Step 1: Log into the Game Control Panel and navigate to your DayZ service.

Step 2: Stop your server if it is running.

Step 3: Click Configuration Files, then click Text Editor next to serverDZ_By_HostHavoc.cfg.

Step 4: Locate and edit the following lines:

serverTime = "SystemTime";        // or "2024/06/15/12/00" for a fixed start time
serverTimeAcceleration = 12;      // day cycle multiplier (1 = real time)
serverNightTimeAcceleration = 1;  // night multiplier relative to day (higher = faster nights)
serverTimePersistent = 0;         // 0 = reset each restart, 1 = persist time across restarts

Step 5: Click Save and start your server.

Common day-length presets

serverNightTimeAcceleration is a multiplier on top of serverTimeAcceleration during night. For example, setting it to 4 makes nights pass four times faster than days.

Weather

Vanilla DayZ weather is server-side dynamic and not pinned to a fixed config value. For detailed weather control, edit the WorldsData weather section inside cfggameplay.json in your mission folder. This is advanced and varies by community mod loadout.