Pause Day Cycle Data pack for Minecraft 1.20.1, 1.21.1

Pause Day Cycle

To enable AFK detection feature, Detect AFK Players must be installed.

When nobody's on a Minecraft server, the in-game time still increases. This means you can't track the number of days played, and the local difficulty will also increase. That's not a concern for servers that have players online almost constantly, but for small/medium sized servers, this is a problem.

This is a very light-weight data pack to prevent game time from increasing when nobody's online or when every player online is tagged as afk, without pausing the server itself so that automatic farms can continue to run.

See it in action

Time pauses while player is AFK. Player sitting done with AFK Sit.

Why another one of these?

There are already a few mods and data packs that do the same thing as this one, but none of them did quite what I need:

• It integrates with Detect AFK Players, allowing AFK players to also not skyrocket the game time.
• It's easy to integrate with other datapacks so that the pause/unpause doesn't break.

Even with the introduction of the server property pause-when-empty-seconds, the issue of AFK players increasing game time is not solved, and spawn chunks will not be ticked while paused, which you may or may not want.

Details

When nobody is online or all online players are tagged as afk (see Detect AFK Players) the following gamerules will be set to false:

• doDaylightCycle
• doWeatherCycle

doMobSpawning is not changed because it allows automatic farms in spawn chunks or manually loaded chunks to function with nobody present.

Note: If one of the gamerules is already set to false while the time isn't paused, that gamerule will not be changed - this pack respects your options!

Extending it

This datapack provides two function tags: pause_day_cycle:pause and pause_day_cycle:resume. These will be called when the day cycle is paused and resumed. Below is an extremely simple example of an add-on data pack that uses these tags to log to the server when the day cycle is paused.

announce/data/pause_day_cycle/tags/functions/pause.json

{ "values": ["announce:pause"] }

announce/data/announce/functions/pause.mcfunction

say Day cycle has been paused