Events, Holidays & Patterns

MythTapestry supports three types of temporal references that you can place on your calendar. Each serves a different purpose.

World events

World events are one-time historical occurrences — battles, coronations, cataclysms, discoveries. They mark specific moments or spans in your world’s timeline.

Event fields

Field	Description
Name	Primary name (e.g. “The Great Fire”)
Aliases	Alternative names (e.g. “Fire of 1523”, “The Burning”)
Description	What happened
Start / End	Range-based positioning on the timeline (absolute day values)
Time of day	Optional fractional start/end times
Precision	Which temporal scale the date is precise to (references a scale name from the event’s calendar — e.g. “Day”, “Month”, “Year”, “Season”)
Precision unknown	Flag for approximate dates (“sometime in the Third Age”)
Calendar	Which calendar system the event uses
Linked entity	Optional link to an Event entity in the knowledge graph

Note

Events use range-based positioning — even a single-day event has a start and end. This allows events to span multiple days, months, or even years (e.g. a war lasting from Year 100 to Year 107).

Precision system

The precision field references a temporal scale name from the event’s calendar. For example, an event with precision “Year” only guarantees accuracy to the year — the exact month and day may be approximate or unknown. If the calendar has custom scales like “Season” or “Age”, those are available as precision values too. Setting is_precision_unknown to true marks the entire date as approximate.

This matters for display and for the graph’s temporal controls, which can filter to show only events at a given precision level. Content units also use the same precision system in their narrative time context.

Holidays

Holidays are annually recurring dates tied to a specific calendar. They repeat every year automatically.

Defining holidays

Holidays can be defined in two ways:

Method	Fields	Example
Day of year	day_of_year_start, day_of_year_end	Day 45 to Day 47 (a 3-day festival)
Scale-based	scale_id, unit_index, day_in_unit_start/end	Month 6 (index 5), Days 1–3

The day-of-year method is simpler — just specify which day numbers in the year the holiday spans. The scale-based method lets you say “the first 3 days of the 6th month” which adapts if months have variable lengths.

Holiday fields

Field	Description
Name	Holiday name (e.g. “Festival of Stars”)
Aliases	Alternative names
Description	What the holiday celebrates
Precision	How precise the date is

Recurring patterns

Recurring patterns are events that repeat based on overlay temporal scales — like “Market Day every 5th day” or “Council meeting on the 3rd Fireday of each month”.

Simple patterns

A simple pattern ties directly to an overlay scale unit:

• Overlay scale: Which overlay cycle (e.g. Week)
• Unit index: Which unit in the cycle (e.g. 3 for Thursday in a 0-indexed week)

This creates a pattern that recurs every cycle — every Thursday, every 5th day, every new moon.

Complex patterns

For more sophisticated patterns, use pattern_config with structured rules:

Ordinal-in-division pattern: “The 3rd Friday of every month”

• base_division_id — which scale is the container (Month)
• overlay_scale_id — which overlay to reference (Week)
• ordinal — which occurrence (3rd)
• unit_index — which unit in the overlay (Friday)

Pattern fields

Field	Description
Name	Pattern name (e.g. “Market Day”)
Aliases	Alternative names
Description	What happens on this recurring date
Calendar	Which calendar this pattern belongs to

Tip

All three temporal reference types — events, holidays, and patterns — support aliases. This is useful when the same event is known by different names in different regions or cultures of your world.