[2023] Community Mod Spotlight - Extended Timeline

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello everyone!

I am Ryagi, a Community Ambassador on Europa Universalis IV. Countless Modders do amazing work on their projects and the modding community they have built up is worth highlighting!

For a brief while, we have been hosting mod spotlights written by the Mod authors themselves over on our forums[forum.paradoxplaza.com]. Today we wanted to bring them to you directly here on steam. Let us know if this is something you are interested in seeing more of here! For today's spotlight we look at the ever popular Extended Timeline

It's likely this mod needs no introduction, but you may be less familiar with the mod author, Qweytr. We hope you enjoy their showcase today! For those of you who may not be familiar, you are in for a treat. Without further ado, I'll let Qweytr take it away.

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Hi, I'm Qweytr, the developer of the Extended Timeline mod. If you are interested enough in EU4 mods to be reading this, you most likely have already heard of it, but just in case you are not, the basic idea of Extended Timeline is to allow you to start at any date you like and play for as long as you like. Due to limits of the game engine, any date in this case covers only dates after 2AD though, but that is already more than enough work for one person.

It was between 12 and 14 years ago, after my first full playthrough of EU3 was cut short by the 1820 end date that I knew I had to improve things. After that is has been a lot of work, though sometimes with breaks of several months, but at other times working on the mod every waking hour for a month straight. And thanks to that work the mod has had a very accurate starting setup for a good while now, with 800 new tags, all with historically accurate borders and rulers for every single day. It's not perfect of course, but neither is vanilla EU4, which is the level of historical accuracy I have aimed for and mostly reached and in certain aspects even surpassed.


Eurasia at the 1206 start date

The start dates are all well and good, but this is a game after all, so what happens after you unpause. For a long time, the answer was unfortunately not enough. Although I have made hundreds of events and decisions covering many important points of history like spread of Christianity, fall of Rome and rise of Islam, spread out over such a long timespan these events have to some felt quite sparse.


A couple examples of the many events I have made, belonging to the event chains to decentralize Japan and the rise of Islam


It is of course inevitable that the vanilla period, which has a whole team of professionals adding content for a much shorter timespan would have more flavor than the parts I have added. It is simply not possible for one man to match Paradox in that aspect. But I never thought I would be doing Extended Timeline alone from start to finish. I always dreamed that once the basic fundamentals are in place, people interested in certain regions or time periods would contribute to the mod and help me flesh those parts out. And recently this dream has been closer to becoming true than ever before.

By far the biggest recent addition was the integration of More Missions: Extended Timeline REDUX sub-mod by World's Smuggest Detective into the main mod, adding a total of 29 new mission trees, 5 great projects, 3 disasters and some other smaller additions. Below are a few examples of the recently added mission trees.

Ayyubid missions:

Funanese missions:

Sassanid missions

Vandal missions

Another recent addition is a new religion called Ecclesia Unita, which represents a form of Christianity reformed to prevent the Great Schism. This represents a kind of content I would not make myself, as I focus on things that happened historically, but since this was all done by LimonenZitrone I had no problems with adding it to the mod. He also made a new decision to form Germany for the medieval kingdom of Germany. Previously the vanilla decision was available already in the middle ages, even though it was clearly meant to represent the forming of modern Germany.



Next we have events for Ostsiedlung, meaning Germans settling down in the Slavic lands in the eastern edges of the Holy Roman Empire. They were made by Jey the Count as the first taste of the more comprehensive additions he is planning for medieval Europe.


A couple events from the Ostsiedlung event chain

The most recent of all the contributions was a new main theme by Utopia, which you can also listen to on YouTube. It was added to the mod just two weeks ago along with a minor addition by Terkaza to the Zunist religion.



Those were all of the biggest contributions to the mod over the past two months. I want to specially thank not only the people mentioned above, but everyone who has contributed to the mod in the past. Extended Timeline would not be where it is today without the awesome community around it.

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And we the whole EU4 team want to thank Qweytr for their years of hard work and dedication towards Extended Timeline as well as the EU4 modding community as a whole.
That wraps up today's spotlight. Though relatively short we hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to ask any questions about Extended Timeline and do let us know if you have any suggestions for future mod spotlights.

Extended Timeline can be on the steam workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217416366

Previous mod spotlights:

• Europa Expanded[pdxint.at]
  
• Ante Bellum[pdxint.at]
  
• The Idea Variation[pdxint.at]
  
• Dirinas[pdxint.at]

Have suggestions for future spotlights? Let us know in the comments!