OK. I know this has been said before, but I'm gonna repeat a bit with some new stuff.
First, I love the new nighttime sequence at the end of the prologue.
That said, you didn't carry it over to the beach. Suddenly, it's broad daylight. So that's a bit odd. I was all excited that it was going to be dark out on the beach and slowly get lighter, but instead it was like night, then you threw a switch and suddenly it is day.
Then, on top of that, I've said it before and I'll say it again here, it's weird to go from night to day to "Let's rest" shortly after meeting Shadowheart at the door of the ruins. Night, day, then first camp to end day happens all within a few minutes of gameplay IF you listen to the game tell you that you should long rest shortly after fighting the intellect devourerers. If you don't do this, and you put off camping, you put off story elements or skip them entirely.
So, I get it if you still don't want to implement a realtime clock with day-night cycles and weather. I think that'd be the most awesome and immersive gameplay, but I also get that it would be a huge change and hard to implement without overhauling the budget.
Therefore, how about this idea? Keep everything dark as your character stands up on the beach and you take control. However, instead of your character being fully healed up and rested, have them carry over whatever injuries, etc. they had in the prologue at the end. Thus, they might need to, from a gameplay perspective, rest to recover spells and hp. As the character is moving east, have it start to get brighter as if the sun is rising. By the time you reach Shadowheart, have it be in that in between stage where it is not quite dawn. You have your conversation with her. Then, as you conclude your conversation with her, the sun has peaked on the horizon off to the east. Bam, start of a brand new day.
After this, fight the intellect devourerers. Then, instead of a tutorial tooltip saying that you can long rest to recover and call it a day, have your character think something like, "After everything we've been through in the Hells, I know a new day just started, but maybe we should find a place to camp and rest. I think I need some time to recover after all that. Besides, it might be good to have a base camp." Then display the tutorial long rest tip. Thus, the game is suggesting to the player that they should call it a day even though they just started the day. This then guides players to have that first night story convo with Shadowheart, and they don't miss it because they're thinking, "Rest? Already? That's dumb."
Then, if you don't long rest, you continue however long you want as normal, and if you miss that convo then you miss it. No big deal. When you do eventually long rest, show the cutscene where you first make the camp your own. However, make it a daytime scene instead of night. Since it is day until you long rest, it should be a daytime scene when you first find the camp and make it your own.
Now, add a cutscene or two that shows the party spending time at the camp during the day and then again at night, doing different things like sharpening weapons, talking, eating and drinking, etc. simulating that they have been at the camp for some time. Use this cutscene, or similar cutscenes each and every time the player chooses to long rest, making them skipable for those who hate immersion. Thus, you are showing that whenever you long rest they aren't just teleporting to camp and it is suddenly night. They are going to camp and resting there for hours before it gets dark and then the nighttime camp scenes occur. This creates the illusion of time without having to implement the realtime clock with day/night cycles.
BUT...You still need a better way to nudge players to long rest for more story content. You need to give them a reason to long rest at camp more often. I pretty much missed a ton of story the first several times I played through because I was trying to go as long as possible without calling it a day. I don't mind calling it a day more frequently if I have a good reason for it. Right now, however, it seems actually counter-productive to ever long rest unless I absolutely have to since I know that every day moves me one step closer to a mind-flayer tadpole turning me into a monster. I need to be practically made to long rest since I know that every day counts.
So, allowing 2 short rests is fine, but there should be a potential risk even to do this. If you short rest, you might trigger a random encounter. The more dangerous the area, the more chance of a random encounter. This will force players to either long rest or fast travel to camp to short rest. Don't allow resting at all in areas like the Druid's Grove. Then, whether it is calling it a day or just short resting at camp, allow story conversations to occur while at camp. That way, people aren't missing out on a lot of good dialogue simply because they aren't long resting.
Make food NOT able to heal people unless they do a short or long rest. As long as I have plenty of health regen items like potions and food, I'm going to push the party as far as I can in a single day, like I did my first few playthroughs. Food should be needed to recover when short resting or long resting. Consume certain quantities of food based on how much HP you recover while resting, and that's the only time it heals you. Thus, you may start running low on recovery items and spells and be forced to end the day to long rest and recover, or at the very least port to camp to short rest safely. This also gives you a reason to pick up all the food items you can find and even makes sense as to why you would send them to camp instead of keeping a ton on you. It also gives you a reason to fight a battle or two and maybe call it a day, since you will need to in order to manage healing items more effectively. So potions are more important, food has a unique use, and so do long and short rests. AND, on top of it all, you nudge players to rest at camp more often to trigger more story so they don't miss out. AND, you simulate day/night more effectively, showing that they aren't just waking up, adventuring for ten minutes and then it is suddenly night and they should go to bed. AND, you no longer need characters to say, "Let's call it a night," after they've only been adventuring for 10 minutes and they haven't even used any spells or lost any HP.
