Calendar & Timeline

If your story tracks time — and most do — Wonderthrough lets you build the calendar your world actually runs on, date your scenes against it, and keep your history straight. You can use a familiar Gregorian calendar, or invent one from scratch with its own months, festivals, and eras.

Building a calendar

A calendar in Wonderthrough is yours to define. You can start from a preset — Gregorian, Japanese, Islamic, or a science-fiction stardate system — and adjust from there, or build one completely from scratch.

A custom calendar can have:

• Your own months and divisions — name them, set how many days each one holds, and add festivals or intercalary days where your world needs them.
• A week cycle with your own day names, if your world has weeks at all.
• How years are labeled — simple numbers, a repeating cycle of named years, or eras tied to a ruler or age (like “the 3rd Year of the Reign of King Marcus”).
• Eras and leap-year rules for worlds where the timekeeping is genuinely different from ours.

You can keep more than one calendar in a project. One is marked the default, which is the one the scene date picker reaches for first.

Dating your scenes

Open a scene’s date picker to place it in time. You can choose the calendar, then pick a year, a month or division, and a day — with optional time of day if the moment matters.

You don’t have to be precise when you don’t want to be. A scene’s date can be exact to the day, approximate to a month or year, or just a free-form note (“sometime after the war”) when the timing is still loose. That flexibility means you can date what you know and leave the rest open without it feeling broken.

Parsing dates from your own words

You don’t have to count days by hand. In the date picker you can type a date the way you’d write it in the story — “three days after the Sundering”, “the next morning”, “during the Fall of Sentinel” — and ask Wonderthrough to work out the actual date for you.

It reads your phrasing against the calendar’s structure, your historical events, and anchors like the previous scene, then proposes a date with its reasoning shown so you can check the logic. If your wording could mean more than one thing, it offers you the candidates to choose from. And if it can’t resolve something — say you referenced an event that has no date yet — it tells you why and offers to fix the gap right there, like creating the event or setting its date without leaving the picker. As with everything else, the result is a proposal you confirm, not a change it makes on its own.

Historical events and periods

Your world’s history can live in Wonderthrough as its own entities:

• Historical Events are the dated moments your story refers back to — a battle, a coronation, a disaster. Each one can carry a description, a category, a sense of how significant it is, and a start (and optional end) date. Because they’re dated, you can point a scene’s date at one (“two days after the Battle of Westmarch”) and let the parser do the math.
• Historical Periods are the named ages and spans that frame your timeline — an age of enlightenment, a long war, a dynasty — each marked with the years it covers.

Together with your dated scenes, these give you a consistent backbone of time to write against, so the history behind your story stays as solid as the story itself.

Related help

• For dating scenes inside your manuscript, see Writing & the Editor.
• For creating historical events and other world entities, see Custom Entities & Worldbuilding.