Was trying to figure out why all of the dates in my Quartz installation were set to the current date. My configuration looked like this:

import { QuartzConfig } from "./quartz/cfg"
import * as Plugin from "./quartz/plugins"

const config: QuartzConfig = {
  configuration: {
    defaultDateType: "published",
    /* elided */
  },
  plugins: {
    transformers: [
      Plugin.CreatedModifiedDate({
        priority: ["frontmatter", "filesystem"],
      }),
      /* elided */
    ],
    /* elided */
  },
}

export default config

According to the Quartz documentation:

Syntax, Authoring Content, Quartz Documentation

Some common frontmatter fields that are natively supported by Quartz: [...]

• date: A string representing the day the note was published. Normally uses YYYY-MM-DD format.

So, I updated my files accordingly:

---
title: why i make games
date: 2024-03-18
aliases:
- why i make games
---

However, this did not fix the dates. Upon inspection of the source code, it appears that the default CreatedModifiedDate plugin does not read the date field to set the published date:

created ||= file.data.frontmatter.date as MaybeDate
modified ||= file.data.frontmatter.lastmod as MaybeDate
modified ||= file.data.frontmatter.updated as MaybeDate
modified ||= file.data.frontmatter["last-modified"] as MaybeDate
published ||= file.data.frontmatter.publishDate as MaybeDate

Changing the frontmatter to this fixed the date issue:

---
title: why i make games
publishDate: 2024-03-18
aliases:
- why i make games
---