So, I kept getting tripped up by the Star Rail maintenance windows. You know how it is, you plan your evening around dailies, and bam, servers are down. Or worse, you forget when it ends and miss out on that first wave of post-maintenance login rewards. Got real tired of constantly checking forums or the launcher just to figure out the timing.
My first thought was just setting phone reminders. But honestly, finding the exact start and end times, converting them to my local time… it felt like more effort than it was worth each time. Lazy, I know. I looked around for existing countdown apps or websites, but most were either overloaded with ads or just didn’t feel right. Some didn’t even update properly.
Figuring it Out
So, I figured, how hard could it be to make my own simple countdown? Just something basic I could glance at. Here’s basically what I did:
- Finding the Times: This was the easy part. I just grabbed the official maintenance start and end times whenever Hoyoverse announced them. Usually popped up in the game notices or on their official site.
- The Time Zone Headache: This was the slightly annoying bit. The announcements are often in server time (UTC+8 mostly, right?). I had to make sure I was calculating the difference to my actual time zone correctly. Messed this up once or twice initially, thinking maintenance was ending sooner than it was.
- Making it Tick: Okay, got the start and end times in my local time. Now, I needed something to actually count down. A static page saying “ends at 5 PM” wasn’t what I wanted. I needed a live timer.
Putting it Together
I decided to throw together a super simple webpage. Like, really basic stuff.
I started with just plain HTML to structure the text. Something like “Maintenance ends in:”.
Then, the core part. I had to use a little bit of Javascript. Nothing fancy. Found some basic countdown timer scripts online – the kind that take a future date/time and calculate the hours, minutes, seconds remaining compared to right now. I plugged my calculated end time into one of those scripts.
Had to tweak the script a bit to make it display nicely, just showing the hours, minutes, and seconds left. Didn’t bother with fancy graphics or sounds. Just the numbers ticking down. That’s all I needed.
The Result and Downsides
So now I have this barebones HTML file sitting on my computer. When maintenance is announced, I open it, quickly edit the end time variable in the Javascript part, save it, and then just open the file in my browser. It shows the countdown. Simple.
The big downside? It’s totally manual. Every single maintenance period, I have to manually get the new times and update that little script variable. I thought about trying to automate pulling the times from Hoyoverse, but honestly, that sounded like way too much work and prone to breaking. This manual way takes like, two minutes tops each time, so good enough for me.
It does the job, though. No more guessing. I just pop open that local file and see exactly how long I have left to wait. Even shared the file with a couple of friends in my group who found it useful too. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best, I guess. Beats refreshing a webpage constantly. It was a decent way to kill some time while waiting for the servers to come back up, anyway.
