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 colour 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.

Reading the canvas

The canvas has a few controls along the top, and a help button (the question mark) that explains them in place.

• 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. 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, or hold Ctrl (or Cmd) and scroll, to spread out a crowded stretch. Click the percentage to reset. Drag the empty canvas to pan.
• Filters. Categories, Relationships, and Lanes hide or show what is drawn without touching your data.

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.

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.

Comparing timelines

When a world holds more than one timeline, a Compare button 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, coloured by the new relationship type.

The bridge runs both ways. From a relationship's history in the Relationship Web you can create a new timeline event without coming here first, and even name a brand-new timeline if the world doesn't have one yet. See How relationships change over time for that flow. Either tool works on its own, so you can start wherever the writing takes you.

Sharing a timeline with readers

Each timeline has a public switch in its settings. Turn it on and the timeline appears on your world's public page in a read-only form, with no editing and no drafts. Keep it off to work in private. You can also export a timeline as a Markdown or plain-text file from the same menu.

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.