So then I thought it was some sort of in game penalty for sleeping in a bed that you didn't own. Fine, so I went to Novac and paid for a room in the Dino hotel and slept for 1 hour and the same exact thing happened only this time I was given the well rested benefit.
So then I slept for 3 hours after reloading my saved game just to see what would happen and my character died due to dehydration.
You have got to be kidding me. This is obviously a bug. Just so the developers of the game can know for future use, I have slept for 9 hours every night for the past 24 years and am still alive. That's right, 3 times as long as the time span that is killing my character due to dehydration.
"set timescale to" is at the default. I'm loading the game with NO mods on it whatsoever, the only .esm file that is selected to be active is the default FalloutNV.esm which comes with the game.
I've checked all of the .ini files and none of them are actively changing "set timescale to", in fact this wouldn't matter anyway because I tested it by changing the timescale to something ridiculously fast like 15000 and watching the days and nights pass very quickly in game and my thirst didn't even rise at all so that leads me to believe it's something else causing it.
I've also tried using New Vegas Mod Manager to load the game and the extremely quick dehydration issue still occurs. I am at a loss for any other possible explanations. I am using patch 1.2.0.285 which I have to use because it fixes the save file corrupt issue that I was having previously where my save files would randomly refuse to load and the game would crash to desktop as soon as I tried to load them. I didn't play hardcoe at the default patch level so I can't say if this current patch is causing this issue or not.