Learn To Worldbuild From Scratch With Me
I’ve talked before about how I like to worldbuild for my writing, and I thought it would help if I demonstrated the process more actively, so I’m going to come up with some worldbuilding as I write this post, all following the steps I gave in the linked post
1. Visualise the landscape
I like to do this by finding a location in Minecraft to build in, so I created a new world in order to get a snapshot of the spawn location and see if I could get inspiration from that. Here’s the image I got:
And honestly, I’m pretty happy with this starting point! You’ve got the natural rise and fall of this valley, the different sand and terracotta types, the trees up at the tops of the mountains. There’s a lot of character to the land already
2. Give your location a main export/value
In Minecraft, gold and mineshafts are a lot more likely to generate in the badlands, so that seems like a pretty solid start based on the location alone. This means that the location would be home to a mining community, and thus a lot of the people living here are likely to work in the mines, and thus may be quite hardy physical labourers. They’re also likely to be quite a wealthy community, considering they’re the ones with all the access to gold and precious ores, and so their trade avenues are likely to be pretty diverse
3. Consider how this export/value, combined with the landscape, would shape your location’s founding, history and/or culture
So from the biome and export alone, we’ve conceptualised a wealthy mining community of physical labourers. If we’re to add in how the land looks right now, my first instinct is to look at that dip in the valley where the red sand is; that’s a clear indication of a river that’s long since dried up
In real life, settlements tend to pop up by rivers and other natural water sources since water is such a necessary part of life, meaning that a settlement passing along the lost river would make plenty of sense. If we wanted, we could leave the river drained, and construct a dilapidated mining community from a bygone era — the water ran out, and so the people had to leave for survival
4. Expand on these ideas until you’re satisfied
From here you’ve already got some solid worldbuilding, and if there’s not much to be done in this land then you can leave it at that. But we’re here for a full project, so allow me to ramble for a while:
There are still questions that remain if we’re curious enough; what caused the water to run out, and where did the miners go? My genre of preference is fantasy, so I have a little more wiggle room for ideas here, such as considering this from a magical or divine perspective. Maybe they angered a god, or they mined a cursed gem, and it caused the river to dry up?
But a cursed and barren sand settlement is awfully similar to Porphyria, an existing city I have, so I want to try something a little different. What if, instead of the river drying up being some kind of disaster or curse, it was actually by design? What if there were a dam put in place that blocked the river from reaching the settlement?
And why would someone want to cut off the water supply to the settlement? Their gold mines. What if somebody wanted to buy the land and claim the gold for themself, and when told no, they attempted to make the land inhospitable to force the settlement’s hand?
But we’ve already established that these miners are a hardy community, and I have my doubts that they’d just take this lying down. But what would they do? Break the dam? Find a new water source?
Wait, maybe the latter could work, actually. What if they found an underground spring or something while mining? Maybe water that’s sourced from further up the river, forking off underground, and thus hasn’t been blocked off by the dam? So maybe, instead of staying on the surface, the miners move underground
Actually, now that I think about it, this is getting similar to an old civilisation I came up with years ago but didn’t do much worldbuilding for; a ravine where the dwarves of Glynnwyld moved to evade the ripple effects of the Great Elven War. Originally it was full of green grass and sparkling crystals, but that could always change to fit our new worldbuilding and put this badlands mining settlement into my existing lore. Maybe the High Elves built the dam to cut off the river that flowed into dark elf territory, and the dwarven settlement was just collateral damage? Or the dark elves needed more land and access to precious minerals for the war effort, and so built the dam to gain full access?
And that resulted in the dwarves moving underground, leaving behind the shell of their old settlement in favour of forming a true underground community
Aaaaand I’m calling it there! I think I’m gonna call the above ground settlement the Rosegold Valley, due to the gold mine and the red sand and terracotta forming the landscape. Which could make the underground settlement the Rosegold Caverns. I’m not entirely sure I’ll use this location in my actual story, and if I do I might put a bit more thought into fully incorporating it into my existing worldbuilding, but this was a really fun project! Thanks for sticking around, and I hope this helps you figure out your own worldbuilding!
