Disco Elysium: How to Pass and Skip Time
We show you how to pass time, make it go quickly or even skip ahead in Disco Elysium.
Disco Elysium's semi-realistic approach to time means that there'll be moments where you want to skip ahead to trigger certain events, or hang back and take a while to evaluate your surroundings. We'll explain how time works in Disco Elysium, and how to pass or skip time quickly.
How to Pass and Skip Time Quickly
If there's something you want to do later on, or just want to get to a different point in the day, there are several options available to you.
- Go to sleep! This one's obvious, but it's worth repeating - if there's a bed available to you, go to sleep to skip ahead to early morning in the next day. You can only do this in the evening, of course.
- Read case notes from your ledger. After finding it in the dumpster near the hanged man, you can interact with your ledger in your inventory to read case notes. Each one skips time forward 30 minutes.
- Sit on a bench. This one you can only do when Kim isn't with you, either if he's doing other stuff or already in bed. Head to the bench outside the Whirling-in-Rags, near where the two old men play games during the day. If you sit on it, you can let time pass. If you have a book from the bookstore just above you, you can read that as well.
How Does Time Work in Disco Elysium?
As you've probably noticed, there's a clock in the lower-right hand corner of the screen indicating what day you're in, as well as what time it is. Certain events, tasks and actions are time dependant (such as meeting a contact at a specific time), and after 21:00 certain characters will disappear, heading to bed. By two in the morning, pretty much everybody who doesn't work nights will have vanished, leaving you with fewer opportunities to interact with the world and heavily emphasizing that you should go to bed soon.
However, the actual passage of time is related to your actions in the game. Walking around the world doesn't use up time - you could spend hours running laps around the petanque players and not a minute of in-game time would pass.
Instead, time changes when you interact with objects in the world, or when you talk to people. Every box of dialogue, whether with an item, a person or the voices in your own head, uses up one minute of time. So if Cuno shrieks at you for five paragraphs, you've been listening to him for five minutes.
