the TZ Bug in Chill with You on Linux

What’s This About

There’s a game on Steam called Chill with You ~ Lofi Story (is it even a game? it’s basically a pomodoro timer!). It’s one of my favorites - the protagonist is adorable and provides great companionship.

The setting is that you and the protagonist exist in different parallel universes, so I always assumed the time difference between the game and my local time was intentional. I never bothered to look into it.

Until the 1.2 update (January 27th), when I saw a comment in Steam’s discussion board: basically saying that when running this game on Linux with Proton, the in-game time always shows UTC+0.

For those unfamiliar with UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), here’s a simple example: I’m in UTC+8, so if my actual time is 8:00 AM, the game would show 0:00 AM - an 8-hour difference.

Wait, what? So it wasn’t some parallel universe setting after all, just the timezone not being read correctly. No wonder it was exactly 8 hours off.

Problem Analysis

It’s actually a pretty simple issue, and I quickly found the cause: Proton-run Windows programs can’t correctly read the Linux system’s timezone information. On Linux, timezone data is usually stored in /usr/share/zoneinfo/, while on NixOS it’s in /etc/zoneinfo/.

The solution is simple - just manually specify the timezone in the launch options. Go to Steam → Game Properties → Launch Options and add:

TZ=Asia/Shanghai: Sets the timezone to Shanghai (Beijing Time)
TZDIR=/etc/zoneinfo: Specifies the timezone file directory location

It should look something like this:

TZDIR="/usr/share/zoneinfo" TZ="Asia/Shanghai" %command%

After adding these launch parameters and restarting the game, the time displays correctly. 9:31 is now 9:31.

Something like this, it was originally showing 1:31

Afterword

That pretty much solves the problem. I also replied to that discussion comment with the solution. If you’ve encountered the same issue, I hope this post helps you.

By the way, I use NixOS, so normally I should use /etc/zoneinfo instead of /usr/share/zoneinfo, since NixOS doesn’t have the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. However, this still works because Steam’s environment handles it for you.

Belike:

~ $ steam-run ls /usr/share/zoneinfo
Africa     Egypt      Hongkong     Mexico    ROK
America     Eire       HST     MST     Singapore
Antarctica  EST        Iceland     MST7MDT   Turkey
Arctic     EST5EDT    Indian     Navajo    tzdata.zi
Asia     Etc        Iran     NZ     UCT
Atlantic    Europe     iso3166.tab   NZ-CHAT   Universal
Australia   Factory    Israel     Pacific   US
Brazil     GB        Jamaica     Poland    UTC
Canada     GB-Eire    Japan     Portugal  WET
CET     GMT        Kwajalein   posix     W-SU
Chile     GMT+0      leapseconds   PRC     zone1970.tab
CST6CDT     GMT-0      leap-seconds.list  PST8PDT   zonenow.tab
Cuba     GMT0       Libya     right     zone.tab
EET     Greenwich  MET     ROC     Zulu

~ $ ls /usr/share/zoneinfo
lsd: /usr/share/zoneinfo: No such file or directory (os error 2).