The Timezone Bug in Chill with You

Feb 8, 2026 - 2 min read - 400 words

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Basic Introduction
Problem Analysis
Solved

Basic Introduction

There’s a game (actually a pomodoro timer) called Chill with You ~ Lofi Story, which is one of my favorites. The female lead is adorable and provides great companionship (though it’s not particularly great as a pomodoro timer). The game has a setting where “you” and the heroine exist in different parallel universes. So I’d always assumed the time gap between the game clock and my local time was part of the setting, and never bothered to calculate how much it was off — I just ignored it.

Until after the 1.2 update (January 27th), when I saw a comment on Steam’s discussion board: essentially, when running this game on Linux with Proton, the in-game time always shows UTC+0. As for what UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is — to give a simple example, I’m at 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 at 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. I quickly found the cause: Windows programs translated through Proton somehow can’t correctly read the Linux system’s timezone information. On Linux, timezone data is typically stored under the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory. So the fix is straightforward — 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)
/usr/share/zoneinfo/: Specifies the timezone file directory location

So the launch option ends up looking like this:

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

After adding these launch parameters and restarting the game, the time displays correctly.

Something like this, it was originally showing 1:31

Solved

That pretty much wraps it up. I also replied to that comment thread with the solution. If you’ve encountered the same issue, I hope this post helps you out. 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. But this still works, because Steam’s environment handles it for you.

Like so:

~ $ 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).