While you’re waiting, the code is literally acting like you’re hitting ‘.’ (pause/pass) for as long as it takes for the selected duration to expire, so it’s rendering every frame and any monster activity etc exactly as if you were running around for the same amount of time. There might be some kind of speedup that can be done, like with sleeping for example where it only draws the map* once every 300 turns.
That having been said, the code is pretty unoptimized at the moment in general, especially the lighting code, which is what I’m working on right now, so there should be some major improvements soon even if we don’t end up doing a specific change for the wait code.
*Drawing the map is the single most expensive operation the game does, so making it redraw the map 5x less often will result in something like a 4x speedup.
