The Quest makes use of a system to represent the passage of time in game. There is no active way of seeing the game's clock during gameplay. The only way a player will be able to know the current time within his/her file will be by saving and making note of that file's day and time annotated at the moment it was saved.
Gameplay[]
There are a number of elements that make use of the game's clock to trigger different events and/or effects. Perhaps the most important one will be the triggering of Night and Day. Time in The Quest is measured in Minutes, Hours, and Days. There are certain events that meassure time in the form of Weeks, but in actuallity, these trigger every 7 Days rather than in an actual unit of meassurement for Week.
Just like real life, there are 60 Minutes in one Hour, and 24 Hours in one Day.
There is no benefit or penalty for completing the main story quests in the core game or any of the expansions, but many players in the comunity like to make use of the game's clock to meassure different levels of skill and ingenuity. One example of this is to see who can perform the Dash to Mithria exploit in the shortest amount of time (the shortest recorded stands at just under 1 day).
Passage of Time[]
The main effect that denotes the passage of time in The Quest is the player's movement in the world. One minute within the game passes each time the character moves into a new grid on the map. There are 21 grids from North to South, and 21 grids from East to West within a single zone. Assuming that the character meets no obstacles in crossing a single zone from one end to another, it will take him/her exactly 21 game minutes to reach each oposing side. That also means that it would take that character 1 hour and 24 minutes to walk all four frontier lines of that same zone.
However, walking is not the only way for time to move forward.