Timeline

The timeline gives your project its own calendar, eras and dates, so you can build a timeline for a story and see what happened when, even in a world where "when" is complicated.

Creating a timeline #

Choose Create Timeline and pick a calendar:

Gregorian calendar — real-world years, months and days, for anything set on Earth.
Custom calendar — your own units of time and how many of each fit into the next, for a secondary world with eight-day weeks or thirteen-month years.

Every event, chapter and character date in the project is measured against this calendar.

Timeline settings #

The calendar and its eras are set up in Settings → Timeline, away from the timeline itself; Timeline settings at the top of the timeline page opens it. Calendar holds the date format, the current date, relative dates and, for a custom calendar, its units. Changes are kept only when you choose Save; Discard puts the saved values back.

Eras #

Timeline eras, in the timeline settings, divides history into named periods: a Third Age and a Fourth Age. An era has a name, a prefix such as 3A, a colour and a span, and one era can be marked as ongoing. A bar above the list draws every era to scale, so gaps and short eras show at a glance. Eras cannot overlap: while you draft one, the form names the era it would overlap and will not save until the dates are free. An absolute era counts its years from its own start, so a date reads 3A 212 rather than a number from the beginning of time.

How do I build a timeline for a story? #

Create events and give each one a date. The timeline shows them in three views, chosen at the top of the page:

Table — every event in a grid, with its date, colour, tags and Gap before: the empty time since the event before it.
Chronicles — your world's history read as a book. Each era is a chapter headed by its span and number of events; each event shows its date, the start of its description, the people and places it involves, and its tags. A line between two events says how much time passed, and the space between them grows with it. Download chronicles saves it.
Gantt — events, chapters and plotline beats as dots and spans on a chart you can zoom from the whole history down to a single day, with the lifetimes of your records alongside.

Filter any view by date, era, tag or text.

How much time passed between two dates? #

Open the Duration calculator from the clock button at the bottom of the sidebar, on any page of the project. It has two dates, From and To, and shows the time between them in the calendar's own units.

Type a date into either field.
Right-click any date shown in the project, in a table or a list, and choose Add to duration calculator. A date range offers its start or its end.
In a date picker, the clock button beside Clear adds the date you are editing without changing the field.
On the timeline, an event card's menu has Add to duration calculator, which fills the next free date with the event.

The first date fills From, the next To; a third replaces To. Recent comparisons keeps your last ten pairs for this project, on every device you sign in on: choose one to compare it again.

How do I read a timeline that spans thousands of years? #

Events rarely spread evenly: a few busy centuries, then millennia of silence. The chart folds the silence by default. Any empty stretch longer than a twenty-fifth of the whole timeline shrinks to a narrow shaded break labelled with its length, ≈ 12,400 years, and the eras that begin inside it. Select the label to see what lies on either side, show the stretch around it or add an event in the middle of it. Switch the Time scale buttons above the chart to Linear scale to see time at its true proportions; the choice is remembered for you in each project. The chart starts just before your first event and ends just after your last one, or the last repeat of a repeating event within your eras, so an era that runs on long after the story does not leave it empty.

Zoom with Ctrl and the mouse wheel over the moment you care about, or with the slider and the + and − buttons. The labels along the top follow your calendar: centuries, then years, months and days as you go in. Zoom to fit shows everything again.
Pan by dragging the chart sideways, or with Shift and the wheel.
Era chips above the chart fit one era to the screen.
The overview strip under them always shows the whole timeline: era colours, where events crowd together, and a frame for what is on screen. Drag the frame to move, drag its edges to zoom, or select anywhere to jump there.
Numbered pills gather events too close together to tell apart at this zoom. The longer the stretch of time on screen, the longer the stretch one pill gathers, so on a ten-thousand-year view years 1, 2 and 3 share a pill that splits apart as you zoom in. Hover a pill to list its events and the dates it covers; select it to zoom until they separate, or, when they share one date, to pick one from the list. Hover any dot or bar to see what it is.
Arrows at the edges count the events beyond the screen and how far away the nearest one is; select one to jump to it.

How do I find what came before and after an event? #

Select an event on the chart. A card opens beside it, on the side away from the event, with its date and era, the start of its description, the records it involves, and the events before and after it with how much time separates them; select either to move to it. The card's menu holds Add event in the gap before and after, which create a new event halfway into that gap with the date filled in, and Add to duration calculator. Close the card with its × or Esc; on a phone it rises from the bottom of the screen. With the chart focused, ← and → step from event to event and [ and ] jump between clusters; see keyboard shortcuts.

How do I read a long history as a story? #

Switch to Chronicles. The bar at the top always names the era and date you are reading.

Jump to era goes straight to another era's chapter.
The arrow beside an era's heading folds its events away, leaving the heading and its count.
Show narrows the chronicle to spans of time, or to the events with one tag.
Find in chronicle highlights events whose name or tag matches and steps through them with Enter or the arrows; a match inside a folded era unfolds it.

Select an event's dot to make it the selected event in the other views too.

Gaps, beside the scale buttons, lists the largest empty stretches of the whole timeline, of what is on screen, or of one era, including an era's empty beginning and end. Each row shows the length, the events on either side and the eras crossed, with buttons to show the stretch or add an event in it.

View on timeline on an event's page opens the timeline with that event selected and the chart zoomed to it and its neighbours. The address keeps the selected event, so you can bookmark or share the view.

Below it, Before & after names the nearest events by start date, how long before or after they happened and in which era, and any that start on the same date. Each one links to its page, and its timeline icon opens the timeline focused on it.

Can a date move when another one changes? #

Yes, with relative dates. A date can follow another record's date, "three years after the siege", instead of being a fixed number. Move the siege, and every date that follows it moves too, along with the dates that follow those.

In a date field, choose Relative, then Pick an entity.
Choose Which date of that record to follow.
Set the Direction (Before or After) and how long.

Relative dates are on by default. To turn them off for a project, open Timeline settings and switch off Relative dates.

Chapter dates, event dates, characters' birth and death dates, and storyline events can all be relative. A date cannot follow itself, directly or through a chain. If you delete the record a date follows, the date keeps its current value and stops following.

A date can also follow one time a repeating event comes round: pick the event, then set Occurrence, so a wedding falls on the harvest festival's twelfth year. Change the festival's date or how often it repeats, and the wedding moves with it.

Recompute relative dates, in the same settings, recalculates every relative date in the project and tells you how many changed.

Move the siege and the treaty and the return move with it. Only the siege carries a number.

How do I make an event repeat? #

Give the event a repeat rule. A full moon every 29 days, a harvest festival every year and a winter that comes back each year are each one event. On the event's page, choose Repeats under the date and set Every and a unit of your calendar: years, months, weeks or days in the Gregorian calendar, your own units in a custom one. Under Ends, a series runs on forever, stops at a date, or ends after a number of times. Next dates lists the next five after the project's current date. The same Repeats field is in the form that creates an event and in the one that edits it, once the event has a date.

The event's own date is its first time, and every repeat lasts as long as the event, so a season given as a range repeats as a range. The event keeps one page, one description and one set of participants; the repeats are not separate events.

On the Gantt view the repeats are lighter marks in the event's row: hover one for its date, click it to open the event. Where they are too close together to draw one by one, a dashed line shows the stretch they cover. The table and the chronicles mark a repeating event with a repeat icon, and the Lens calendar shows it on every day it comes round.

What is happening at the same time? #

The Gantt view answers it. It draws events, chapters and plotline beats as bars against one another, so overlaps are visible: what else was going on while this was happening, which a list read top to bottom does not show. It can also draw when records existed (locations, places, creatures, entries, organizations and collection records), when characters were born and died, and the dates you add in custom date fields. Open Timeline options next to the view switch to choose which kinds are drawn, whether a span (existence, or birth and death) is one bar or two single dates, and, in the Gantt view, to hide eras with nothing in them; the choice is remembered for you in each project. The chronicles and table views list the same items among the events, and the same switches apply. Select an event to open its card, or any other bar to open its page.

Storyline events #

A storyline event is a moment in one character's history. Add one on the character's Storyline tab with Add storyline event: a title, a date, an optional location and description, and Field changes for anything that changed from that date on, such as a new title or a switched allegiance. See characters.

A storyline also shows what its record took part in. Every event the record is linked to appears on its Storyline tab or History card at the event's date, with the role and note from the event's participants. Characters, locations and places also show the dated chapters they appear in or that are set there. The chips above the list hide changes, events, chapters or membership; the choice is remembered for you in each project.

When a character joined or left an organization is an item too, on both storylines, worded for the page you are on: Mare joined as Leader on the organization, Joined the Silver Order as Leader on the character. These items come from the dates on the membership, so change them there; a period without a date adds nothing.

Add to an event, beside Add storyline event, links the record to an event you pick, or to a new one dated at the project's current date, with a role and a note.

Current date #

A project can have a "now". In Timeline settings, set Current date to Latest chapter date to follow the story as you write it, or Fixed date to choose one.

A date picker with no date yet opens at the current date. Dates that belong together open at each other: a beat at the previous beat's date, a death date at the birth date, a new history item at the latest one. Nothing is saved until you apply it.

Tips #

Pick the calendar before you date anything; every date in the project is written in it.
Anchor a long history to a few key events with relative dates, so moving one event reshapes everything that follows it.
Keep a moon, a season or a yearly feast as one repeating event rather than one event per cycle, and tie what happens at a particular one to that occurrence.
Give chapters a date too. Lens then shows the story in time order and flags flashbacks, jumps and characters in two places at once.
An event without a date cannot appear on the timeline; suggestions point out undated ones.
Colour events by kind, battles in one colour and births in another, to read the Gantt view at a glance.
Before writing a new stretch of history, open Gaps for its era: the longest empty stretches are where a reader will wonder what happened.
Read an era in Chronicles with the others folded away to check it tells a story on its own.

Locations, events and more — create the events the timeline shows.
Characters — birth and death dates, and a character's storyline.
Plotlines — dated beats that appear on the Gantt chart.
Lens — check the story's chronology for continuity errors.
Maps — see where things happened as well as when.