The game's crafting systems have gone through too many iterations to comment on, but I just want to say here - night in Firefall is absolutely beastly. It's dark and genuinely a bit tense, hard to see things outside the radius of your flashlight (unless you're a dirty cheater and turn your gamma up!). You can see explosions from far away, and it's just cool: there might be a bright flash of red in the far distance, a few more flashes of gunfire. It just looks cool.
There's also been developer talk of having certain enemies appear and events that only happen at night.