Crops' calendar

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The Crops' calendar (pronounced: 'cropes') is a lunar calendar established by the Kalikhan Academy of Sciences. Although it's close in date to the lore calendar, the Crops' calendar is not implemented in-game.

The reason behind its implementation was to create a standardized calendar for academic work, most notably the documentation of historic events. Converting from real time to lore dates is intended to be as convenient as possible: for example, the date of August 27, 2023 converts to August 27, 6 AC. It also follows the convention of one month in real time equating to a year in-game. For this reason, January, February, March etc. are not names of months, but years. It is denoted by using the terms anno carroti (AC) and before carrots (BC).

The calendar begins with March 1, 1 AC and the current date is Octember 14, 20 AC.

Description

Phases of a lunar week

The basis of the Crops' calendar is the lunar week, a period of 8 days during which the Moon completes a cycle of phases from a full moon to a new moon, and then back into a full moon. 9 lunar weeks make up a month, which is 72 days in total. The length of a year varies between 28-31 months to more properly accommodate for the solar orbit. There are 12 different years that repeat in order, beginning in March and ending in February — this repeating cycle is called a dosentury.

The solar orbit length is the amount of time it takes for Earth to orbit the Sun once, totaling 26,298 days. However, a dosentury lasts only 26,280 days — to fix this time shift, every 4th dosentury becomes a leap dosentury, where the last year contains an additional month. Leap dosenturies are the equivalent of leap years.

A dosentury is divided into 12 years
No. Name of year Length in months
1 March 31
2 Aepril 30
3 May 31
4 June 30
5 Jule 31
6 August 31
7 September 30
8 Octember 31
9 November 30
10 Decembry 31
11 January 31
12 February 28 (29 in leap dosenturies)

Date format

The full date format for the Crops' calendar is:

[Lunar week number] Moon of [Name of the year] [Month number], [Year number] AC

For example, the date for the third lunar week of the seventh month of June in the year 15 would be:

3rd Moon of June 7, 15 AC

When the exact lunar week is not important, unknown or unnecessary, it can be left out:

June 7, 15 AC

Dosenturies are usually not included in the date format, but can be added using a semicolon. They consist of the symbol D, followed by the dosentury in Roman numerals.

June 7, 15 AC; DII

Calendar era

The calendar follows the Carrot Era — abbreviated AC, for the Latin anno carroti, meaning "in the year of the carrot". It numbers the years since the appearance of the wild carrot as a widely grown agricultural product, starting with 1 AC. Based on this calendar system, the calendar itself was first introduced in May 24, 3 AC.

Time before 1 AC is denoted by BC (before carrots), with the years moving in reversing order. The date before March 1, 1 AC is February 28, 1 BC.