“Dates”, a word so simple yet so complex that it draws numerous ravenous timeliners towards its light every time it is mentioned in relation to a new release. But this time, no one could foresee the tidal wave of discoveries that stemmed from this one, little date in the book Scum and Villainy

It all started when a picture of Tan Divo at the graduation of ‘953.4 got posted in the spoilers channel of StarWarsReference. Immediately we jumped on the prospect of figuring out a new dating system. However, due to a miscue about the logo in the background (we thought it was the Empire), we dropped the topic because we didn’t have a clear date. Fortunately, CakeBoi realized that the logo was actually the Republic and we reopened the topic. Soon afterward, I noticed a small apostrophe before the date, indicating that it was an abbreviated date. And soon after that, I also noticed that the year matches up with Pablo’s Real-World (RW) dating system. From there, numerous more pictures were posted, confirming our suspicion that the book’s dating system matched up with RW.

Real World Dating

Now just a quick detour to explain Real World dating. This system is based on the one that Pablo uses for his timeline and has been utilized by myself and marvel on our personal timelines for a while. The main proponent is that the date of A New Hope is in 1977, the year it was released in theaters. The system then takes into account the in-universe dates of the movies to formulate the rest of the movie’s years. So, Empire would be in 1980, Jedi would be in 1981, and the Sequel Trilogy would be in 2011. For the Prequels, the dates don’t start going the other direction like the BBY/ABY system, they instead start counting backward so RotS is 1958, AotC is 1955, and TPM is 1945. Remember these dates as I explain the new system.

Now that we had the idea that Scum and Villainy’s system matched up with RW, we needed to confirm it. So, we looked through numerous more pictures in the book and found these facts:

Oh my god, Prana file is 8011. TFA/TLJ is 2011

Poe attacking Megalox from the Poe comic: 8011 (this event was before the ST in 2011 as well)

Padme assassination from AotC: 7955

Unfinished TCW bounty hunter arc: 7958

The full list of dates from Scum and Villainy

With these facts in hand, it became ever clearer that we had figured it out. The last three digits of the Scum and Villainy dates matched up with the last three digits of the RW dates. And thus, a new system was discovered.

The System

I should explain that this is an in-universe system, just like our Gregorian Calendar, so it is used by characters in the movies and books which is really cool to see. I hope we see it used in other media soon. So, this dating system is actually very straightforward.

TPM: 7945

AotC: 7955

TCW: 7955-7958

RotS: 7958

Solo: 7964 and 7967

Rebels: 7972-7977

Rogue One: 7977

ANH: 7977

ESB: 7980

RotJ: 7981

Battle of Jakku: 7982

Resistance and the ST: 8011

Now Year Zero in this system would be 7977 before ANH which, coincidentally, is the main point of the BY system. This places Year Zero in 7977 BBY in the BY system. There isn’t really a canon event that took place in 7977 BBY that we know of yet so we will have to just wait and see why this calendar was created.

The Name (CRC)

While we were able to successfully figure out how the dating system works, we weren’t as successful in figuring out what the name of the dating system is. While flipping through the book and jotting down dates for things, marvel noticed a short blurb on Sebulba in 7945. This blurb has an extensive date that uses C.R.C. as a name. Yep, that’s right, CRC is the name of the new dating system.

Unfortunately, we had no luck in finding out what CRC stands for. The rest of the book didn’t have any clues on it so we can only provide our guesses:

Common Republic Calendar

Common Republic Concordance

Coruscanti Republic Calendar

Creation of the Republic Calendar

Current Republic Calendar

Update: After Cake talked to Matt on Twitter, we have some new info.

So, as you can see, it looks like the name of the system will go unknown for at least a little while. It also seems like it is based on a certain event in-universe that spurred the creation of the calendar. Now, we don’t believe it’s more complex on a normal basis. However, there is a second set of numbers after the year that might yield more difficulty.

The Other Numbers

So, as you know the first four numbers of these dates are the year. The full date looks like this XXXX.XXX.X. The final number is the case file as described by the book but the second set of numbers is really what we were trying to figure out. So, we found all the events in 7956/21 BBY and ordered them by their second set of decimals. However, what we found did not support any chronological order. So, we came to this conclusion:

Matt was right and this wasn’t meant to be deciphered.

Summary

After some deep dives and lots of work, Scum and Villainy introduced us to a new dating system called CRC (acronym meaning unknown.) It is based on RW dates and is seemingly used to date major events before the AFE calendar. Year 0 is in 7977 BBY which places A New Hope in 7977 CRC (funny right). The years count up from Year 0 and it seems much easier to remember than BY, RW, or FE.

Alright, thanks for reading this monster post. It took a lot of work and a lot of effort from all the minds over on Reference. Thanks to Sapphire, venatrix, Vid, and robotical for all the assistance. Thanks for reading!

Architects: AV-6R7, CakeBoi, confederalis, NumidianPrime, and sam.jarron