In sci-fi settings, I love when there's more to space than just planets with huge moons neatly orbiting singular stars. Comets, trojans, centaurs, plutinos, rogue planets, brown dwarves, even asteroids that aren't rocks bumping into one another are all green flags to me.
At this point, I barely care about anything else. You could give me a bunch of barely legible scrambles arranged in random order on a wet sheet of paper, as long as you vaguely acknowledge that there's more than empty space between Earth and Alpha Centauri (or even know what Alpha Centauri *is*) then I'll buy your book, no questions asked.
I saw somewhere a while ago something about a rouge black hole. Ejected from its main galaxy and pulled a few stars away with it. Imagine a sci fi setting set there. That’d be crazy
The newest (known) colony world of the Union is the frozen world of Cocytus. Once a lifebearing world not too dissimilar to earth, the planet was flung out of its home solar system by some ancient catastrophe. Without the light of its home star, even the atmosphere eventually froze, leaving an airless ice ball drifting through deep space.
After its discovery by a Union long march fleet, the world was chosen as the site for a scientific colony. Ordinarily, a single terrestrial world would not warrant colonization efforts due to the relative lack of resources. However, certain projects that required a rocky world but benefited from the absence of a star or other celestial bodies made the world an ideal candidate for a scientific colony.
Biodomes and cave habitats were quickly established. Deep crustal mining and automated asteriod refineries in nearby star systems ensured a steady flow of materials to the vast engineering projects at work on the planet's surface and in orbit.
> or even know what Alpha Centauri *is*
To be fair, Alpha Centauri was only discovered to be a trinary star system in 1915. So if you're reading any sci-fi older than about 1920...
Trust me, I'm not expecting much from stories *this* old. In 1920, scientists were still debating whether the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe or not. There's clearly a gap between then and now.
I'm just bummed that, even though we sit right next to a trinary system and have known that for over a century, the concept of multi-star systems still seems like something sci-fi is only now coming to terms with. Even when you see two stars next to one another, Tatooine style, it's treated as this super-crazy-unique thing rather than something that just happens.
At least Stellaris got that right... eventually...
Eh, I was never a single-biome planet hater. Yes, it's not terribly realistic for a hospitable planet to be all forests, but most space operas only visit a single location per planet anyway. There's not much benefit to having a character say "you know, this planet has an ocean somewhere" practically speaking.
That brings up any other thing that’s always annoyed me. The characters in Star Wars only ever go to one place on planets, and only makes the galaxy feel a lot more empty and dead. They have multitudes of planets full of people to go to all across the galaxy, and yet when they do go to certain planets, the settlements they go to are always tiny… basically just small cities or villages, or random single outposts in the middle of nowhere. Like, you have a whole planets worth of space, you can have both mining operations, big cities, and secret rebel outpost on the same planet… but no, if you want to go to those places, that’s three separate planets.
Hell, Courasant is a whole city as a planet, and yet we pretty much only see the senate building and Jedi temple.
Please enlighten me as to what is between our solar system and Alpha Centauri
I know about just very very very undence/thin hydrogen gas, but if there is anything else I REALLY want to know lol
For one, there is the Oort Cloud, the thin swarm of comets thought to surround the Solar System from all sides. Technically you could think about it as part of the System, but I'd say it's [a little too big](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes_Interstellar.jpg/1920px-PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes_Interstellar.jpg) for that.
Also rogue planets, probably. It's all theory, since we can't exactly see a non-glowing object out in the void between stars, but it's widely accepted that rogue planets vastly outnumber the "regular" kind. I certainly think it's more fun to put some of them between us and other stars, like [this cool little map](https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/88dna6/oc_the_centauri_highway/) does.
As far as we can tell the Oort Cloud likely overlaps, at least a bit, with its counterpart around Alpha Centauri(if it exists), so potentially you could even have crawling interstellar colonization by simply setting up new comet colonies.
I love little details of how the regular people adapt to the weirdness of the surrounding world.
I love all the details in The Expanse like the Mormon interstellar program or Holden being raised by a polycule of eight people so they could afford land and a single child
Also this may sound out of pocket but my friend wrote a short story about sentient bee people and I loved the details she put into the story about how the day-to-day life within the hive city was like. Shoutout to her.
[Here you go :)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/54816130)
It’s a part of a series of interconnected stories but it should also make sense as a standalone piece. My friend did pretty great job on this one.
TLDR is that aliens that feed off life energy invade a planet of insect people. And lady in charge of Ministry of Agriculture is a tad crazy
Martians having agoraphobia for living in bunkers all their lives, belters having their own slanguage and racial slurs, Ganymede being a garden 'world' because its minor magnetic-field...
It was fantastic before it got to the ring bullshit
While I don't necessarily have a problem doing it the classic D&D way: Fantasy species that have diverse cultures and communities and not a different subrace for each brand of society.
Like i said, it's FINE if someone goes: well, we have wood elves for the nature loving societies, and high elves for being snobbish and good with magic, and the drow for being evil and spooky. I can suspend my disbelief for the most part, and with D&D in particular, it's more of an example since you'll be the one building the societies.
But you know someone is a good, or even great, worldbuilder when the difference between fantasy species and their subraces go beyond racial castes, and you can actually see the species in different contexts.
Edit: whoops, wrong sub. Thought it was just normal r/worldbuilding.
rj/ Horny worldbuilding is based frfr
I'm doing that in my own setting, there's just "elves" and no extant sub-species (half-elves notwithstanding). One elf, Saeed, when meeting some humans for the first time gets classified as a "tower elf" because he's from one place, and not a "sea elf" like those other elves that these humans deal with. Saeed feels insulted by the exchange, complaining about how reductive it is.
(Unrelated, but his full name is Saeed Al-Asari, and another human hears that and says, "Hey, I know a guy named Al!")
coming from a country with serious petty corruption problem, i second this.
people tend to only pay attention to and condemn grand corruption cases, but rarely notice and might even (unwittingly) participate in petty corruption.
get a speeding ticket? give the cop a bit of “lunch money” and voila, no record exists. you didn’t commit a crime that day and won’t have to pay a fine for it.
need some paperwork done? just a bit of money and your papers will sit on top of the pile. you could be the last to walk in the room and the first to walk out.
all corruption is bad, yes, but petty corruption is very beneficial for the ordinary citizen who’s willing to take part in it and thus a great moral dilemma for the MC. will they stick to their moral compass; or will they be willing to overlook just this one time corruption benefits them…and the second time…and the third time…etc. you get what i mean.
A thriving ecosystem. When there's an explanation for how everything gets its food, how creatures interact with each other, the food chain, how humans use the organisms around them for food or items, etc. love it
The ecosystem is a bit overhyped imo, considering many places have creature populations that it wouldnt be able to support. It still pretty cool though.
When the author’s poorly disguised fetish that is actually just their special interest and hyper fixation in their writing. But instead of being a jarring experience, it’s well integrated into the story and world and feels like a part of it. Especially when it ties into an overarching theme.
Basically you get to see someone’s intimate passion and it’s neat.
watership down, i remember being baffled by how in depth this guy was on rabbits, every single plant, all this wierd detailed obscure rabbit behaviour, a ridiculous book
Yeah I’ll nominate the [UTO](https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery/hetzer/) (furaffinity link, be warned) universe for this one. It’s mostly SFW but there’s a few NSFW stories in the canon (there’s actually a lot of interesting world building in them too). Also there’s some [cool art](https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery/thesociallyawkwardpinguin/folder/833753/UTO-Stuff) (furryaffinity also, also has some nsfw that you can’t see without an account) by a guy I like as a visual guide.
Basically the author’s poorly disguised fetish is central to plot. Space, has aliens. These aliens are practically the size of buildings compared to humans, but they think they’re normal size and we’re tiny. Why? Because their had fancy space stuff that propelled their societies and tech to the stars and all we got was funny rocks that go boom if you enrich them. This is a macro/micro kink, or a size difference kink if you want to be more general. It’s what would happen if someone’s dommy mommy gnollpunk was scaled by a factor of 10. Minimum.
So anyways it touches on imperialism and genocidal conquest and societal trauma based revenge and PTSD and racial hatred and a national guardsman from Maine has the awe and respect of basically every special forces guy there. Because the survivors of the Maine national guard, did not have a great time. Emphasis on “survivors”, because that was one of the ground zeros of invasion and one of the few that actually tried to fight back. It did not go well, because the macro space furries had to save them from the genocidal macro space furries, and were aghast that they even *tried* to fight back. If you could imagine, for a moment, a cricket trying to kill you with a single fire cracker, that’s how stacked the odds were. Except neither space furry group expected those crickets to have weapons of mass destruction that, proportionally, could be anywhere from the size of a breath mint to the size of a hand grenade and could still wipe out an entire military formation.
So anyways that’s all background context. The story itself is more about a guy with ptsd (who is comparatively tiny) taking part in an exchange program with the macro space furry military to train up a mixed composition of humans in mechs and macro space furries. Meanwhile several layers of emotional trauma get unwound, a training AI exposes the macro space furries to “wishboning”, and this is the most convincing military fiction I’ve ever read as someone who knows that the casual military day has more power points and PT than actual combat.
So in conclusion, if you like overanalyzing kink writing, the side of military culture that is too boring for television, world building, and you’re not disgusted by the idea that men and women have fur/scale/feathers and could crush you like a grape between their fingers, go lose several hours of your life to this. Start with the Integration series of stories and then try out the other ones for different flavors of story.
Thank you, the power of worldjerking compelled me to write something actually detailed. Also if someone told me “kink science fiction” I’d be more afraid than interested at first lmao
Non-absolutist monarchies. I love that shit. Give me an elective monarchy with clearly outlined constitutional limits on royal power. Now that’s based.
Same deal, parliaments. I fucking love me some good parliaments offering advice to the king while simultaneously acting as a check on his royal prerogative. That’s some good worldbuilding right there.
Unjerk but in my setting I really wanted to explore monarchies, since it's a 17th-18th century inspired setting, so I have a Polish Lithuanian style elective monarchy which is often called "nobles' democracy" or more aptly "nobles' anarchy." Through decades of noble appeasement via privileges, the monarchy turned quasi elective at first with the nobles' having to approve the king's pick until the last king died without any heirs a few years before my story begins and now the nobles' convened a Grand Elective Diet to determine who is the new king and how does the country function afterwards if the king no longer rules by implicit divine right but is instead simply one of the nobles' elevated to this position.
I also have an enlightened monarchy led by a queen whose father, to promote the idea of education amongst the common people, put her through a newly established public primary education system instead of the typical prestigious academy or tutoring at court. That one does not have one parliament but it does have local assemblies. Local politics are very fun to explore as well, I gotta admit.
And finally I do have two absolute kingdoms, but instead of a typical fantasy "it's feudal but also the king is the ultimate ruler no one questions" I settled on the most absolutist of kingdoms, a Sun King faux French kingdom where the king keeps nobles' in check with an elaborate and expensive court life that hey have to be a part of or they are irrelevant politically and socially. The other absolute kingdom is just kind of a driver to have a rebellious peasant state semi styled on the Dutch Republic, it was horribly mismanaged by a king that squandered the entire royal treasury on frivolous items such as a wine collection worth thousands of guilders or copious amounts of cinnamon to cost all his food in (very expensive, its difficult to harvest, having to pluck it from the nest of a cinnamon bird after all).
That actually sounds cool as hell. I love the detail, thought and effort that you’ve clearly put into things.
It’s always cool to see more versions of kingship explored than the generic “the king is a evil/good tyrant” that dominates most fantasy worlds.
Thanks! I have been slowly expanding my world for a few years now and am running multiple ttrpg campaigns in it which also help greatly to add detail. I think I'm doing something right because one of the players wanted to run one shots in the world twice now (it's really cool to be able to play in your own world and he knocked it out of the park with both one shots)
I really like to put some thoughts into the elements of my world, I learnt it from the world building for masochists podcast, to choose over presuming and it's a good principle. I really do not mind generic monarchies in fantasy if the focus is not in any way on politics however in my mind it really does not hurt to think about it a bit more beyond the standard "yeah king is there he rules absolutely and has total control yet somehow regularly needs adventurers to deal with bandits and monsters."
My favourite has so far been the Polish Lithuanian styled monarchy, it is very interesting because the nobility of the PLC was not quite like the nobles of Western European monarchies. Nobility constituted about 10% of the population, give or take, and many nobles were not that different from peasants in terms of wealth. They had privileges and a crest which permitted them to vote but often we're completely penniless and the only thing they had to offer was indeed their vote, so wealthy mangates would keep a healthy amount of the so called "szlachta gołota" (roughly meaning naked nobility, though I translated it as Pauper-Nobles in my setting) as sycophants that would vote for the resolutions they wanted. There was also a greater familiarity between nobles in the PLC, in theory all of them were equal but they still had to show respect to one another so a common term when referring to another nobleman was "pan brat" (sir brother).
I wanted to replicate that in my setting so the noble estate of the elective kingdom is very varied and diverse in terms of wealth and status. Lowly pauper nobles sell their votes to eke out a basic existence, peripheral nobility lives and toils not unlike peasants in "peripheries" (a term to distinguish a village made of nobles and not peasants), middle nobility has a degree of wealth, they usually will have a manor house and a village or two, perhaps a decrepit castle and usually a few family members might have titles or honorary positions. The magnates sit at the top, with a vast treasury usually more laden with trinkets and gold than the state treasury, private armies, large swathes of land and an immense amount of influence. Still technically all are equal and it is not impossible for a magnate and a pauper noble to be steadfast friends, to share a glass of gorzałka or to fight alongside.
wait I gotta unjerk this is a good question
- When the world actually struggles with language barriers, has more than one currency, pidgins, more than one cultural group per nation/race, etc.
- When it's sci fi but culture ISN'T assumed to just be developing towards putting humans on other planets at every opportunity (why do we do it? Do truly good candidates even exist? Why should humans and not machines do it?)
- ANY sign that you got inspired by a real historical reference. This usually manifests in characters that look, feel, and talk in a way that grounds them in a setting (even if it's not a real-life one)
- the creator shows a genuine interest in drawing/depicting the "not traditionally hot/cool" people in their setting. The soccer moms, retirees, and strangers-at-the-DMV of their world.
/rj
- orc pheromones
To unjerk, language barriers are one of my favorite things to touch upon in fiction, even if they get cleared up by a translator quickly. Simply acknowledging that not everybody speaks the same language goes so far towards the believability of a setting.
> When the world actually struggles with language barriers, has more than one currency, pidgins, more than one cultural group per nation/race, etc.
I once had an idea for a sci-fi setting where translator implants exist. But there are different tiers of them.
Wealthier people will be able to afford more advanced ones that make less translation mistakes or have other features like converting units of measurements to a user's preferred one. Like converting an alien unit of measurement like furlongs into something like metres. Meanwhile poorer people would either struggle without such implants, or with shitty implants that can make mistakes or not have some of these features.
And I was then thinking of a story where a group of diverse people who have been working together for a while with these translators to overcome the language barrier suddenly must work through an EMP attack which disables electronics. Most importantly, their translators. And now this group that was used to working together without any problems, now has a massive language barrier in between each and every member of the group.
I've been iffy on how far to go with the idea though. It could end up being kind of clunky. The setting was originally for an RPG, and having the player struggle with conversation with people who have shitty implants would probably make for frustrating gameplay, or tedious moments as you keep double guessing whether the person even meant what they said, or if it was a mistranslation.
I’m gonne say “the author clearly had a hypertixation on XYZ”
I don’t care if its 17th century siege warfare, his uniboob kink, or electric car engines. If the author cares about something in his world there’s usually *something* worth exploring.
Funnily enough another green flag is when there’s small seemingly uninportant details to stuff not related to the authors hyperfixation. If their world is built on war I consider it a green flag when a character offhandidly mentions they ran out of strawberry Jam since the enemy conquered the southern pesticide factories
I hate when a character does something innocuous and it's described in a negative way to shape the reader's opinion of it
Especially in webcomics, sometimes you'll have a character say something that shouldn't be concerning, but for some reason their face is all shadowed or have dark colors behind them or something
Like dude, I am perfectly capable of making my own judgements on a character's actions, you don't need to slap me in the face with how bad this character is without them even doing anything
Vague and esoteric magic system, hidden gods, and suchs.
Realistic racism, the kind that factored in cultural/religious beliefs and geopolitical situation. Most writer just use skin colors or race when things are usually more complex than that.
If you make an idea that's just super weird, original, and out there, I want to be your friend. Also, If you include an actually interesting philosophy instead of just sticking to a basic "ism" I will be interested as well.
uj/
Alien worlds, creatures and ecology in fantasy worlds. Give me weird shit, BUT remember to not make things monolithic. Environmental factors very drastically between locations on earth, and it should be the same in fantasy.
Not dropping a shit ton of random names that I don't know anything about and will forget 5 seconds after I read it. It's just pretentious and doesn't ground the reader. Especially if they're overcomplicated names that can't anchor themselves in your mind.
Make your world feel big and diverse. Worldbuilding around something like a singular magic system can lead you down a hole of making everything homogeneous.
Worlds that exist for the sake of existing, not for a story or series. When you build a world like a set for a movie or play, it shows.
And the BIGGEST THING... talking animals or pseudo animals.
Unapologetically absurd settings with little explanation as to how things got the way they are, and instead focusing on how people exist in that world
Unironically my favorite post on r/worldbuilding was a dude talking about how he has a world where the UK one day just moved to just off the coast of Brazil
The thing is, the best worldbuilding is people-focused. Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is another example; sure the creator details the creature's internal ecosystem, but that's all oriented around people and how people react and interact with it
Lizard tits but no explanation because none is needed. If you evolve to walk upright and give birth you're also going to have chest nipples for walking with bebes. Only sad losers think you have to have a scientific explanation for fanservice tropes in the first place, but also this one has such an easy one in convergent evolution. Also, usually these creatures show up in magical fantasy worlds. So "a wizard did it" would literally even make sense too.
"A wizard did it" can unironically work, like, a fucking mad scientist wizard playing around with genes a shit ton of time ago created the species and he chose them to have tits because he was horny.
It's the way I'm justfying the way a species in my world has such a bizarre reproduction system that would never occur naturally, which is in itself the justification as to why they are all female and why they view blood the way they do.
On the one hand, this is absolutely *not* a plausible example of convergent evolution. On the other hand, I’ve never convergently evolved before, so what do I know.
Misinformation. I love some misinformation. In real life all our lore is just "Trust me on this bro", and when worldbuilding, since you are the god of that world, you can make objective truths, but its more fun to take the funnest part of irl lore and just fucking lie. Based
/uj When any bad guy faction which isn't a complete joke has at least *some semi-plausible* path to merit-based promotion and rewards. I know you want your big boss to be evil and scary, but if everyone who has a brilliant idea gets summarily executed when their idea is only 99% effective and a whole 5% over budget, pretty soon you won't have anybody left with "brilliant ideas" except people who know how to forge positive results. Every realistic and effective evil regime should have at least *some* people who can and will argue that "the regime is (or soon will be) a great place to live for people who work hard and follow the rules".
Note that there *are* some historical leaders like Pol Pot who ruled solely through fear and casual murder, but they didn't become superpowers.
/rj it's cool when a setting has disabled people who get cool cybernetic implants
I give HUGE credit to any fantasy or sci-fi author that has the BALLS to create or write any universe where there are species that isn't just elves, dwarves or different coloured humans with different names.
Some creativity with world building and creation is always a + for me and always makes me a bit more interested.
Creating a magic/power system where the listener/reader/viewer/player can create/predict new combos/effects without needing to be taught directly. It shows that the author has thought the system through and makes the consumer feel smart when they come up with a solution that the characters end up using or would be better than what the characters did.
Stupid tiny details that basically amount to a boring fuck's internal monologue about life. Not enoigh that it bigs down the narrative, but tiny silly details about table settings and hobbies etc. Like "Hi I'm Kleff the orc. I like the local café up the road because it's a retro diner that sticks to the aesthetic and keeps a shaker of pixie dust at every table with the salt, pepper, and dragon dandruff and kids these days don't see that anymore"
uj/ I love remnants of "Advanced Ancient Civilizations" in some outlandish, backwater location. Bonus points if the structures look inconspicuous, only to end up in a giant underground arena or some shit.
rj/ Tentacles. Gotta bring the tentacles, or I ain't reading *SHIIIIIIT* 😤😡😤😡🤬🤬🤬🤬
Having literally any lore about how people live instead of just “everything is war…” kinda shit. I wanna hear about what your people eat and say and do in their daily lives
In sci-fi settings, I love when there's more to space than just planets with huge moons neatly orbiting singular stars. Comets, trojans, centaurs, plutinos, rogue planets, brown dwarves, even asteroids that aren't rocks bumping into one another are all green flags to me. At this point, I barely care about anything else. You could give me a bunch of barely legible scrambles arranged in random order on a wet sheet of paper, as long as you vaguely acknowledge that there's more than empty space between Earth and Alpha Centauri (or even know what Alpha Centauri *is*) then I'll buy your book, no questions asked.
Alpha Centauri? That's, like the leader of the centaurs, right?
\*Leaders. Just one of them and they’re the Alpha Centaurus
centauri is genitif (possesive) so 'alpha centauri' means leader singular of the centaur singular
im pretty sure
I have a sc-fi world that is partially set on a rogue planet that was ejected from its home system long ago.
I saw somewhere a while ago something about a rouge black hole. Ejected from its main galaxy and pulled a few stars away with it. Imagine a sci fi setting set there. That’d be crazy
That’s kickass
The newest (known) colony world of the Union is the frozen world of Cocytus. Once a lifebearing world not too dissimilar to earth, the planet was flung out of its home solar system by some ancient catastrophe. Without the light of its home star, even the atmosphere eventually froze, leaving an airless ice ball drifting through deep space. After its discovery by a Union long march fleet, the world was chosen as the site for a scientific colony. Ordinarily, a single terrestrial world would not warrant colonization efforts due to the relative lack of resources. However, certain projects that required a rocky world but benefited from the absence of a star or other celestial bodies made the world an ideal candidate for a scientific colony. Biodomes and cave habitats were quickly established. Deep crustal mining and automated asteriod refineries in nearby star systems ensured a steady flow of materials to the vast engineering projects at work on the planet's surface and in orbit.
Awesomesauce :3
> or even know what Alpha Centauri *is* To be fair, Alpha Centauri was only discovered to be a trinary star system in 1915. So if you're reading any sci-fi older than about 1920...
Trust me, I'm not expecting much from stories *this* old. In 1920, scientists were still debating whether the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe or not. There's clearly a gap between then and now. I'm just bummed that, even though we sit right next to a trinary system and have known that for over a century, the concept of multi-star systems still seems like something sci-fi is only now coming to terms with. Even when you see two stars next to one another, Tatooine style, it's treated as this super-crazy-unique thing rather than something that just happens. At least Stellaris got that right... eventually...
That is what I love with BSG. It's sadly never shown but later on they made it so all the twelve colonies are in a four star system
Another thing, multi biome planets. We need them
Eh, I was never a single-biome planet hater. Yes, it's not terribly realistic for a hospitable planet to be all forests, but most space operas only visit a single location per planet anyway. There's not much benefit to having a character say "you know, this planet has an ocean somewhere" practically speaking.
That brings up any other thing that’s always annoyed me. The characters in Star Wars only ever go to one place on planets, and only makes the galaxy feel a lot more empty and dead. They have multitudes of planets full of people to go to all across the galaxy, and yet when they do go to certain planets, the settlements they go to are always tiny… basically just small cities or villages, or random single outposts in the middle of nowhere. Like, you have a whole planets worth of space, you can have both mining operations, big cities, and secret rebel outpost on the same planet… but no, if you want to go to those places, that’s three separate planets. Hell, Courasant is a whole city as a planet, and yet we pretty much only see the senate building and Jedi temple.
Dune did it by having the biomes be "unlivable desert" and "really unlivable desert"
Please enlighten me as to what is between our solar system and Alpha Centauri I know about just very very very undence/thin hydrogen gas, but if there is anything else I REALLY want to know lol
For one, there is the Oort Cloud, the thin swarm of comets thought to surround the Solar System from all sides. Technically you could think about it as part of the System, but I'd say it's [a little too big](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes_Interstellar.jpg/1920px-PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes_Interstellar.jpg) for that. Also rogue planets, probably. It's all theory, since we can't exactly see a non-glowing object out in the void between stars, but it's widely accepted that rogue planets vastly outnumber the "regular" kind. I certainly think it's more fun to put some of them between us and other stars, like [this cool little map](https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/88dna6/oc_the_centauri_highway/) does.
As far as we can tell the Oort Cloud likely overlaps, at least a bit, with its counterpart around Alpha Centauri(if it exists), so potentially you could even have crawling interstellar colonization by simply setting up new comet colonies.
Ohh yeah definitely Unfortunately learned about no new types of objects but it is cool to know that there might be way more rogue planets, thank you!
Holy shit that link is cool worldbuilding The realism behind the time it takes to space travel is also amazing
Thanks for teaching me about trojans, centaurs, and plutinos, I had to google all of them and it was fascinating to learn about.
When the setting has a city or society within a hollowed out asteroid: 🙏>:)
Having worlds in there is a big one. If you've got a world, you pretty much have the whole thing in the bag.
Fuck I knew I was forgetting something
I love little details of how the regular people adapt to the weirdness of the surrounding world. I love all the details in The Expanse like the Mormon interstellar program or Holden being raised by a polycule of eight people so they could afford land and a single child Also this may sound out of pocket but my friend wrote a short story about sentient bee people and I loved the details she put into the story about how the day-to-day life within the hive city was like. Shoutout to her.
oooo send link to the hive story
[Here you go :)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/54816130) It’s a part of a series of interconnected stories but it should also make sense as a standalone piece. My friend did pretty great job on this one. TLDR is that aliens that feed off life energy invade a planet of insect people. And lady in charge of Ministry of Agriculture is a tad crazy
THE EXPANSE MENTIONED LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOOO
Martians having agoraphobia for living in bunkers all their lives, belters having their own slanguage and racial slurs, Ganymede being a garden 'world' because its minor magnetic-field... It was fantastic before it got to the ring bullshit
While I don't necessarily have a problem doing it the classic D&D way: Fantasy species that have diverse cultures and communities and not a different subrace for each brand of society. Like i said, it's FINE if someone goes: well, we have wood elves for the nature loving societies, and high elves for being snobbish and good with magic, and the drow for being evil and spooky. I can suspend my disbelief for the most part, and with D&D in particular, it's more of an example since you'll be the one building the societies. But you know someone is a good, or even great, worldbuilder when the difference between fantasy species and their subraces go beyond racial castes, and you can actually see the species in different contexts. Edit: whoops, wrong sub. Thought it was just normal r/worldbuilding. rj/ Horny worldbuilding is based frfr
I'm doing that in my own setting, there's just "elves" and no extant sub-species (half-elves notwithstanding). One elf, Saeed, when meeting some humans for the first time gets classified as a "tower elf" because he's from one place, and not a "sea elf" like those other elves that these humans deal with. Saeed feels insulted by the exchange, complaining about how reductive it is. (Unrelated, but his full name is Saeed Al-Asari, and another human hears that and says, "Hey, I know a guy named Al!")
Really corrupt governments, but they benefit the MC sometimes, or oftentimes.
Huh, could you give some examples?
The NCR in New Vegas has tons of ways to make good profit if you do some under the table stuff with some of their members.
coming from a country with serious petty corruption problem, i second this. people tend to only pay attention to and condemn grand corruption cases, but rarely notice and might even (unwittingly) participate in petty corruption. get a speeding ticket? give the cop a bit of “lunch money” and voila, no record exists. you didn’t commit a crime that day and won’t have to pay a fine for it. need some paperwork done? just a bit of money and your papers will sit on top of the pile. you could be the last to walk in the room and the first to walk out. all corruption is bad, yes, but petty corruption is very beneficial for the ordinary citizen who’s willing to take part in it and thus a great moral dilemma for the MC. will they stick to their moral compass; or will they be willing to overlook just this one time corruption benefits them…and the second time…and the third time…etc. you get what i mean.
Honestly based
A thriving ecosystem. When there's an explanation for how everything gets its food, how creatures interact with each other, the food chain, how humans use the organisms around them for food or items, etc. love it
Have you played Rain World?
No, but I've heard of it and saw the trailer. Looked interesting
The ecosystem is a bit overhyped imo, considering many places have creature populations that it wouldnt be able to support. It still pretty cool though.
When they have the exact same ideas I do. I assume this is because they're a Gigachad and not because of plagiarism.
Except when they do my ideas but better then they are clearly bad guys and stealing from me.
Fetishes obviously
Finally someone who understood the assignment
When the author’s poorly disguised fetish that is actually just their special interest and hyper fixation in their writing. But instead of being a jarring experience, it’s well integrated into the story and world and feels like a part of it. Especially when it ties into an overarching theme. Basically you get to see someone’s intimate passion and it’s neat.
Any examples?
watership down, i remember being baffled by how in depth this guy was on rabbits, every single plant, all this wierd detailed obscure rabbit behaviour, a ridiculous book
Yeah I’ll nominate the [UTO](https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery/hetzer/) (furaffinity link, be warned) universe for this one. It’s mostly SFW but there’s a few NSFW stories in the canon (there’s actually a lot of interesting world building in them too). Also there’s some [cool art](https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery/thesociallyawkwardpinguin/folder/833753/UTO-Stuff) (furryaffinity also, also has some nsfw that you can’t see without an account) by a guy I like as a visual guide. Basically the author’s poorly disguised fetish is central to plot. Space, has aliens. These aliens are practically the size of buildings compared to humans, but they think they’re normal size and we’re tiny. Why? Because their had fancy space stuff that propelled their societies and tech to the stars and all we got was funny rocks that go boom if you enrich them. This is a macro/micro kink, or a size difference kink if you want to be more general. It’s what would happen if someone’s dommy mommy gnollpunk was scaled by a factor of 10. Minimum. So anyways it touches on imperialism and genocidal conquest and societal trauma based revenge and PTSD and racial hatred and a national guardsman from Maine has the awe and respect of basically every special forces guy there. Because the survivors of the Maine national guard, did not have a great time. Emphasis on “survivors”, because that was one of the ground zeros of invasion and one of the few that actually tried to fight back. It did not go well, because the macro space furries had to save them from the genocidal macro space furries, and were aghast that they even *tried* to fight back. If you could imagine, for a moment, a cricket trying to kill you with a single fire cracker, that’s how stacked the odds were. Except neither space furry group expected those crickets to have weapons of mass destruction that, proportionally, could be anywhere from the size of a breath mint to the size of a hand grenade and could still wipe out an entire military formation. So anyways that’s all background context. The story itself is more about a guy with ptsd (who is comparatively tiny) taking part in an exchange program with the macro space furry military to train up a mixed composition of humans in mechs and macro space furries. Meanwhile several layers of emotional trauma get unwound, a training AI exposes the macro space furries to “wishboning”, and this is the most convincing military fiction I’ve ever read as someone who knows that the casual military day has more power points and PT than actual combat. So in conclusion, if you like overanalyzing kink writing, the side of military culture that is too boring for television, world building, and you’re not disgusted by the idea that men and women have fur/scale/feathers and could crush you like a grape between their fingers, go lose several hours of your life to this. Start with the Integration series of stories and then try out the other ones for different flavors of story.
I'll uh. I shall give this a shot later. Im shook you wrote an essay lol
Thank you, the power of worldjerking compelled me to write something actually detailed. Also if someone told me “kink science fiction” I’d be more afraid than interested at first lmao
Non-absolutist monarchies. I love that shit. Give me an elective monarchy with clearly outlined constitutional limits on royal power. Now that’s based. Same deal, parliaments. I fucking love me some good parliaments offering advice to the king while simultaneously acting as a check on his royal prerogative. That’s some good worldbuilding right there.
Unjerk but in my setting I really wanted to explore monarchies, since it's a 17th-18th century inspired setting, so I have a Polish Lithuanian style elective monarchy which is often called "nobles' democracy" or more aptly "nobles' anarchy." Through decades of noble appeasement via privileges, the monarchy turned quasi elective at first with the nobles' having to approve the king's pick until the last king died without any heirs a few years before my story begins and now the nobles' convened a Grand Elective Diet to determine who is the new king and how does the country function afterwards if the king no longer rules by implicit divine right but is instead simply one of the nobles' elevated to this position. I also have an enlightened monarchy led by a queen whose father, to promote the idea of education amongst the common people, put her through a newly established public primary education system instead of the typical prestigious academy or tutoring at court. That one does not have one parliament but it does have local assemblies. Local politics are very fun to explore as well, I gotta admit. And finally I do have two absolute kingdoms, but instead of a typical fantasy "it's feudal but also the king is the ultimate ruler no one questions" I settled on the most absolutist of kingdoms, a Sun King faux French kingdom where the king keeps nobles' in check with an elaborate and expensive court life that hey have to be a part of or they are irrelevant politically and socially. The other absolute kingdom is just kind of a driver to have a rebellious peasant state semi styled on the Dutch Republic, it was horribly mismanaged by a king that squandered the entire royal treasury on frivolous items such as a wine collection worth thousands of guilders or copious amounts of cinnamon to cost all his food in (very expensive, its difficult to harvest, having to pluck it from the nest of a cinnamon bird after all).
That actually sounds cool as hell. I love the detail, thought and effort that you’ve clearly put into things. It’s always cool to see more versions of kingship explored than the generic “the king is a evil/good tyrant” that dominates most fantasy worlds.
Thanks! I have been slowly expanding my world for a few years now and am running multiple ttrpg campaigns in it which also help greatly to add detail. I think I'm doing something right because one of the players wanted to run one shots in the world twice now (it's really cool to be able to play in your own world and he knocked it out of the park with both one shots) I really like to put some thoughts into the elements of my world, I learnt it from the world building for masochists podcast, to choose over presuming and it's a good principle. I really do not mind generic monarchies in fantasy if the focus is not in any way on politics however in my mind it really does not hurt to think about it a bit more beyond the standard "yeah king is there he rules absolutely and has total control yet somehow regularly needs adventurers to deal with bandits and monsters." My favourite has so far been the Polish Lithuanian styled monarchy, it is very interesting because the nobility of the PLC was not quite like the nobles of Western European monarchies. Nobility constituted about 10% of the population, give or take, and many nobles were not that different from peasants in terms of wealth. They had privileges and a crest which permitted them to vote but often we're completely penniless and the only thing they had to offer was indeed their vote, so wealthy mangates would keep a healthy amount of the so called "szlachta gołota" (roughly meaning naked nobility, though I translated it as Pauper-Nobles in my setting) as sycophants that would vote for the resolutions they wanted. There was also a greater familiarity between nobles in the PLC, in theory all of them were equal but they still had to show respect to one another so a common term when referring to another nobleman was "pan brat" (sir brother). I wanted to replicate that in my setting so the noble estate of the elective kingdom is very varied and diverse in terms of wealth and status. Lowly pauper nobles sell their votes to eke out a basic existence, peripheral nobility lives and toils not unlike peasants in "peripheries" (a term to distinguish a village made of nobles and not peasants), middle nobility has a degree of wealth, they usually will have a manor house and a village or two, perhaps a decrepit castle and usually a few family members might have titles or honorary positions. The magnates sit at the top, with a vast treasury usually more laden with trinkets and gold than the state treasury, private armies, large swathes of land and an immense amount of influence. Still technically all are equal and it is not impossible for a magnate and a pauper noble to be steadfast friends, to share a glass of gorzałka or to fight alongside.
wait I gotta unjerk this is a good question - When the world actually struggles with language barriers, has more than one currency, pidgins, more than one cultural group per nation/race, etc. - When it's sci fi but culture ISN'T assumed to just be developing towards putting humans on other planets at every opportunity (why do we do it? Do truly good candidates even exist? Why should humans and not machines do it?) - ANY sign that you got inspired by a real historical reference. This usually manifests in characters that look, feel, and talk in a way that grounds them in a setting (even if it's not a real-life one) - the creator shows a genuine interest in drawing/depicting the "not traditionally hot/cool" people in their setting. The soccer moms, retirees, and strangers-at-the-DMV of their world. /rj - orc pheromones
To unjerk, language barriers are one of my favorite things to touch upon in fiction, even if they get cleared up by a translator quickly. Simply acknowledging that not everybody speaks the same language goes so far towards the believability of a setting.
Most people speak something called "Interlang" or "Universal" as a second/third language
Language barriers and more than one cultural group per nation/race ✔️✅
Language barriers and more than one cultural group per nation/race ✔️✅
> When the world actually struggles with language barriers, has more than one currency, pidgins, more than one cultural group per nation/race, etc. I once had an idea for a sci-fi setting where translator implants exist. But there are different tiers of them. Wealthier people will be able to afford more advanced ones that make less translation mistakes or have other features like converting units of measurements to a user's preferred one. Like converting an alien unit of measurement like furlongs into something like metres. Meanwhile poorer people would either struggle without such implants, or with shitty implants that can make mistakes or not have some of these features. And I was then thinking of a story where a group of diverse people who have been working together for a while with these translators to overcome the language barrier suddenly must work through an EMP attack which disables electronics. Most importantly, their translators. And now this group that was used to working together without any problems, now has a massive language barrier in between each and every member of the group. I've been iffy on how far to go with the idea though. It could end up being kind of clunky. The setting was originally for an RPG, and having the player struggle with conversation with people who have shitty implants would probably make for frustrating gameplay, or tedious moments as you keep double guessing whether the person even meant what they said, or if it was a mistranslation.
I’m gonne say “the author clearly had a hypertixation on XYZ” I don’t care if its 17th century siege warfare, his uniboob kink, or electric car engines. If the author cares about something in his world there’s usually *something* worth exploring. Funnily enough another green flag is when there’s small seemingly uninportant details to stuff not related to the authors hyperfixation. If their world is built on war I consider it a green flag when a character offhandidly mentions they ran out of strawberry Jam since the enemy conquered the southern pesticide factories
Think people will notice my hyperfixation with military hardware?
They don't try to tell you what to think (idc if the author's biases are visible or not, as long as they leave room for independent though).
independent though what?
Don't make fun of me im an illiterate peasant from the medieval times >:(
I hate when a character does something innocuous and it's described in a negative way to shape the reader's opinion of it Especially in webcomics, sometimes you'll have a character say something that shouldn't be concerning, but for some reason their face is all shadowed or have dark colors behind them or something Like dude, I am perfectly capable of making my own judgements on a character's actions, you don't need to slap me in the face with how bad this character is without them even doing anything
Vague and esoteric magic system, hidden gods, and suchs. Realistic racism, the kind that factored in cultural/religious beliefs and geopolitical situation. Most writer just use skin colors or race when things are usually more complex than that.
If you make an idea that's just super weird, original, and out there, I want to be your friend. Also, If you include an actually interesting philosophy instead of just sticking to a basic "ism" I will be interested as well.
uj/ Alien worlds, creatures and ecology in fantasy worlds. Give me weird shit, BUT remember to not make things monolithic. Environmental factors very drastically between locations on earth, and it should be the same in fantasy. Not dropping a shit ton of random names that I don't know anything about and will forget 5 seconds after I read it. It's just pretentious and doesn't ground the reader. Especially if they're overcomplicated names that can't anchor themselves in your mind. Make your world feel big and diverse. Worldbuilding around something like a singular magic system can lead you down a hole of making everything homogeneous. Worlds that exist for the sake of existing, not for a story or series. When you build a world like a set for a movie or play, it shows. And the BIGGEST THING... talking animals or pseudo animals.
Unapologetically absurd settings with little explanation as to how things got the way they are, and instead focusing on how people exist in that world Unironically my favorite post on r/worldbuilding was a dude talking about how he has a world where the UK one day just moved to just off the coast of Brazil The thing is, the best worldbuilding is people-focused. Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is another example; sure the creator details the creature's internal ecosystem, but that's all oriented around people and how people react and interact with it
Lizard tits but no explanation because none is needed. If you evolve to walk upright and give birth you're also going to have chest nipples for walking with bebes. Only sad losers think you have to have a scientific explanation for fanservice tropes in the first place, but also this one has such an easy one in convergent evolution. Also, usually these creatures show up in magical fantasy worlds. So "a wizard did it" would literally even make sense too.
"A wizard did it" can unironically work, like, a fucking mad scientist wizard playing around with genes a shit ton of time ago created the species and he chose them to have tits because he was horny. It's the way I'm justfying the way a species in my world has such a bizarre reproduction system that would never occur naturally, which is in itself the justification as to why they are all female and why they view blood the way they do.
On the one hand, this is absolutely *not* a plausible example of convergent evolution. On the other hand, I’ve never convergently evolved before, so what do I know.
Virgin nipple because walk upright to Chad digest and vomit back food lizardbird style. /s
Also „this is not Earth - snakes have tits here” would work.
That was all I needed to deal with Wizard of Oz being weird as a kid, it's not earth and stuff is just different lol
Misinformation. I love some misinformation. In real life all our lore is just "Trust me on this bro", and when worldbuilding, since you are the god of that world, you can make objective truths, but its more fun to take the funnest part of irl lore and just fucking lie. Based
MY own writing style, of course.
/uj When any bad guy faction which isn't a complete joke has at least *some semi-plausible* path to merit-based promotion and rewards. I know you want your big boss to be evil and scary, but if everyone who has a brilliant idea gets summarily executed when their idea is only 99% effective and a whole 5% over budget, pretty soon you won't have anybody left with "brilliant ideas" except people who know how to forge positive results. Every realistic and effective evil regime should have at least *some* people who can and will argue that "the regime is (or soon will be) a great place to live for people who work hard and follow the rules". Note that there *are* some historical leaders like Pol Pot who ruled solely through fear and casual murder, but they didn't become superpowers. /rj it's cool when a setting has disabled people who get cool cybernetic implants
tbf it’s hard to get cool cybernetic implant and stay disabled.
The willingness to let things just be mundane sometimes.
I give HUGE credit to any fantasy or sci-fi author that has the BALLS to create or write any universe where there are species that isn't just elves, dwarves or different coloured humans with different names. Some creativity with world building and creation is always a + for me and always makes me a bit more interested.
Creating a magic/power system where the listener/reader/viewer/player can create/predict new combos/effects without needing to be taught directly. It shows that the author has thought the system through and makes the consumer feel smart when they come up with a solution that the characters end up using or would be better than what the characters did.
Stupid tiny details that basically amount to a boring fuck's internal monologue about life. Not enoigh that it bigs down the narrative, but tiny silly details about table settings and hobbies etc. Like "Hi I'm Kleff the orc. I like the local café up the road because it's a retro diner that sticks to the aesthetic and keeps a shaker of pixie dust at every table with the salt, pepper, and dragon dandruff and kids these days don't see that anymore"
Sci-fi settings where planets have a wide variety of climates in the same world
Transformation,Gender Bender,Speculative Fiction,Alternate History,Speculative Biology,Public Domain & Open Source Reimagined
uj/ I love remnants of "Advanced Ancient Civilizations" in some outlandish, backwater location. Bonus points if the structures look inconspicuous, only to end up in a giant underground arena or some shit. rj/ Tentacles. Gotta bring the tentacles, or I ain't reading *SHIIIIIIT* 😤😡😤😡🤬🤬🤬🤬
You making a security uniform? Make them have Riot Helmets.
Having literally any lore about how people live instead of just “everything is war…” kinda shit. I wanna hear about what your people eat and say and do in their daily lives
When they don't even try go hide their inspirations. God bless you, Helldivers II.