Welcome

Hi all, welcome to my worldbuilding blog. This post is mostly just bookkeeping, so if you want to dive right in, skip ahead to the first post or check out the site map to see everything posted so far.

The idea for this blog came from browsing r/worldbuilding and finding numerous attempts to create general-purpose guides for creating geologically accurate worlds. Many of these are quite good (the curved lines method is a particularly clever one to use if you’re in a hurry) but none quite hit the mark in terms of conveying an understanding of plate tectonics and climatology. Eventually I figured that rather than leaving snippy comments on other people’s guides, I should just make one of my own, in full and excessive detail.

But more than just regurgitating my prior knowledge, I want to reexamine a lot of what I think I know. There’s a lot of received knowledge bouncing around when it comes to worldbuilding—some of which I’ve spread around myself—but much of it is either out of date or misinterpreted. So I want to look into these claims, find where they come from, and see how well they’ve hold up in the light of current research. I also want to clarify what the exact claims are, down to the specific mathematics—or as much as the general audience can be expected to follow.

That means that, generally speaking, I’m going to be looking at primary sources—scientific research, where I can find it. I won’t be holding myself up to the standards of a peer-reviewed journal, but I’ll try to link to important sources and lay out the logic behind the claims I present. My particular background is in geology and paleontology, but I’ll be getting way out of my wheelhouse pretty much immediately. If you understand a subject area I cover better than I, feel free to let me know if I’ve gotten something wrong; I’m hoping these posts can continue to serve as useful resources in the future, rather than being forgotten after posting.

So: The general structure of this blog, at least at first, will be in order of advancing time and increasing specificity. We’ll be covering the formation of stars and planets, the process of plate tectonics and the landforms it creates, the abiogenesis of life and evolution of complex organisms, and the development of civilizations, culture, language, and technology. To help show how all this information can be applied, I’ll also build our own example civilization, starting from the formation of their solar system and running all the way through to an interstellar empire. In the interests of keeping this blog applicable to a wide range of settings, including those that just transplant humans onto another world, I’ll be operating with a few key restrictions: This species will develop on an Earthlike terrestrial world with continents and oceans, they will live on land, and they will have written and spoken language. Other than that, we’ll go in with no plans and see how they turn out. I won’t even give them a name, because we don’t yet know how they speak.

Advice on Using this Blog

I want to be clear that I don’t think you have to go into this much depth to convincingly build a rich world. In fact, I’d say the amount of time and effort I intend to put into building the example world would be excessive for most uses. The intention here isn’t to dictate a standard for worldbuilding, but to provide resources and examples covering the full range of worldbuilding someone might engage in—or at least the specific category of realistic worldbuilding. Some people like to worldbuild for its own sake, which is fine; but some are using it to enhance a text (a book, film, game, etc.) and in that case my personal advice is that worldbuilding should always be in service to the story, rather than the reverse.

By its nature, the main "An Apple Pie From Scratch" series is written in a particular sequence with every post informing the next one; a species' culture depends on its biology, which depends on its evolutionary history, which depends on the planet's geology and chemistry, which depends on the astronomical context. But I am trying to write each part to work as a standalone article (at least as well as I can without being too repetitive). So if you have a specific question or area of interest, feel free to skip ahead to a specific post (see the site map). You can even skip to specific sections of a post—each one will have a table of contents linking to sections and subsections near the top—though these are less standalone.

Though this blog emphasizes the use of hard numbers and formulas to place limits on worldbuilding, I don't think they have to be used in every case. When it comes to producing fiction, I think it's often more important to have an intuitive sense of what's reasonable rather than calculated figures for a specific case; and I hope my blog can provide that as well. In my own writing, for example, I take a "fuzzy edges" approach to worldbuilding: Always imply there is more to the world than what directly described in the text; Indirectly reference a subject before describing it later; Never describe something not related to the characters' current thoughts and actions. Use worldbuilding to provide context for the story, not to write an encyclopedia.

For that approach, this blog is excessively detailed and specific. But there may still be cases in a story where specifics are necessary, and in any case a different approach may be appropriate for other authors, genres, or media; or for projects not focused on producing a work of fiction. This blog's scope is as broad as possible to serve the needs of any approach.

So enjoy, and don't be afraid to skim and skip around—or to leave a comment if anything is unclear. And don't neglect the resources outside the posts themselves: I'm particularly proud of my worldbuilding spreadsheet, and I'm working on putting together some infographics to summarize key points.

And, of course, any support you can give on Patreon would be deeply appreciated.