World Building (Literally)

World building (Literally)

In the process of working on my novel, I’ve had to create entire new planets. Fortunately for me, only one of them (currently) requires extensive planning into the depths of the environment, since that’s a two-pronged plot point. 

I’ll preface this with the fact that I am not a scientist nor particularly gifted in the sciences despite my fascination with them. So all of the resources I have I’ve found useful from starting with the bare bones and expanding into the literal process of creating a world.

Perhaps the best single resource that I lean most heavily on is Mark Rosenfelder’s The Planet Construction Kit. This book goes into more depth than I really needed, but for someone who really wants to start from scratch it’s an indispensable tool. Not only does he go into detail on creating the literal planet (and even the solar system!), but he goes further into environments, and who and what you might find there before expanding beautifully into developing cultures and the details of whatever created inhabitants of your world would need. I really can’t recommend the book enough.

Personally, I needed a little more detail before I felt comfortable assigning climates to my planet, and that’s where I drew a page out of the site worldbuildingworkshop (here) to go step-by-step through the logical development of a world. This included the application of:

wind patterns

pressure systems

ocean currents

precipitation

seasonal changes

how all of the above affect the assignment of environment to your world

It’s worth noting that this site’s explanation is inspired from a now-defunct site that is currently only available via the Wayback Machine. The Climate Cookbook goes into even further detail, but is also a more complicated read. Definitely worth a look. (It’s still available as of Jan ‘18)

I also found that @mythcreantsblog had an excellent post on their off-Tumblr site that helped further in the effort to assign climates, with exceptionally helpful illustrations. Definitely something to check out if you’re trying to pull a planet together. (Here)

My last site I didn’t use as much as the others, but is definitely worth honorable mention for the useful question-and-answer dynamic that covers much of the same information. For those needing illustrations to follow along, the text-heavy format might not be best, but it goes into details that definitely compliment the processes that the other resources go into. (Here)

Of course, I’m sure there’s lots of other useful sites and tools out there, but these were the primary resources that I leaned on while putting my new planet together.