Lore calendar
The lore calendar is the official Alathran calendar system. It has gone through multiple iterations, with the current version being its third revision.
Description
In the lore calendar, a year is divided into four seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. Every new year begins in Winter, with each season lapsing 540 days, totaling 2160 days over the year. This ensures that every year in-game lasts exactly 30 real days. Having every year last roughly a real month was the original vision of the staff when creating the calendar, a property that also influenced the creation of the Crops' calendar.
Because a 12 year cycle is finished in 360 real days, the calendar finishes 5-6 real days earlier than their respective real months. Over time, this causes the calendar years to advance faster, meaning that the expected synchronization of years to real months starts to shift out of place. This might cause conversion to other calendars to become more difficult in the future.
Contrary to other popular calendars, the lore calendar epoch starts at year 0. How the epoch was determined is unknown in lore.
Conversion
As of 13 AC, Alathra offers only one-way conversion assistance from real time to a lore date, which is through the /finddate command. This is done using a UNIX timestamp, a value determined by seconds that have passed since midnight of January 1, 1970. To convert a real date into the lore calendar, you must first convert it to its respective UNIX timestamp, using a converter tool such as this website.
For example, the real date of August 27, 2023 converts to the timestamp 1693094400 (you can also specify a time, for this example it was midnight).
Once you've obtained the timestamp from the date you wish to convert, you can use the command: /finddate [timestamp] to convert to a lore date. /finddate 1693094400 converts to Day 157 of Autumn, Year 5.
In short, the conversion process can be explained using this diagram:
REAL DATE ⇒ Unix converter ⇒ UNIX TIMESTAMP ⇒ /finddate command ⇒ LORE DATE