Thread: Revelations from Patch 6.1

Originally Posted by Cleretic

I agree that it's probably a lowball estimate, but the figure given was basically right in the middle of what my own estimates drew up.

Not only is a multiple of a thousand years an extremely appealing estimate to shoot for regardless of what the actual figure is (case in point, consider how many real-world empires we just go for the larger rounded number for), but my own math on the Calamities says that's 'about right but a lowball'. We know it takes a thousand to fifteen hundred years to set up another Calamity after one, from the figures in the first Encyclopedia Eorzea on the Fourth through Seventh Calamities. Extrapolating from that and picking up from the fact the Fourth Calamity was five thousand years ago, we can then reason that the First Calamity was somewhere between 8000 and 9,500 years ago. But then you have to factor in that preparing the Thirteenth for what was ultimately a failure also would've taken about that amount of time; therefore, we can assume that the Thirteenth's fall was somewhere between 9000 and 11,000 years ago.

Ten thousand is smack-dab in the middle of that range, so it's a perfect 'sounds legit' figure. But if I were being honest, I'd actually assume the Thirteenth shot would've actually taken less time since they'd need to prep one world instead of two, so my money is on it likely being longer than ten thousand years, just because the Ascians probably would've have taken less time on this one than their career average successful Calamity count.

(For people who've seen me run these numbers before and noticed they're different; previously I was running the '1000 to 1500' estimates for all the Calamities, but this time I remembered that we have a figure that the Fourth Calamity was 5000 years ago, so this time I was adding on the estimates for previous Calamities onto that instead of just going '7/8x1000 and 7/88x1500'!)

There's also the issue of "time flows differently between worlds" that just makes me tempted to give up on matching timelines to each other.

So Golbez experienced around ten thousand years of darkness, or some such period of time that works for a poetic "ten thousand years" rounding off, which is kind of matching with the idea of a Calamity needing 1k to 1.5k years to set up, based on the Source's history. This constitutes setting up a civilization (or multiple civilizations) that is powerful enough to affect the aether of the entire world somehow, and in the case of the Thirteenth a way to distribute auracite to champions, as well as create the need for champions in the first place.

But that's based on the time of the Thirteenth, which we don't know is one-to-one to the Source at the time. And given the sheer length of time, ie a thousand years or so, it could expand and contract multiple times in multiple ways through that millennium.

I figure that on average, Golbez's ten thousand years might be close enough to our ten thousand years summed up. It's only speculation, though, and assumptions made based on how well it fits the timeline if it had happened on the Source instead of the Thirteenth.