I appreciated this post, as it drove home to me how little I understand programming, and game development in particular.

"This will slow things down, but it's the safest way to be sure of a correct timestamp. I don't see this as a final solution, I hope there are ways to get an immediate timestamp which is either known to be correct or within acceptable error bounds."

However, I had a thought about this. Since the 'server' for each iteration of the game is intended to be distributed, I thought of the 'gossip about gossip' validation mechanism of hashgraph. This would minimize resources necessary to devote to validation, and enable instant validation of local events, swift validation of regional events, and potentiate system wide validation at leisure for matters (unlike volcanic eruption for example) that haven't a system wide time critical nature.

Edit: The more I think about it, the more that model seems highly suited to the varied infrastructure and network topography the game will encounter, for every aspect of game-space evolution as effected by players and incident programmatic or ambient change.