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Good morning everyone, I have a quick question for you.

Could you quickly explain to me how to understand the Warhammer 40k Timeline?

This is the format: (Number).M(Number)
For example, 999.M41

I assume M41 would be 41st millenia, but what is the number before this? And when would the 42nd millenia be?

Thank you in advance.

-Dinkins

A millenium is 1000years so i think it's like the 999 year of the 41st millenium. So in theory it will be the 42nd millenium in a year ish.

I guess if you were to write in conventionally it would be 41999 like 2013 would be 13.M2

I think it's denoted like that because time is more relative in a universe. Where it's hard to have a standard time.

Almost - 2013 is 013.M3.

0-999 is M1
1000-1999 is M2 , etc.

So 999.M41 is 40999

"Warhammer 40,999, because we don't want to change the name!"

They've actually begun to move things into the 42nd Millenium in the fiction. They are just doing so incredibly slowly. Other than that you have things correct. You read the first three numbers as the year of the Millenium and the last part is said millennium. So, 775.M38 would be the 775th year of the 38th Millenium.

Where have they moved things into the next millenium?

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/M42#.Uaveu67D8dU

I'm just going by that. They could only cram so much stuff into 999.M41.

IIRC, some of the fluff peices in the Grey Knights codex are in m42 as well.

The date system can be quite complex. For example:

0123456.M41

The first number, 0, is the check number. This is how accurate the date is, with higher numbers indicating that they are further removed from true Terran time. It works by showing how many degrees of separation there were between the person recording the date and Terra. For instance, a 3 would indicate that a person present was in psychic contact with someone who was subsequently in psychic contact with Earth. I imagine there is some sort of intergalactic version of the speaking clock going on.

The second three numbers, 123, are the time of year the event happened at, assuming that a year is split into 1000 equal parts. So 123 places it around February 13th.

The next numbers, 456, are the year in the indicated millennium.

The last bit is simply the millennium. So 0123456M41 would be February 13th, 40456.

 Trickstick wrote:
So 0123456M41 would be February 13th, 40456.

sounds rather complicated when you start breaking it down to days of a year

It is. I think they only started doing that because they moved time too far forward and then realized they didn't want to move out of the 41st Millennium.