how do avernites keep track of time?

[apolloooo]

like there's no sun, star, or clocks in there. there are hourglass but nobody would switch up hourglass everytime the sand hit the bottom part.

[Edgwyn]

Some of the hour glasses are probably larger models good for 8 or 12 hours instead of one hour. In a village you could have a central bank of hourglasses and people responsible for maintaining them and making an announcement (by ringing a bell or similar) every hour. Ships bells and church bells were historically used to announce time when clocks/watches were rare.

[apolloooo]

that makes sense. i wonder if someone forgot to turn the glass upside down, they'd be all wrong about time now

[TriRodent]

Back in the Pre-A1 days when Solberg, Patrick, Erika & others were getting the caves ready for habitation they designed their luminescent fungus to have a day night cycle as well. The big question though is why do they continue to have time zones down in the caves? Having to reset my hourglass when teleporting from Formello over to the Castle has always struck me as silly given that there is no sun crossing the sky.

 

And while we're sort of on the subject, how come various dungeons require you light a candle/lantern when you enter them? The glowing fungus 'outside' doesn't change just because we went down a different corridor/entered a cave (which brings up another question - how can you enter a separate cave when you're already IN a cave to begin with?). Examination of fungus (fungi?) levels both inside & outside the area in question seem to show more or less the same coverage of the luminescent fungus & yet I still need a light.

 

Things like this keep me up at night (or at least the time of day that I decided is 'night' given the lack of sky down here...)

[ĐªгŦĦ Єяŋϊε]

I always assumed it was like the underdark with vast caverns connected with smaller tunnels. So inside a vast cavern with glowing fungi on the roof there could easily be a subcave which the game calls a cave.

If it makes you feel better every time you see the word cave think subcave.

[BlackDragon]

Yo, dawg, I heard you liked caves, so I... no, no, forget it, that particular meme is better left buried, and possibly pacified with a Ritual of Sanctification. >.<

 

But yeah, a day/night cycle on the glowing fungus is the most likely explanation for how people roughly keep track of time. It's also entirely possible that many just... don't. In an agrarian society, you really don't have much need to count minutes or hours - at most, you need to keep up with the seasons, of which there are none in this underground cave-system. You'll also notice that, no matter how long you travel, you never really wind up walking into a city in 'night mode' - so it could very well be that, like settlements far north of the polar-circle, they just stopped giving a damn about the time and just sleep when they're sleepy, eat when they're hungry, and work until they're tired.

 

As for sub-caves being dark, I've noticed that many of the ones that have that problem specifically mention that the luminescent fungus grows thin or disappears entirely in the area, due to some natural or supernatural pollutant making it harder for it to grow in that area. Undead-infested areas (such as the infamous Spiral Cave) in particular makes sense from this perspective - the undead are constantly surrounded by an unnaturally cold aura, and such low temperatures would logically make it difficult or impossible for anything to grow in the area. Hence, darkness. Of course, particularly unholy areas might simply have areas of magical darkness that swallow up whatever light-sources there might be... but that's another can of worms entirely. (How does an area of magical darkness even WORK? Darkness isn't a 'thing', it's an absence of something... gah. It's just a show, I should really just relax... it's just a show, I should really just relax...)

[Sudanna]

Darkness isn't a 'thing', it's an absence of something...

 

i mean, you could say the same thing about cold.