Better day counter

The counter runs on the server, so installing it on a server is enough and vanilla clients connect without any mod. It derives the day from the world's own clock instead of reading the floor of the day-time value, which means the count never jumps around, and it only moves forward, so setting the time backwards never lowers it. Skipped nights advance the counter by one day each, even when players sleep through them, and worlds that were already old when the mod was added start at their current day rather than at zero.

The display can be moved between three vanilla anchors that the server controls: the sidebar, the boss bar and the action bar, placed at the right-center, top-center or bottom-center of the screen. The sidebar placement uses a single slot and hides while the F3 debug screen is open, while the bar placements stay visible. The chosen position is remembered across restarts, and the state is stored in the vanilla scoreboard file scoreboard.dat. Players can also see the time-of-day phase, Morning, Afternoon or Evening, in the boss bar or action bar, and a night mode fills the bar as the day advances and recolours it for each phase.

Better day counter is published for Fabric only, with a single build for 26.2 released on 2026-07-20 and Fabric API required beside it. The mod is released under All rights reserved, so it is not open source. Because the sidebar slot can conflict with another plugin or datapack that also writes to it, server owners who run such a setup may prefer one of the other placements.