Popping FFXIV's Time Bubble

An Extradiegetic Study and Reconceptualization of the Relationship between Earth's Arrow of Time and Etheirys's

I wanted to take a second to describe how I conceptualize time within the world of Final Fantasy XIV, since my autistic mind just cannot make sense of existence in a world where I can experience qualia and also time never passes. My brain says, “Nope,” and shuts right the hells¹ off. I could play a video game in a world like this, sure. But not imagine living in it—certainly not for the seven long years of wildly impactful RP that I’ve been both blessed and cursed to have built, experienced, and thrust upon me.²

In the official canon of FFXIV, the Main Story Quest’s timeline exists within what is often referred to as a “Simpson’s Time Bubble,” where timey-wimey-ness and cartoon physics permit characters somehow both to grow as people (or not, depending on how seriously the medium takes itself) and to have their clothes never decay as they wear them consistently over the course of Earth years (sometimes decades). This is how you wind up with academically, socially, and emotionally intelligent 15-year-olds in anime. Which, you know… Americans, we have this whole pseudo-dichotomously-gendered “physical body” ideal we feel depressed if we don’t see reflected in our mirrors. The Japanese have an ideal for the body and mind. That’s hard-core, and despite my real 150+ IQ, there is zero chance that I could have effected either, had I been born in a culture that required it of me. I find it way simpler never to fail to disappoint society in this timeline.

In order to make sense of how life might actually work for individuals that could live as people with real lived experiences, as rich as those of any human being on Earth, I had to reconstruct a version of the arrow of time for FFXIV that both flowed and that did so in an empirical, measurable fashion. A lot of people like to introduce randomness into their fictional “systems” by rolling dice (or other forms of probabilistic simulation often used in RP). And sure, this introduces a limited form of randomness into any gaming system. But six options is a little sad, isn’t it? Even one thousand options isn’t really all that many if you’re playing a game that’s truly “long-term” (and my nearly-a-decade long RP saga is certainly that). Moreover, nothing in the empirically³ real universe balances “bad” outcomes and “good” outcomes quite in the way a TTRPG tries to.

I like to introduce randomness into my gaming systems—and my fictional multiversues⁴ besides—by using natural laws instead. Effectively, I introduce randomness by bringing math into the picture. This isn’t “real” randomness either, but it is more akin to the phenomenological experience of randomness (which is often more accurately described as a sense of stochasticity rather than true mathematical randomness—which would technically allow a single quarter to land on heads 100 times in a row with low probability but zero shame). By introducing natural laws into a gaming system—even one that includes magic within its very nature—all that occurs within the context of the game, no matter now “random” or “stochastic” or even “fantastical” it feels, is woven into the tapestry of nature itself: a structural component of its functional existence, we might say. Magic, thus, becomes “natural” rather than “supernatural”—“normal” rather than “paranormal.”

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OK, but—Like—You Mentioned RP Time?

Yup, yup, yup. I was getting there. So, I like standardization, and I like simplicity at the point where a concept reaches a user—an important principle in programming and in GUI⁵ design since Apple thought to itself, What if instead of code, people interacted with pretty pictures that represent code? What people don’t often realize is that simplicity at the user-level (what in quantum physics is called the “macroscopic level” of physics, where quantum mechanics give way to the classical, “Newtonian” physics that we find most intuitive to our lived experience) requires complexity at the level beneath it, where the parts of the sublayer interact to render invisible its intricate mechanics to the layer above it.

Essentially, in doing all this, I basically designed a tiny app that gives you the answer to a simple question:

If I RPed on a given Earth date, on what date did my fictional characters phenomenologically experience the qualia of that RP using the Eorzean calendar, assuming that one Eorzean year is equivalent to one Earth year in its “distance” across the fourth axis of spacetime.

Sorry. That was me asking the question. You asking the question is probably more like:

If I RPed a given day on Earth, what day was that on Eorzea?

And the answer is, hold my beer. And probably also, sit down. This might hurt, and I’m sorry—there will be math.

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Unlike her Archon son Maxx, Joan prefers all the parts of adventuring that don’t involve math. Arcwolf, E.C.A. (2025, September 11). Maxx and Joan at the Heralds of Jijivisa’s First Step Café [Digital screenshot]. Final Fantasy XIV. Published under the FFXIV Materials Usage License.

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The Standardized Etheiryan Year

An Etheiryan solar year—one revolution of the star around its stellar twin, the Etheiryan sun Sol⁶—is composed of twelve isochronal⁷ moons, or months. Each Etheiryan moon is comprised of exactly four weeks, each week containing exactly eight suns (“days”). The sum of the total number of suns in a single Eorzean solar year is consistently 384 suns, or “days.” Finally, an Etheiryan sun is defined by “four cycles of the six elemental hours”⁸ (Ice, Water, Wind, Lightning, Fire, and Earth), a total of 24 (4 × 6) bells (“hours”) per sun.

Since we tend to live through our everyday lives primarily in terms of minutes, hours, and days—on account of the way that we phenomenologically experience the arrow of time within our Schwarzschild spacetime⁹—it makes the most sense to link these to the lived experience of our characters within the context of RP as it is experienced independently by the character, on the one hand, and the player on the other. Since these Earth concepts map perfectly—on a 1:1 basis—with Etheiryan temporal measurements like the minute, the bell, and the sun; it would be silly not to envision these as experientially congruent—or isochronal both ontologically and phenomenologically.

Equivalence Equations for Second, Minute, Bell, Sun, Week, and Moon

Conceptually, then, we’ll link the three isochronal measurement units between Etheirys and Earth mathematically. Then use those to arrive at the remaining two: week and moon.

No. Let’s get even kinkier. Let’s do this algebraically. 😎

The equivalence equations for Etheiryan seconds, minutes, bells, suns, weeks, and moons are represented by the set of equations listed below, where the second (s_🥕), minute (m_🥕), bell (b_🥕), and sun (d_🥕) of Etheirys each map congruently with the second (s_ℝ), minute (m_ℝ), hour (b_ℝ), and day (d_ℝ) of Earth, respectively speaking; and the Etheiryan week (w_🥕) and moon (M_🥕) are arithmetically derived from the isochronal four:

\(\begin{aligned} s_{🥕} &\equiv s_{\mathbb{R}} \\ m_{🥕} &\equiv m_{\mathbb{R}} \\ b_{🥕} &\equiv h_{\mathbb{R}} \\ d_{🥕} &\equiv d_{\mathbb{R}} \\ w_{🥕} &\equiv 8d_{🥕} \\ M_{🥕} &\equiv 4w_{🥕} \equiv 32d_{🥕} \end{aligned}\)

The Problem with the Eorzean Year

We start having issues with 1:1 isochronal mapping between Etheirys and Earth when we come to the temporal measurement unit we call the year because, as you can see mathematically—skip the aside quickly for the English version if you’re mathophobic!—when we try to derive the value for both years (Y_🥕 for the Etheiryan year and Y_ℝ for it’s Earth counterpart), we quickly derive its inequivalence:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{🥕} &= 12M_{🥕} = 384d_{🥕} \\ Y_{\mathbb{R}} &= 12M_{\mathbb{R}} ≈ 365.25d_{\mathbb{R}} \\ Y_{🥕} &\not\equiv Y_{\mathbb{R}} \end{aligned}\)

The result of this mathematical truth is that in order to accurately reflect a 1:1 isochronal mapping between Etheirys and Earth, we would have to rely entirely on counting suns¹⁰ (the smallest common isochronal measurement unit shared by both Etheirys and Earth).t₀

This would be awful, and it would utterly fail at representing the way that we actually record the long-term passage of time.

The Rationale for the Etheiryan Solar Year’s Standardization

When we think of things of things that happened to us “a long time ago,” we very rarely can call upon actual calendar dates for our more formative events. Sometimes we might remember the day of the week, but even this can’t always help us to pinpoint the exact, chronological date that a given event happened because of or about us.¹¹

On average, unless a purposeful effort has been made to remember the exact date that a given thing occurred, we tend to remember our own chronological linearity in terms of years—and, once you’ve got one or two under your belt, decades. I can think of things in my early childhood that happened in “elementary school” (1989–1990), or “around when I had my hernia repair surgery” (1991–1992), but I can tell you the birth dates of a number of people in my life that I can count on one hand because that’s what godsdamn agendas are for. And besides that, it truly is difficult to keep track of our “short-term” perception of time over the “long-term” as these memories are stored in completely different ways within the human brain.

Turns out that, evolutionarily speaking, it really doesn’t matter that the tiger mauled your firstborn son on January 4th so much as it matters that a tiger mauled your firstborn son five years ago and that you’ll never permit that to happen to any of your children ever again.¹²

Since short-term and long-term spans of time are processed and stored differently by the human brain, and since these differences result in innumerable phenomenological variations in the ways that we perceive the passage of time across our idiosyncratically processed lived experiences,¹³ it makes no sense to measure “the date that an RP took place” and “the year that an RP took place” in the same manner.

The Difference Between Lived Experience and Lived Chronology

Lived experience represents the individual narratives of our everyday lives. It is the “I went to visit your grandmother, and OMG your uncle was there, and he’s the worst!” of biological memory. When it is stored in long-term memory, this kind of narrative is compressed and reconstructed every time it is recalled, which is what results in these kinds of narratives becoming corrupted when recalled frequently over the course of a long life-time.¹⁴ This narrative, when recalled, presents itself consistently in terms of days, minutes, and hours. Even when experiences last days or longer, our narrative remembers these events in packets, which we can conceptualize as “scenes.”

Lived chronology represents the ways in which narrative events are temporally organized across a lifetime-unified, conscious span of time. We we think about a narrative, the when it happens often feels as if it must be separately remembered. You might imagine this as a given narrative as being “tagged” with a reference coordinate point along a chronological, one-dimensional diagram of a person’s lifetime. This metaphorical, mnemonic “tag” is stored along with its siblings in long-term memory and often considered in terms of weeks and months (for events that happened in the recent past), and in terms of years and decades once events have crossed into the “passive storage” that most our past memories eventually settle into as we age.

Conclusion, AKA TL;DR

The rationale for standardizing the Etheiryan year with the Earth year, then, relies on data combined by an interdisciplinary approach (mine—the “Ellic Jackhammer of Paradigm Shattering”) from the diverse fields of evolutionary psychology, neurology, physics, existential philosophy, and user-experience design.

Because we can only directly reference the phenomenological experiences of human beings from Earth—if someone ever meets a pataphysical visitor from the sub-universe of the MSQ of FFXIV, please let me know—in order to correctly report the experience of living in Etheirys through the context of narrative storytelling, we have to somehow match our temporal measurements to both forms of temporal experience.

This is what standardization does for us, and it’s exactly what’s already being done in the FFXIV RP community in response to data presented directly to each player, by the game developers and the writers, at the moment of character creation—even if they never would have referred to it in any of the ways that I have. In the FFXIV Forums there is thread where the original poster Tayelle goes into great detail about how to adapt the Eorzean calendar structure to that of the western hemisphere of Earth’s Gregorian calendar, using the calendar showed to the player at the moment of character creation as a guide.

Without the use of math or its jargon—terms like “standardization”—the FFXIV have mapped the sun of every single moon (32 suns long) to the day of every single Gregorian month (a clever but super-weird peppering of 28-, 29-, 30-, and 31-day months across every four-year cycle) in order to render moons and months into isochronal units of time. The FFXIV devs accomplish this by pairing two adjacent suns in each moon either once, twice, or three times—as needed to repair the damage that reality has done to our neatly conceptualized attempt to make sense of the concept of lunar months, back when we still thought witches’ curses were the primary cause of feudalist market downturns.

Using the replication of the official guide as inspiration, we can further standardize the Etheiryan solar year to render it isochronal with its Earth counterpart, confusingly also named the solar year. To do this, we’ll need algebra.

Here’s where your shout of “Red Light” will require you to skip to the next subsection entirely. Stop when you reach the next “Heading 1,” for the CSS aficionados among you.

The Math of Etheiryan Solar Year (Y_🥕) Standardization

STEP ONE: Rationale for Distinguishing Etheiryan Sun from Year

1. Premise 1 – Short-term and long-term time are stored and experienced differently by human beings.

2. Premise 2: The narrative of Final Fantasy XIV evidences that all player (i.e. humanoid) races experience consciousness in ways very similar to our own, permitting them to be reasonably, rationally, and meaningfully “roleplayed” by the average human player.

3. Conclusion: Short-term and long-term time are experienced in the same dichotomous manner by the human beings of Earth and by the humanoid “races of man” (the player races) of Etheirys.

STEP TWO: Rationale for Chosen Variables

1. Premise 1 – Etheiryan suns and Earth days are isochronal and a perfect equivalence variable connecting both arrows of time.

2. Premise 2 – Etheiryan suns and Earth years are anisochronic,¹⁵ and consequently useless in helping us draw a link between their native arrows of time.

3. Premise 3 – The FFXIV developers have provided an official map of the Eorzean calendar—measuring the Etheiryan solar year from start to finish (all 384 suns)—by individually assigning every Eorzean sun to a specific Gregorian calendar date.

   1. Assumption 1 – The individual assignment of Eorzean suns to Gregorian calendar dates was arbitrarily made, resulting in several Eorzean suns representing the same Gregorian day (e.g. the 28th and 29th Suns of the First Astral Moon both map to January 28) for no deducible reason.

   2. Sub-Premise 1 – The individual assignment of suns to days is only relevant to the nominal dating of a given Gregorian date using the Eorzean calendar. Dates are nominal entities in chronological taxonomy (we name time by them) but they are not “time spans” (we don’t measure time by them). While the length of a date and the length of a day are conceptually identical, that is only because the nomination of a date linguistically represents the span of time that a day is referent of.

   3. Rebuttal to Assumption 1 Using Sub-Premise 1 – It doesn’t matter how the devs matched Eorzean suns to Gregorian calendar dates. The fact that they were matched in such a way evidences that the length of an Etheiryan solar year is intended, by the devs themselves, to map 1:1 with the Earth solar year.

   4. Mini-Conclusion – If the official lore cannot but lead us to conclude that the FFXIV devs intended for the Etheiryan solar year to last as long as the Earth solar year, then standardizing the Etheiryan solar year to Earth’s is the only way to render the two units isochronal across years, decades, and greater spans of time.

4. Conclusion – If Etheryan suns are isochronal with Earth days, nominal Eorzean suns and Gregorian calendar dates can be mapped 1:1, and the Etheiryan solar year’s length can be algebraically standardized to map 1:1 with the Earth solar year, then we have a framework for an algebraic function that maps every Eorzean calendar date across the Sixth Astral, Seventh Umbral, and Seventh Astral Eras.

And you need an algebraic function like that if, you know, you wanted to do something crazy like build an app that makes this a thing you can just plug numbers into and get Eorzean date for Earth date and vice versa like it’s nothing. Something like that can help us find the year that a given RP event took place in whether we’re journaling about it having happened yesterday or trying to remember some shit you did with an old friend so far back you still remember when the U.S. was a republican democracy.

One More Thing We Need: the Origin Point

Even if we do map time 1:1 for Etheirys and Earth, any attempt to actually find equivalent points across a time axis (a one-dimensional length of string with units we’re working on matching exactly to one another), what point on that axis will be our origin (t = 0): the exact moment when the universal timelines of FFXIV and Earth perfectly overlapped.

The choice of an origin is necessary for the algebraic function that we want to be functional, but its specific location on the t-axis isn’t terribly important from a universal standpoint. If I picked one origin and you picked another, our math would result in different calendars, but notably not different experienced lengths of time. This is thanks to the standardization of Etheiryan and Earth solar years, which keeps us experiencing the arrow of time in the same way, even if we wind up naming our dates differently. Math is just that awesome.

So the origin is arbitrary, but I’ll tell you what origin I chose and encourage you to do the same:

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, also known as Final Fantasy XIV Patch 2.0, was released worldwide on August 27, 2013, for both Playstation 3 and PC. In my RP group—the free company called the Heralds of Jijivisa—we generally permit 3–6 months between the release of an expansion or patch and when we begin to RP as if the events of said expansion or patch have already happened for our characters. While we see these events as happening over an unknown period of time, we see the events of a singular expansion or patch resolving on the date of its release.

This works wonderfully because our original RP characters are not part of the MSQ and even those of us with Archon status and professional relationships with the Scions of the Seventh Dawn don’t find out about the events that took place in the MSQ during said expansions and patches for months.¹⁶

If we generalize from that practice, then August 27, 2013, becomes not only the worldwide release date for ARR: it also becomes the exact date that the leaders of each city-state of Eorzea collectively declared the end of the Seventh Umbral Era and the beginning of the Seventh Astral Era.

We have our origin:

\(\begin{aligned} d_{t_{0}, 🥕} &= \text{1st Sun of the 1st Astral Moon, Year 1 of the 7th Astral Era} \\ d_{t_{0}, ℝ} &= \text{August 27, 2013 CE} \\ d_{t_{0}, 🥕} &= d_{0, ℝ} \end{aligned}\)

And with our origin in hand, we can easily define some important variables we’ll need later. For example:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}} &= 2013 \\ M_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}} &= 8 \\ d_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}} &= 27 \end{aligned}\)

Hold onto those! We’ll need them!

The Algebraic Function: (Just-)Born!

I thought I’d go ahead and do the math for you. So here’s the challenge ahead of us. We’ve got one Etheiryan solar year (Y_🥕) and one Earth solar year (Y_ℝ). Our job is to find the numbers, variables, and operators we’re gonna need to drop them on either side of an equal sign we smack right there in between them, and call it a day. (A sun? 🤔)

Let’s start with a Gregorian calendar date; I’m writing this on December 28, 2025. This gives me three variables to start with, including some of the ones we figured out at the end of the previous section. So, what variables can I fill in already?

Six, and I’ll start with the three “gimmes,” the ones your own chosen date give you:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 2025 \\ M_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 12 \\ d_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 28 \\ \end{aligned}\)

Then, using the variables we defined at the end of the previous section, we can arrive at the difference between the origin date (represented by t_0,ℝ) and the given date (represented by t_ℝ), which we can represent using the d variable (meaning “suns” or “days”) because a “date” is only the name of a day. You can’t actually do a lot, mathematically speaking, with the “name” of a day, so we’ll have to figure out what d_Δt–0,ℝ actually is piece by piece.

Using the variables we defined just above, let’s derive the difference between the origin date and the given date. Put another way, let’s derive the total number of days elapsed between the origin point and the given date:

\(\begin{aligned} d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} = \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) - \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) \end{aligned}\)

From here, we can combine the expressions and known values for Y_t,ℝ, M_t,ℝ, and d_t,ℝ to derive d_Δt–0,ℝ—the total number of days elapsed between the origin date and the input date.¹⁷

STEP ONE: Calculating f(t_o,ℝ)

The formula for calculating is as follows:

\(\begin{aligned} \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &= \text{f}(Y_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}}, M_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}}, d_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}}) \\ \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times Y_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}} \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (M_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}} + 1) \rfloor + d_{t_{0},\mathbb{R}} \end{aligned}\)

Now let’s plug in our known constants for the origin variables:

\(\begin{aligned} \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times 2013 \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (8 + 1) \rfloor + 27 \\ \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times 2013 \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times 9 \rfloor + 27 \\ \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 735,248.25 \rfloor + \lfloor 275.4009 \rfloor + 27 \\ \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 735,248 + 275 + 27 \\ \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 735,550 \end{aligned}\)

Fun fact? The function f(t_0,ℝ)? It’ll always be 735,550. This is a constant, so take note of it.

STEP TWO: Calculating f(t_ℝ)

The function f(t_ℝ) is not as kind. We have to re-calculate it every single time we choose a new input calendar date (t_ℝ). Them’s just the ropes. The general function is below:

\(\begin{aligned} \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &= \text{f}(Y_{t,\mathbb{R}}, M_{t,\mathbb{R}}, d_{t,\mathbb{R}}) \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times Y_{t,\mathbb{R}} \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (M_{t,\mathbb{R}} + 1) \rfloor + d_{t,\mathbb{R}} \end{aligned}\)

We know the formula; let’s plug our values for Y_t,ℝ, M_t,ℝ, and d_t,ℝ in!

\(\begin{aligned} \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times 2025 \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (12 + 1) \rfloor + 28 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times 2025 \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times 13 \rfloor + 28 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 739,631.25 \rfloor + \lfloor 397.8013 \rfloor + 28 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 739,631 + 397 + 28 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 740,056 \\ \end{aligned}\)

STEP THREE: Subtract f(t_o,ℝ) from f(t_ℝ)!

Now we return to the variable we’ve been after this whole time: d_Δt–0,ℝ. To get at it, all we have to do is subtract, so let’s go!

\(\begin{aligned} d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &= \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) - \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) \\ d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &\approx 740,056 - 735,550 \\ d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &\approx 4,506 \text{ Earth days} \\ \end{aligned}\)

That’s it. You’ve got your first conversion variable: there have elapsed a total of 4,506 Earth days between the input date (December 28, 2025) and the origin date. At last we can compute our Etheiyan temporal units.

STEP FOUR: Calculating Y_🥕,7AE

Now that we have d_Δt–0,ℝ, calculating the Etheiryan year (Y_🥕,7AE) is easy as pie:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{🥕, \text{7AE}} &\approx \left\lfloor \frac{d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}}}{365.25} \right\rfloor + 1 \\ Y_{🥕, \text{7AE}} &\approx \left\lfloor \frac{4,506}{365.25} \right\rfloor + 1 \\ Y_{🥕, \text{7AE}} &\approx \lfloor 12.3368 \rfloor + 1 \\ Y_{🥕, \text{7AE}} &\approx 12 + 1 \\ Y_{🥕, \text{7AE}} &\approx 13 \\ \end{aligned}\)

And so you have discovered that the Earth solar year named 2025 of the Common Era is none other than Year 13 of the Seventh Astral Era.

STEP FOUR-AND-A-HALF: Calculating Y_🥕,6AE or Y_🥕,7UE

The function described above works only for dates during the Seventh Astral Era. Dates prior to the Seventh Astral Era must be derived differently, and this system is incapable of providing dates that exist outside of either the Sixth Astral Era, the Seventh Umbral Era, and the Seventh Astral Era. Attempting to calculate dates outside of its effective range will result in meaninglessness, as we don’t know enough about other eras to talk about time taking place within them.

Earth dates prior to August 27, 2013, will offer d_Δt–0,ℝ values that are negative, which breaks the formula’s utility. To calculate years in 6AE or 7UE, a slightly altered formula must be used. Fortunately, you only have to start from d_Δt–0,ℝ = f(t_ℝ) – f(t_0,ℝ), so it’s not that bad.

So, for any year on the calendar, find d_Δt–0,ℝ. Once you’ve got that, you’ve gotta play a little logic game. If d_Δt–0,ℝ is a positive number, great! You’re in the Seventh Astral Era, and we welcome you to the present epoch.

If, however, d_Δt–0,ℝ is negative, compare the final value of d_Δt–0,ℝ as instructed below and proceed with the appropriate equation.

STEP FOUR-AND-A-HALF, PART 1: Calculating Y_🥕,7UE

If d_Δt–0,ℝ < 0 and d_Δt–0,ℝ > –1,827, your input Earth date will resolve to an output Etheiryan date taking place during the Seventh Umbral Era (which lasted only five years). To proceed, use the following equation:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{\text{🥕, 7UE}} &= 6 + \left\lfloor \frac{d_{\Delta t-0, \mathbb{R}}}{365.25} \right\rfloor \end{aligned}\)

Let’s use April 3, 2010, as a test case and derive the Etheiryan year (Y_🥕,7UE). First, let’s define our known variables:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 2010 \\ M_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 4 \\ d_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 3 \\ \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 735,550 \end{aligned}\)

Now let’s calculate f(t_ℝ):

\(\begin{aligned} \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times Y_{t,\mathbb{R}} \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (M_{t,\mathbb{R}} + 1) \rfloor + d_{t,\mathbb{R}} \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times 2010 \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (4 + 1) \rfloor + 3 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times 2010 \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times 5 \rfloor + 3 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 734,152.5 \rfloor + \lfloor 153.0005 \rfloor + 3 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 734,152 + 153 + 3 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 734,308 \end{aligned}\)

And finally, we subtract:

\(\begin{aligned} d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &= \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) - \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) \\ d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &\approx 734,308 - 735,550 \\ d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &\approx -1242 \text{ Earth days} \\ \end{aligned}\)

And finally, we plug d_Δt–0,ℝ our into our new Y_🥕,7UE equation:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{\text{🥕, 7UE}} &= 6 + \left\lfloor \frac{-1242}{365.25} \right\rfloor \\ Y_{\text{🥕, 7UE}} &= 6 + \lfloor -3.4004 \rfloor \\ Y_{\text{🥕, 7UE}} &= 6 + -4 \\ Y_{\text{🥕, 7UE}} &= 6 - 4 \\ Y_{\text{🥕, 7UE}} &= 2 \\ \end{aligned}\)

And thus do we know that 2010 is the Year 2 of the Seventh Umbral Era.

STEP FOUR-AND-A-HALF, PART 2: Calculating Y_🥕,6AE

If d_Δt–0,ℝ < –1,827, your input Earth date will resolve to an output Etheiryan date taking place during the Sixth Astral Era (which lasted exactly 1,577 years). To proceed, use the following equation:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{\text{🥕, 6AE}} &= 1578 + \left\lfloor \frac{d_{\Delta t-0, \mathbb{R}}}{365.25} \right\rfloor \end{aligned}\)

Americans like myself celebrate the penning of our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Let’s see what year that fell on in Etheirys!

You know what to do now: Define known variables!

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 1776 \\ M_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 7 \\ d_{t,\mathbb{R}} &= 4 \\ \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 735,550 \end{aligned}\)

Calculate f(t_ℝ)!

\(\begin{aligned} \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times Y_{t,\mathbb{R}} \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (M_{t,\mathbb{R}} + 1) \rfloor + d_{t,\mathbb{R}} \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times 1776 \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (7 + 1) \rfloor + 4 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 365.25 \times 1776 \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times 8 \rfloor + 4 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx \lfloor 648,684 \rfloor + \lfloor 244.8008 \rfloor + 4 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 648,684 + 244 + 4 \\ \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) &\approx 648,932 \\ \end{aligned}\)

Calculate d_Δt–0,ℝ via subtraction!

\(\begin{aligned} d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &= \text{f}(t_{\mathbb{R}}) - \text{f}(t_{0,\mathbb{R}}) \\ d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &\approx 734,308 - 735,550 \\ d_{\Delta t-0,\mathbb{R}} &\approx -86,618 \text{ Earth days} \\ \end{aligned}\)

And now, at last, we use our Y_🥕,6AE formula:

\(\begin{aligned} Y_{\text{🥕, 6AE}} &\approx 1578 + \left\lfloor \frac{-86,618}{365.25} \right\rfloor \\ Y_{\text{🥕, 6AE}} &\approx 1578 + \lfloor -237.1472 \rfloor \\ Y_{\text{🥕, 6AE}} &\approx 1578 + -238 \\ Y_{\text{🥕, 6AE}} &\approx 1578 - 238 \\ Y_{\text{🥕, 6AE}} &\approx 1340 \\ \end{aligned}\)

There we go. The United States became an independent nation-state on Earth during Year 1340 of the Sixth Astral Era.

STEP FOUR-AND-A-HALF, PART 3: Failing to Calculate Y_🥕,6UE and Beyond

If, for some reason, you’ve decided to use an input Earth date that resolved to a d_Δt–0,ℝ ≤ –576,000, your output Etheiryan year will lie in the Sixth Umbral Era or further backward in time, and I cannot help you here until Yoshi P. busts out a full timeline of that era too.

Etheiryan Moons and Suns

Now we leave the world of math behind entirely and rely on our FFXIV official reference guide to match the Earth day with the Etheiryan sun and the Earth month with the Etheiryan day. Let’s review our equivalence formulas real quick:

\(\begin{aligned} s_{🥕} &\equiv s_{\mathbb{R}} \\ m_{🥕} &\equiv m_{\mathbb{R}} \\ b_{🥕} &\equiv h_{\mathbb{R}} \\ d_{🥕} &\equiv d_{\mathbb{R}} \\ w_{🥕} &\equiv 8d_{🥕} \\ M_{🥕} &\equiv 4w_{🥕} \equiv 32d_{🥕} \end{aligned}\)

With this in mind, we can easily find the second, month, and bell of any sun just by looking at our own Earth clock and swapping out one universe’s temporal unit for the other’s isochronal partner.

We know the length of a day and the length of a sun are identical, and this is what permits the earlier equivalences to hold when we try to convert a calendar date. But suns and moons are nominally and arbitrarily assigned, so we can just rely on what the devs tell us and take it as is.

The Official FFXIV Sun and Moon Reference List

Pick an Earth calendar date. Any Earth calendar date. Now look at the number for the date of the month. That’s probably also the date of your sun.

That is, in most cases:

\(d_{🥕} = d_{\mathbb{R}}\)

Listed below is every date in the annual Gregorian calendar and its relationship with its assigned Etheiryan sun on the Eorzean calendar. Every Earth day is represented by at least one Etheiryan sun, although some are represented by two.

Unfortunately, the sequential nature of calendar dates means that any date that contains more than one sun instantly pushes every date after it over by a sun, so the clock slides forward ever so slightly. This is useful in permitting February to have 32 suns.

I’ve listed all variant day below following days with more than one sun and excluded any date that matches the formula shown above. Enough from me. Let’s hear from the FFXIV devs:

🧊 January, the First Astral Moon of Halone

• January 28

  • 28th Sun of the First Astral Moon

  • 29th Sun of the First Astral Moon

🧊 February, the First Umbral Moon of Menphina

• February 7

  • 7th Sun of the First Umbral Moon

  • 8th Sun of the First Umbral Moon

• February 8–13

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

• February 14

  • 15th Sun of the First Umbral Moon

  • 16th Sun of the First Umbral Moon

• February 15–20

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 2

• February 21

  • 23th Sun of the First Umbral Moon

  • 24th Sun of the First Umbral Moon

• February 22–28 (or 29)

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 3

🌊 March, the Second Astral Moon of Thaliak

• March 28

  • 28th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• March 29–31

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

🌊 April, the Second Umbral Moon of Nymeia

• April 7

  • 7th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 8th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• April 8–27

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

• April 28

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 30th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• April 29–30

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 2

🍃 May, the Third Astral Moon of Llymlaen

• May 29

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 30th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• May 30–31

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

🍃 June, the Third Umbral Moon of Oschon

• June 7

  • 7th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 8th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• June 8–27

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

• June 28

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 30th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• June 29–30

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 2

🌩️ July, the Fourth Astral Moon of Byregot

• July 28

  • 28th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• June 29–31

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

🌩️ August, the Fourth Umbral Moon of Rhalgr

• August 28

  • 28th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• August 29–31

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

🔥 September, the Fifth Astral Moon of Azeyma

• September 7

  • 7th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 8th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• September 8–27

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

• September 28

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 30th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• September 29–30

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 2

🔥 October, the Fifth Umbral Moon of Nald'thal

• October 28

  • 28th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• October 29–31

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

🪨 November, the Sixth Astral Moon of Nophica

• November 7

  • 7th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 8th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• November 8–27

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

• November 28

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 30th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• November 29–30

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 2

🪨 December, the Sixth Umbral Moon of Althyk

• December 28

  • 28th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

  • 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon

• December 29–31

  • d_🥕 = d_ℝ + 1

Putting It All Together

Pretty easy, right? Once you have a year, the sun and moon are just a matter of applying dates from a table or adding by one, two, or three. Let’s take our three earlier examples. Ready? Here we go!

1. We calculated that December 28, 2025, occurs on Year 13 of 7AE. Since December 28 has two suns, then December 28, 2025, is equal to either the 28th Sun of the Second Astral Moon of 13:7AE or the 29th Sun of the Second Astral Moon of 13:7AE.

2. We calculated that April 3, 2010, occurs on Year 2 of 7UE. Since April 3 has one sun, then April 3, 2010, is equal to the 3rd Sun of the Second Umbral Moon of 2:7UE.

3. We calculated that July 4, 1776, occurs on Year 1340 of 6AE. Since July 4 has one sun, then July 4, 1776, is equal to the 4th Sun of the Fourth Astral Moon of 1340:6AE.

It’s not conceptually difficult, but the math gets pretty unwieldy at times. And that’s not even mentioning the mathematical concepts present in those equations that don’t even get taught in most high school math classrooms: like the floor function. So if you feel a itch to make an app for the FFXIV RP community to use, please let me know you’re doing that so that I can link to it! (And use it myself, too!)¹⁸

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1. Why not use the plural form of “hells” Eorzeans use? I have many possible hells to choose from too: some I make for myself, some are made for me, and I count way more than seven.

2. RP – An initialism for “roleplay,” if you happen to somehow be both reading this and not know what RP is. I’m not saying that’s bad—I love that you’re here. It’s just unusual, so meet someone with so much good taste, curiosity, and the courage to venture into it and look into the unknown. Hello, it is an honor to meet you.

3. In my private philosophy, I call this the Ontological Layer of reality that is shared among all observers (conscious or unconscious), empirically and scientifically discoverable and probabilistic via principles discovered in quantum dynamics and relativity. In the context of this layer, I am an atheist and do not believe in spiritual phenomena, so I treat them as ontologically not-real, or fictional (the result of conscious imagination and not just what we might call “unconscious nature”—since we don’t have a mechanism for consciousness yet, so it makes sense to assume anything that behaves outside of a framework understood for “conscious behavior” is “unconscious.” Notably, I don’t use the word “non-conscious” because obviously some unconscious matter (such as that found in human molecular structures) does not completely remain separate from “consciousness” forever, such as when it participates in it (as the molecular structures within neurons in the human brain do).

4. The original Latin word versus—the word from which the suffix “-verse”; used in words like “multiverse,” “universe,” “reverse,” and “inverse”; is derived—is the past participle of the verb vertere (meaning “to turn”). Now, versus—being a Latin noun ending in -us—belongs to a category of Latin nouns called fourth declension masculine nouns. In Latin, such nouns were pluralized with the suffix -ūs (pronounced “oos”—/ʊs/ if ya nasty). Because this effectively made them sound the same when the word versus was ported into English, we refer to its ported singular today as “-verse” and its plural as “-verses,” using the Germanic -es plural suffix.

I’m too fancy for that shit, though—Shakespeare taught me language is a game, and life taught me that it was too, so I’m not doing that. It’s boring. Singular -verse: we’ll keep that as is, but the plural? I’m reaching back into early Latin for the pre-contracted form of -ūs (-ues) and borrowing from its ancient spirit to resurrect the English plural form of Latin-rooted nouns ending in -e or -us: “-ues.”

So…TL;DR: Universe is the singular; universues is the plural. Multiverse is the singular; multiversues is the plural. I don’t expect all of my neologisms to land, so my prediction is that we’ll call this one an idiologism instead. 😜

5. Graphical user interface (GUI) – A digital environment that allows users to interact with a computer’s operating system through visual elements like icons, menus, and windows rather than text-based code (command line interface; CLI). It was pioneered at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and brought to the masses by the Apple Macintosh in 1984, effectively translating abstract machine logic into a spatial “desktop” metaphor for file system management and an “open” and “closed window” paradigm mediating access to and for interacting with concurrent processes and application data.

6. It’s definitely a “fraternal twin” kind of situation ‘cuz the system had a ultrafuck-ton of aether when it formed, and some glow-happy yellow-orange asshole took like 99.86% of it. Poor Etheirys and its meager ≈0.1% of stellar system aether. 😿

Yeah, sorry—I can’t help it. This isn’t even diegetic, and I’m still makin’ up new lore on the fly. To be fair, this is just a consequence of this paper’s augmented lore, so…maybe nothing new was really added. Just elaborated upon. You see why natural laws are so godsdamn cool? 😼

P.S. ≈0.1%, by the by, also happens to be the amount of solar system mass that our stellar biggest brother Jupiter contains. (Gravity in FFXIV ain’t your grandma’s gravity. Great-grandma? What’s the youngest generation that plays FFXIV these days?)

7. Isochronal – Taking an equivalent amount of time to elapse.

8. A quote taken directly from Chapter 1, “The Suns,” in the diegetic non-fiction book called The Five Ages - An Eorzean Chronology, authored by Lewphon of Sharlayan in 233:6AE. This is not augmented lore. Yeah. Feel that? That’s #LoreJoy right there.

9. Schwarzschild spacetime – The kind of spacetime you’re likely experiencing right now. (If you’re not— Hi to you in orbit! I am in awe of what you do, Astronauts. Stay awesome!) More precisely, Schwarzschild spacetime represents the “curved” spacetime that exists within a gravity well like Earth’s, on average, at about sea level. If you’ve never been to space, you’ve likely never strayed outside of Schwarzschild spacetime. If you have, please contact me: I have questions. Delighted questions.

10. Like “Counting Stars,” but way less catchy.

11. Casual events that you experience as phenomenological qualia—the “stuff” of lived experience and personal narrative that we attribute to our having “consciousness”—can only happen as a combination of two factors: (1) you did a thing to make them happen and (2) they happened around you without any input from you. Every single experience that we have is usually some combination of those two, laying somewhere along a rather simple—in this case—two dimensional spectrum of causal influence.

I’m talking about this like “it’s just true,” but I mean… Isn’t it? You tell me.

12. It turns out, when we’re using evolution by natural selection to understand rather than to persecute one another, a tool like evolution by natural selection can do that too! I love tools. So versatile. In the sense that you can either use them for awesome things or for the shittiest things. You know… Like AI. 🙃

13. Ask any attorney working a traffic case whether I’m wrong about this. They can confirm…enthusiastically.

14. Ironically, if you remember them really intensely but don’t actually bring them up that often, you tend to remember them more accurately, since they go through fewer cycles of mnematic reconstruction.

15. Anisochronal – Taking an unequal amount of time to elapse. Notably, since most spans of time are—by the simple fact of multiversal time spans being so monumentally vast as to be incomprehensible without mathematical shorthand—by consequence of their potential range, quite diverse, we have chosen not to use the prefix hetero- meaning merely “different” or “other.” In contrast, aniso- (literally “unequal”) is the direct antonym of isochronal, which is the only time its use is really merited in the context of time-unit-talk.

16. I mean, if I experienced mind-shattering, world-breaking battles with gods, cosmic beings, and mad kings wielding impossible power, I’d probably take a few months to unwind before I went on social media to talk about it too. (I’ve taken more time for less.)

17. The two functions f(t_ℝ) and f(t_0,ℝ) are based on the calendar function below, which is widely used in computational chronology:

\(\text{f}(t) = \text{f}(Y,m,d) = \lfloor 365.25 \times Y \rfloor + \lfloor 30.6001 \times (M + 1) \rfloor + d\)

This function was designed to solve the problem that specific cultures tend to change their calendar rules for reasons often unrelated to real environmental or astronomical changes or discoveries. For example: “Hey! I found us a new god! Comes from that really dry area with all the shouty religious people. But this dude—Jesus—I was thinking we could base the calendar around the day he was born! Oh, I don’t know when that is, but I can guess wildly! Definitely in the middle of the desert during the coldest part of winter. That’s just sensible worldbuilding.”

The solution was to build this function around Julian Day Numbers (JDN), as the Julian Day count just adds 1 for every solar day, fully preventing the often arbitrary complexity of months, weeks, or leapfrogging February 29s from adding noise to a simple comparison between two calendar dates. The function works by comparing two dates t₀ and t to an “Epoch”—the “moment of creation” for a specific time-tracking system. The Epoch, or “Day 0” for the Julian period is January 1, 4713 BCE.

18. I’m so serious. Contact me!