Time Weaver

The Time Weaver lays your world’s events on a single chronological spine. It answers one question a long project keeps asking: when did this happen, and what else was happening then? It is a Pro worldbuilding tool, alongside the Lexicon Engine, the Relationship Web, the Consistency Sentinel, and the World Bible.

A story runs on two clocks: the order events happen in the world, and the order a reader meets them. This tool maps the first one, so your world stays consistent even when the chapters jump around.

Timelines live inside a world

Open the tool from Tools, then pick a world (or make one). A world can hold more than one timeline. Most projects keep a single main history, but you might keep a separate timeline for an earlier age, a parallel realm, or a subplot you want to reason about on its own.

Every event you add is also an entry in that world. An event you place on the timeline shows up in the World Bible, and a dated entry in the Bible can join the timeline. You never model the same moment twice.

Adding events

Each event has a date written in your own words. “T.A. 3018”, “Year 12, third moon”, “spring of the long winter”: the tool reads the number it can find and sorts events for you. When two events land on the same moment at the same place, it flags them, so continuity slips surface before a reader finds them.

An event can carry more than a date:

• An end date. Give an event an end and it draws as a bar across its span instead of a single dot. Use it for a war, a reign, a journey.
• An approximate date. Check this when you know roughly when something happened but not exactly. The marker draws dashed and faded and still sorts by your best guess.
• A category. Battle, birth, death, political, discovery, travel, or one you invent. The category sets the marker color (which you can change in Appearance, below) and feeds the canvas filter. Birth and death events also draw a faint lifespan band behind the character they belong to.
• A location and linked characters. Tie an event to a place and the people in it. These become links straight to those entries, and the location drives same-place conflict detection.

When events collide

Two events at the same place at the same time, or within a moment of each other, might be a continuity slip: a character can’t be in two halls at once. The Time Weaver watches for these and gives you a place to work through them.

• The warning triangle sits on any flagged event in the list view. Click it to see what it is warning about: which other event shares the place and time, and whether they land on the same moment, sit nearby, or overlap as spans. Open either event right from there to fix it.
• The conflicts count in the action bar tallies the clashes across the whole timeline. Click it, or “Review all conflicts” inside any warning popover, to open the full overview. It groups every clashing pair by the place they share, so you can open either event to re-time it or move it somewhere else.

A conflict is a nudge, not an error. Two coronations in one cathedral on one day might be exactly what you meant. Nothing is changed for you. The flags only make the overlaps easy to spot.

Reading the canvas

The action bar keeps the canvas the main event. One button, Add event, stays in reach. Everything that changes how the canvas looks sits behind Display beside it. Open Display and it opens a panel along the side of the canvas (a sheet from the bottom on a phone), so the controls are one tap away without crowding the spine:

• Spacing. Even gives each event its own slot, which is best for browsing. To scale places events by their real date, so gaps and clusters show.
• Group lanes by. The rows beneath the spine group by character, place, or plotline, so you can read one thread at a time.
• Zoom. Use the plus and minus buttons here, or hold Ctrl (or Cmd) and scroll on the canvas, to spread out a crowded stretch. Click the percentage to reset. Drag the empty canvas to pan.
• Categories, Lanes, and Relationships. Hide or show what is drawn without touching your data.

The bottom of the Display panel has a short help section that explains each control in place. Close Display to give the canvas the full width again.

Other things the canvas draws on its own: shaded era bands behind the spine, dashed arcs above the spine for conflicts, and curved arrows below it for cause and effect between events.

Color the canvas

Appearance sets how the canvas looks. Find it at the foot of the Display panel, or in the More menu (the button marked with three dots in the action bar). Pick a canvas theme, Parchment, Blueprint, Midnight, Mono, or Dusk, to retone the spine, era bands, and labels at once. The same themes carry over to the Relationship Web.

In the same panel, assign a color to any event category, built-in or one you made up, so a battle reads red and a coronation reads gold the way your world pictures them. The colors are saved on the world, so a public timeline shows them to readers too.

In To scale, you can drag a marker whose date is a plain number to move it in time. Dates written in words stay editable from the event panel, so a drag never scrambles them. You can also focus a marker and walk the spine with the arrow keys.

Plotlines

A plotline is a named thread that groups events: the quest, the war, the romance. Create plotlines from the event editor and add events to them, then group the canvas by plotline to see each one as its own row. Plotlines also feed the thread view, which assembles everything tied to one entry, plotline, piece, or series in time order.

Referencing events in your writing

Inside the editor, type @ to mention an event and drop an inline reference into your prose. The reference shows the event’s date and name, and it links back to the exact spot on the timeline. The timeline event panel then shows which pieces reference it, so you can move between the world and the writing without losing your place.

Open the editor’s Tools menu and pick Timeline to browse and add events beside your draft. The panel is narrow, so it lists events instead of drawing the spine. When you want the whole tool, choose View full timeline (or tap any referenced event) and the entire Time Weaver slides in over the editor. This is the same tool as the standalone page, not a preview: the spine and lanes canvas, the list view, the full event editor (category, location, linked characters, dates, plotline membership, cause and effect), plotline management, timeline settings, bulk import, export, version history, and multi-timeline compare are all here. Nothing opens a new tab, so your draft stays exactly where you left it. The workspace fills the screen on a phone and runs wide on a desktop. Use ‹ Back to editor (or the corner close) to return to the line you were writing.

Comparing timelines

When a world holds more than one timeline, Compare (in the More menu) stacks them on a shared scale, each as its own band. Use it to line up an earlier age against the present, or a subplot against the main thread, and see how they overlap.

The relationships lane

If you track relationships in the Relationship Web, turn on the Relationships lane to drop each change onto the same scale as your events. A friendship that breaks the same year as a battle lines up underneath it, colored by the new relationship type.

The bridge runs both ways. The Relationship Web carries a Manage timeline button beside its scrubber that opens this same event editing in place: pick or create a timeline and add, edit, or remove events, with the full set of details, without coming here first. You can also create a single event straight from a relationship’s history, and name a brand-new timeline if the world doesn’t have one yet. See How relationships change over time for those flows. An interactive map reads the same scale the other way around: set it to a moment in the timeline and it reveals its pins progressively, so the world fills in as your history unfolds. Either tool works on its own, so you can start wherever the writing takes you, and the Tools menu in either header jumps you between them for the same world in a new tab.

Timeline settings: rename, share, or delete

Open the More menu (the three-dots button in the action bar) and choose Settings to rename the timeline, write a short description, or turn on its public switch, which puts the timeline on your world’s public page in a read-only form, with no editing and no drafts. Keep the switch off to work in private. The same menu is home to New timeline, Version history, Plotlines, Import, and Export.

To export a timeline, open the More menu and pick a format: CSV or Excel when you want it as a spreadsheet (one row per event, with its date, title, location, linked characters, and notes), which is how most writers keep this kind of data, or Markdown and Plain text for a written version.

The settings panel is also where you delete a timeline. It moves to Trash with its events, so you can restore it from Manage, then Trash, within your plan’s recovery window. If the timeline still has events referenced in your writing, Inkbreaker asks you to confirm before it removes them. See Saving and recovering your work for the window length.

Performance with large worlds

The canvas stays responsive as a world grows. Past a few hundred events it draws only the part of the spine you are looking at and fills in the rest as you scroll, so a sprawling history pans as smoothly as a short one.