I've encountered one quest that suggests I can learn more about my objective if I wait until night, but I can't find a way to wait until night, and resting just takes me to morning in the next day. any help appreciated.

I've encountered a group who will let you sleep in their camp. If you do not join the group, they want an exorbitant amount of cash for the privilege. If you join the group, then sleeping there is free (I think, not having tried it). I am afraid of joining the group for fear that it might make it impossible for me to join some other group.

Does anybody know if it is safe from catastrophic repercussions to join?

I'm not 100% sure since I haven't tried to join other groups yet, but since this group says that you can join provided you renounce all other group allegiances, I suspect that other groups will be the same. That is, you can (probably) join other groups but you'd have to renounce your allegiance to any current group memberships.

It worked like this in Planescape: Torment, so I suspect they would have a similar mechanic here - I can't imagine that you'd be locked out of a group. You most likely cannot re-join a group you've previously quit though.

Also, to the OP: sleeping in the camp doesn't actually change anything to night time, at least when I did it recently - but it did advance the time a day (which is important as some quests may change and/or may fail if you spend too much time sleeping).

Minor spoiler -> You need to break a certain something for nighttime to kick-in a certain area.

I assume this means effectively failing a certain quest?

In the release version?

They only wanted me to fix something, then when that was finished charge 40 shins per night. No joining. I *may* have clicked through their dialogue too fast though, since I'd read it all in the beta. (Also, as far as I'm aware there aren't any joinable factions in the game.)

However, sleeping doesn't set it to night time. The only way to achieve that is what mcneil_1 said.

I'm actually a bit angry that they apparently removed the ability to choose how long you sleep, since this whole quest was their public example of choice.
They have a video on their youtube channel, specifically showing this quest and the ability to come back at night.

If the only way to come back at night, is to fail another quest, that's pretty shit!

Actually after having tried it just for a laugh recently, I can confirm that you don't fail the quest as you can repair the damage you caused (as it were).

The only problem is the people who gave you the quest may react to you differently...

I agree that it's weird you can't just wait/sleep to get to night time. Especially since PST had day/night cycles. I know there's an in-game reason for it, but it's a kind of lazy reason.

Indeed.