Most circumstances in Alter Aeon are governed by game time. Very few in-game aspects are determined by real time. The number of hours played is real time. Real time is provided by the system clock of the computer that runs the mud.

Game time regularly advances by standard units called ticks. A tick is 3 minutes of game time. There are 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day. There are seven days in a week, thirty days is a month, and a year in Alter Aeon is 11 months.

A tick is approximately 30 seconds of real time. Therefore, an hour of real time is about 120 ticks, and there are about 3000 ticks in a day of real time. Time passes roughly six times faster on the game than in real life.

The passing of one tick to another controls when one regenerates hit points and mana. If you put on a piece of +1 hpregen during the middle of a tick and immediately take it off again before the next, it will have no effect. To be effective, you must being wearing the eq when the next tick begins.

Spell durations are governed by ticks. Spells durations appear on the score screen, and indicate the number of minutes remaining. When the spell durations reads 0, you know that it will expire the following tick.

A great many other aspects of the mud are regulated per ticks, such as area repops, offset resets and aging, which will discussed below in further detail.

Events in combat happen much more quickly. Combat is measured in units of time called rounds. Melee combat is discussed in greater detail in our Mechanics of Melee Combat article.

A player's age is measured in game time, with all new players starting at 17 years old. Not many things are affected by age, but young players regenerate/heal hit points faster than older ones, and players will find that they regenerate mana faster as they increase in age. Further, older players have more mana than younger players. Players age whether they are logged in or not.

(For information on using age to increase your mana regeneration, see our article on optimizing mana regeneration for spellcasters.)

A player can change their age by wearing equipment that has an AGE effect. The effect is added (or subtracted if negative) from the players current age, and players will regenerate hit points and mana as if they had the new age. For example, if you are 18 years old and wear a piece of eq that has an 'AGE by 2' effect, you will regenerate hp and mana as if you were 20 years old. It is possible to wear eq that makes you adolescent or infant age or even negative age without ill effect. (On the contrary, you'll regenerate hit points like crazy when that young.)

Players on Alter Aeon are fairly long-lived. As stated above, as players age, they regen mana faster, but they also begin to regen hp slower. This is rarely a big deal, however, as one can expect to live past the second century mark before hp regeneration gets so low that a player actually starts losing hp each tick instead of gaining hp. From this point on, your character would be dying. Players who reach this age can use eq and magic to keep themselves alive, but eventually they will succumb to old age without doing something to prevent or reverse it. Odds are that you'll never have to worry about this during the normal course of play unless you purposefully try to age yourself, which is an uncommon means of improving mana regeneration. This is explained in the next section.

The mud will send a pretty message to you when it is your character's birthday!

Your character ages in game time. Though your character will age faster than real life, it is still a fairly slow rate and nothing to really worry about.

Players can increase the rate at which they age through equipment or magic. A piece of eq with with AGING effect will add to your current rate of aging (which is 1). Wearing something with an 'AGING by 1' effect will age a player twice as fast (1 + 1 = 2), meaning that for every tick that passes, the character would age two. Wearing +2 aging will make you age three times as fast (1 + 2 = 3), and so on. Aging eq is somewhat rare. The haste spell ages a character very fast: much faster than is possible with equipment alone. If you do not want to age, be careful receiving too many haste spells or wearing eq with haste attached. While aging at an increased rate, you may occassionally get the message: "You feel yourself getting older...".

The only way to age backwards is with the eternal youth spell, which is bestowed upon those who drink from the fabled Fountain of Youth. Though drinking from the fountain will lower your character's age and grant them a new lease on life, it comes at a high cost. Characters that receive the benefit of an eternal youth spell lose a significant portion of their knowledge of many of their skills and spells. The spell is also dangerous: if you are not old enough, the spell will simply kill you. Do not seek out the Fountain of Youth unless you truly need to.

Some players believe it useful to age themselves in order to take advantage of the increased mana regen available to the elderly. The efficacy of this procedure is debatable, however, since a player has to devote time into aging the character, then in preventing the age-induced -hpregen from the killing the character and eventually having to drink from the Fountain of Youth and lose tons of spells and skills anyway or risk dying of old age. It is not a technique for beginners, to be sure.

Your current, modified age is show in statistics screen, but, for a more accurate display of your age, the whoami command will show both your actual age (regardless of eq or aging effects) and your modified age, with the actual age first, in the following format: "You are 20 years old, but feel like 52." If your age if negative due to eq, the latter part will read "but feel incredibly young!".