Fabian Schober

Worldbuilding I - Things I learned from building a planet

12 min read

Since I started studying geology a lot has changed about how I view the world. Nature is just a bunch of data points that happen to be observed by us. (And arguably a lot more than that)

Relations

Building a world is essentially just the process of filling up all of those data points yourself. Everything that can be quantized (and I argue that everything can be quantized, depending on who is looking at it) becomes a finite and therefore managable pile of information.

The true challenge lies in getting the relations right. Relations are the foundation of every measurement since the dawn of humanity. Everything is set into a relation to something else, be it a centimeter is one hundredth of a meter which is in turn the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.

Then we are beginning to hit boundaries. Is Caesium something absolute? Well, yes, if you stop there. But no. The periodic table of the elements tells us that Caesium has 55 protons and 78 Neutrons. So every element is just an arrangement of a certain relation of subatomic particles that attract or repulse one another based on some rules.

Let us stop zooming in and think about the relations of forces. The universe does not get too hot and explodes or freezes to death (at least for now) because there is something like a balance between energy-poor and energy-rich spots. The difference between those spots keeps the universe alive because everything seeks entropy and, in doing so, creates motion that most likely takes entropy away in another place, which resets the dynamic. But in some far distant future the maximum entropy will be reached, resulting in a perfect equilibrium where no further useful energy can be extracted. The ratio will be 50/50 for everything. No new motion and information flows.

In the meantime this knowledge helps us greatly when thinking about weather cells and tectonic plates. Hot and cold air chase each other and create friction. Global trade winds shape currents and shorelines. New ocean floor gets born through Seafloor Spreading while pushing plates aside and shoving them under neighbouring continents while maintaining a consistent surface area. Where there is something added, somewhere else something will be subtracted.

Geodynamics are not mundane

Have you ever thought about that the problem you are trying to solve feels so stuck because it is not really the problem you are facing?

There are two types of worldbuilders. People who use worldbuilding as a vehicle to get their stories straight and interesting. And people who are less interested in telling a story but more into creating the world around it. So it is of great importance to think about who you want to be.

Solving physical problems is not for you if the stage you want to set must not be hyperrealistic. You need to distribute your ressources where you really need them - and that involves being honest with yourself. Yes, scientifical arguments are flashy and all but setting up a good stage doesn’t need as much particle physics as thinking about dramaturgy and character development. You don’t have to get that deep into geodynamics for a good story.

Otherwise you are just procrastinating. :)

But on the other hand it is very natural to satisfy the inner child in us. A 3-year old would go on asking “why?” an - for an adult presumably - unreasonably prolonged part of my afternoon:

Kid: Why is the sun up there?

Me: Because we are on a big rock floating through space, cycling the sun. When the sun rises it is actually the rock turning to face the sun.

Kid: Why?

Me: Because this is what planets do: Planets cycle around a hot sun.

Kid: Why?

Me: Because in the beginning there was a lot of rubble and dust which clumped together. The biggest clump was big enough get really hot which became our sun. Everything was spinning so all of the other clumps, which became the planets, contonued to spin.

Kid: Why?

Me: Because everything wants to stick together in the universe. The more stuff is clumped together the more other things want to stick to it. For example, you are sticking to earth.

And so on. This conversation did not happen exactly like this but is synonymous for all of those conversations. What I am getting at is this: There is no end to this. You could go to infinity. You have the natural urge to go to infintity. In worldbuilding this natural fractal complexity of things is not given. It needs to be created. Which means there oughts to be a calculatable tradeoff between detail and efficiency.

A workaround that is quite common is to just take a basic setting of something already existing and make it a dependency for your worlds definition. E.g.:

My world is set on a post-nuclear war earth, 1200 years from now.

or:

My world is a unique medieval world, where all of the rules of earth apply but with magic.

Magic is a big thing in worldbuilding. It can occur actively as part of the worldbuilding (Sorcerers, Magicians, Schamans,…), as a means to limit the ressources needed for creating a convincing world (fog of war) or to empower people with technology which does not exist in reality and/or is very complex to explain (Faster-than-light-propulsion, Plasma Canons,…)1.

Ultimately this was the motiviation for me to first start with plate tectonics and then to study geology. I just wanted to see where everything leads me.

I supposed that the expedition which flew to the Moon would film the moments of faulting, and the violent volcanic activity, and the separation of the continents by the oceans. Amateur cine-photographers know what stop motion photography is. A cine camera is set up, for instance, in front of an unopened flower. One frame is exposed, say, every half-hour, and then all these exposures are projected on to the screen at the usual rate. The bud blossoms out quickly before the spectators’eyes into a beautiful flower. It was just such stop motion photography that I intended to employ in the science-fiction story from one of the lunar craters, to show how the continents drifted apart.

And now, here we are in the cinema. The lights dim slowly and go out, and pictures of the pri meval chaos of the Earth pass across the screen before us one by one. The outlines of the conti nents seem strange and unfamiliar. The whole Earth is one continent surrounded by the World Ocean. The planet zooms towards the spectator to show some individual close-ups of the past of our Earth, taken automatically by the camera. A green carpet of strangely familiar plants stretches along the ocean shore. The camera brings us close to the world of dendritic ferns, horsetails, lycopods… On a fallen moss-covered tree near a lake lies a monster with the mouth of a croco dile. Its head is coated with armour. Beside it we see the remains of a huge frog-like creature; the end of one of the episodes of the great struggle for existence. Hovering above the battleground are gigantic light-winged dragon-flies…

The shape of the crocodile-like creature s’ head, the vegetation and the entire appearance of this world are evidence of very ancient stages of evolution. All the paleontologists present at the show are unanimous in declaring this to be the fauna and flora of the Upper Carbonifer ous, one of the most distant geological epochs, dating back to three hundred or three hundred and twenty million years ago. (Malakhov, 1966, p. 37 -38)2

Manual worldbuilding vs. procedural generation

We differentiate between worldbuilding by hand and by procedural generation.

Generating topological features procedurally is a whole discipline on its own and it is easy to mix the both up. Learning to generate worlds will suck you in but will not necessarily get you closer to the goal of creating your envisioned world. However it will help you get a better understanding about the laws that govern our universe.

I used to mix that up a lot and got frustrated because I wanted to have a special place of my own. But telling a computer to make that place for me resulted in generating hundreds of maps, planets and drafts, without being satisfied, because they did not come from a concious decision.

Procedural

source

I bring to you a really good answer from the gamedev.stackexchange:

Procedural generation works on the idea that you know what you want to create and how it is created but you leave out the details. Think of a set of sliders for color, size, roundness / sharpness, amplitude and such aspects. You don’t want to define every aspect of the result by hand. You want to outline a general idea of what you’d like and won’t like to see, color sets, surface smoothness, and such.

This obviously defines the world in it’s virginal state. You are saving hard drive and memory space because you aren’t storing a lot of detail. You let the details get randomized with a predetermined seed which means, you don’t know what will happen but it will happen again and again every time (like perlin noise from a seed), in fact, the creator says the worlds are created by noise that uses a seed to repeat the same results. It is all build on the notion that you have the functionality to build a planet using a set of values to define it’s properties first and then you let the algorithm, randomly pick these values. The universe itself is built on the concept of randomly picking far enough but not too far spots to place planets.

Comment by: User AturSams - Game Development Stack Exchange

Source: procedural generation - deterministic or not? (No man’s sky) - Game Development Stack Exchange

Generating a world needs the ability to save a generated state and go from there. Revert only a part of the changes. Generate only details but keep the overall structure. Generate only certain details while keeping everything else as is.

This absolutely can be done. It just needs vast amounts of time, ressources and technical expertise to be fruitful. To see such a project (a universal world generator of some sorts) bear fruits it would need some serious motivation to be justified. (In my opinion only a community-driven open source project would satisfy the worldbuilding community).

Generational Methods are cool and all but won’t function without some kind of engine. A software-engine (or framework) is a set of tools and features that provide commonly used functions and rules to create a digital environment. In terms of game engines this means physical models like e.g. how gravity works. So an engine for procedural generation would have different models for shorelines, for continental drift, etc. For now, I will leave this topic, as it would go out of scope for this post.

If you are interested in procedural generation and pogramming in general, here are some interesting ressources:

The human mind

The human mind is somewhat of a supercomputer. And I mean that absolutely unironically. It is the tool you need the most when creating worlds. As Artifexian pointed out in one of his videos, using noise generating algorithms to shape your terrain will result in something that does not take into account a lot of things. To have an accurate shoreline you need the whole system of natural forces to shape it - ocean currents, weather cells, tidal forces,… There is yet no grand unified model to accurately calculate the shape of your continents and islands for you. Or maybe there is, but it is no minor task at hand - let alone the computational power needed.

You, on the other hand, are capable of thinking everything through, step by step. Just draw a rough shape of an island. Then draw in some ocean currents. Think of tidal forces and where your winds are coming from. Step by step you are able to refine the shorelines. Think of the vegetation on land. How do the roots of the trees come in to play? You don’t need to calculate that. You feel it in your guts. And with every book you read, every video you watch, everytime you go outside and look at nature you will become better at feeling it. You are like a super-advanced neural network, using every bit of knowledge to excel at a task.

Series about Worldbuilding

This post is part of an ongoing series about worldbuilding and constructed languages. For an overview of all of the tools and ressources I mention go here.

Footnotes

  1. Preliminary Notes - Atomic Rockets ↩

  2. Malakhov, A., und David Sobolev. The Mystery of the Earth’s Mantle. University Press of the Pacific, 1966 ↩

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