Community Suggestion: Referencing historical event dates in articles

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Referencing historical event dates in articles

New Feature Addition · Timelines · Created by Those2Nerds
accepted

What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?

We currently have no good means of keeping historical event dates consistent between timelines and articles.   Let's say an important coronation happened in year 1015. You add the Historical Event to a timeline, and in a variety of articles you have phrases like "After the coronation in 1015". Later, you realize this event should happen in 1032. Updating the historical event is easy, but now you have to update all your articles, and ctrl+k search won't help you if you used it in prompt fields.   For another example, perhaps you don't know the dates for some events yet, so you want to put a placeholder in. Easy enough to do in a timeline, you can just change the date later. But what about referencing that date in your article text?   If you're a Grandmaster or higher, you could put those dates inside variables. But then you'd need to create both a historical event AND a variable for everything, then remember to change both each time you adjust the date of something.   If you're below GM, you have no option other than scouring all your articles for the wrong date.  

How does this feature request address the current situation?

We can already insert links to historical events in our articles. This suggestion is to be able to insert a date that's connected to a historical event. When the event's date (or alt. display date) changes, these connected dates in our articles automatically update to match.   My personal ideal version of this would not create a hyperlink to the event page - If I'm referring to "The coronation of 1015" in my article, I likely want "coronation" to be the link, not the date. Others may have different opinions on that though.  

What are other uses for this feature request?

The ability to insert these auto-updating dates would already be incredibly helpful for maintaining consistency. There are also two potential upgrades to this that would make it even more useful:   If this feature supported date formatting, people would be less reliant upon the alt display date field and could insert the date in a way that matched the flow of the sentence. For instance, being able to specify if you want "March 15, 2042" vs "3/15/42" vs "15/03/2042" etc. or even just insert the month or year.   Similar to another feature request (Math with Variables), there could be an upgrade to allow you to choose to insert the date or a relative time like "125 years ago" based on the current date set on your World.

The Team's Response

Thanks for the suggestion! We've added this to our list for the planned time update.
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Current score

30/300 Votes · +7801 points

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by 3 Armored Kittens · Prodromos v.1.1 - World Anvil 0.9.15.050 © 2017-2025 [en] | Anvil Time: 14:31, Oct 12 2026