Minecraft news » Time in Minecraft: Steve is Ancient

In normal time, Minecraft is really, really old. Or at least, Steve is.

Like most games, Minecraft's day/night cycle is extremely compressed, compared to ours. An entire day is roughly 20 minutes long, start to finish. If we were to convert this into real-time measurements - one Minecraft second equaling 0.0138 real life seconds - then every Minecraft year is compressed into five real-time days, while one year of real-time comes out to roughly 72 Minecraft years. All said, Steve is approximately 400 years old.

Looks pretty good for his age, eh?

It's nice to know that Steve could have been born in the year 1655 and is still around today, but a more interesting question left to us is, how old are our characters? An easy way to figure this out is to take the month and year you first started playing Minecraft, then convert it to Minecraft time using the following formula:

(real-life months since starting Minecraft) * 6

For example, I started playing Minecraft in November, 2010, which is about 4 years and 6 months. I multiply the number of years by 12 (how many months in a year there are), then add the remaining months. In my case, that's 54 real-life months.

if you need help getting the number of months since you started playing a bit more quickly, just go here, enter today's date in the first box, and the day you joined Minecraft in the second box. It will tell you the years and months on the second line of results.

Once you have the months, multiply that number by 6 (for me, 54 * 6). So, my Minecraft character is roughly 324 years old! Yeesh...he might need a cane soon...

So, how old is your Minecraft character?