I almost didn't get into Vintage Story for this reason exactly. For some reason whenever we set up the server it would start the world at night. It was too dark to play, and it didn't matter how I tweaked my settings.
Not knowing anything about the game, and having to wait 20 minutes before being able to do anything was very discouraging, we gave up on it and I had no real incline to try it out again. A week later we decided to give it another shot, In the end I just looked up a command to set it to daytime.
I don't mind it being pitch black. In rust, that was an exciting part of the game. But in Rust you also start out with a torch.