there is one timer in the game, but it's triggered by story, and it's something that I'm pretty certain is impossible to intervene in, because it doesn't give you enough time to do the considerably amount of work to do so. The timer is basically just to get you into position to see what happens.

I believe the "story" triggers are actually that of progression. Once you've done X, picked up or scanned Y, built Z, things happen around you. I suppose theoretically you could just dick around in god mode through use of a trainer to keep your food and water up indefinitely so long as you didn't DO anything.