Some random worldbuilding thoughts

Thinking about how a post-civilization people like The Gaia Machine might tell time and organize dates. I mentioned in the prologue that they started a new calendar and started tracking the years, but I hadn't thought until now about how they track things like that, and when.

My working idea is that time is told purely based on the motion of the sun. Rising sun is morning, the peak is noon, setting sun is afternoon. The last light of day after the sun sets is twilight, the first light before its rising is dawn. When the sun isn't visible, that's night. They don't really need an exact hour/minute system, they don't have the kind of life that would require it.

Similarly, I think it makes more sense for their year to begin with the start of a new season, or thereabouts, so something akin to the March equinox would probably mark the new year in their world. Maybe it would be interesting to incorporate World Storytelling Day as a part of their tradition, where every equinox is celebrated by recalling and retelling both personal and communal stories from throughout the year as a way to say farewell to the past year. Still workshopping how they track exactly when the equinox happens, and obviously thats not universal; social customs like this would be regional in their world, and anyone beyond a certain physical distance would likely have their own local interpretations of tracking time and the passage of the year. Will work out some other things like that if I have the characters start traveling further and further. Obviously this wouldn't make much sense in the southern hemisphere, where the seasons happen inverse of the northern, so perhaps if there are collections of settlements that have developed a new calendar, they would align with something like the September equinox or similar. I'll work on that more when/if I venture farther into the world. I'd love to explore more of the planet with the story, but when I'm explicitly writing it in a sort of fantasy setting where technology is more limited, it's hard to think of situations off the top of my head that would facilitate more distant travel, though I could definitely see it getting explored more in a later arc.

Something else I'm toying with in worldbuilding is the idea that certain concepts may not re-evolve in the same way they first evolved in the past, and likely wouldn't. In a world that was once upon a time connected by a global community and instantaneous communication anywhere in the world, concepts as simple as a katana or as complex as Christian creationist ideology could re-evolve anywhere in the world from any number of remnant pieces of the pre-collapse society, and allow it to reappear independently anywhere in the world as people begin to rebuild culture and their own idea of community and society.

So yeah, it would be pretty cool if there were cool swords of all kinds, and it might go hard to have a cult that practices essentially a restructured form of conservative USAmerican Christianity. That might be cool.