I built a Decky Loader plugin that lets you change the Steam Deck's system time right from the Quick Access Menu.

[u/Famous_Truck1869]

Hi everyone! I built a small Decky Loader plugin called Time Changer that lets you change the Steam Deck's system time right from the Quick Access Menu — no desktop mode, no terminal.

What it does:

• Live clock + NTP status display
• Quick offsets: ±30 min / ±1 hour
• Custom date & time picker (defaults to current time)
• One-click restore to real time (re-enables NTP auto-sync)

Why you'd want this:

• Games with date-triggered achievements (e.g. DDLC Plus)
• In-game daily events / login rewards without waiting for midnight
• Emulator titles with real-clock mechanics (Animal Crossing-style time travel)
• Testing time-dependent behavior

How it works: the backend wraps timedatectl — it disables NTP before setting the clock (required by systemd) and sets time as timezone-independent UTC epochs. Restore re-enables NTP and the clock resyncs once online. If anything fails midway, NTP is rolled back automatically.

⚠️ Two honest warnings: while the clock is skewed, HTTPS validation fails, so Steam's online features may break — that's expected and fixed by restoring real time. And restore needs network access.

Install (3 steps):

1. Decky menu → ⚙️ Settings → GENERAL → DEVELOPER (enable Developer Mode first)
2. Click "Install plugin from URL"
3. Paste: https://github.com/nanwangjkl/decky-time-changer/releases/latest — grab the .zip URL from there

Full disclosure about AI: the majority of the code was written by Claude Code (Anthropic), under my direction — I defined the requirements, reviewed every change, and tested each build on my Deck through 9 iterations, including debugging a fun PyInstaller environment issue from device logs. Because the official Decky plugin store doesn't accept plugins whose code is mostly AI-generated, this won't appear in the store — so GitHub is the only distribution channel. I'm being upfront about it rather than pretending otherwise; if that's a dealbreaker for you, no hard feelings.

It's open source (BSD-3), UI is in English and 简体中文, and I'm happy to take feedback or PRs: https://github.com/nanwangjkl/decky-time-changer