What time is it there? The map now tells you
You see a flight over Tokyo on the map and wonder whether people down there are having breakfast or going to bed. Until today the map couldn't answer that. Now it can, in a few ways at once.
Time zones. Open the Layers panel and switch on Time zones. The map splits into bands, each one carrying the time it is right now in that band and its offset from UTC. Bands are grouped by the time they show today, not by the name of the zone, so Paris, Berlin and Rome sit in one band because their clocks agree. Countries that keep half-hour or quarter-hour offsets, like India, Iran and Nepal, get their own tone so they don't blend into their neighbours. The layer is off by default because bands are loud on satellite imagery. The map remembers your choice.
With the layer on, a small clock in the top-left corner follows your cursor and tells you the time at that exact spot. On a phone there is no cursor, so it reads the centre of the map instead and says so.
City labels. With time zones on, every city name gets its local time next to it, in a lighter colour so it reads as a note rather than part of the name. Cities use their exact zone, so a capital near a border shows its own country's time even where the band drawing is coarse.
Day and night. A soft shade now covers the part of the Earth where the sun has set. It deepens through twilight and is fullest well after dark, so the edge you see is the evening, not a hard line. This one is on by default. It is computed from the same sun position that lights the flight scene, so night on the map starts where night in the sim does.
Cards. When you pick a ship or an aircraft, its card now has a line with the local time under it. Handy when a cargo ship off Singapore looks oddly still and you realise it's three in the morning there.
Times follow your language setting: 24-hour in German or Ukrainian, AM/PM in English. We only show the current time, not the difference from yours. Your own clock is already on your screen.
Both layers work on the in-game map and on the public map. The time zone data comes from the open timezone-boundary-builder project and lives in our repository, so nothing extra is downloaded from a third party when you open the map. The grid is coarse (about ten kilometres), which is plenty for a world map but means a border town may sit in the wrong band when you zoom right in. City labels and cards use exact zones and are not affected.
If a band shows the wrong time for your area, tell us on Discord. Zone rules change every year or two, and we rebuild the data when they do.