How do you document your worldbuilding? What tools do you use? How do you organize your ideas?
Since the inception of my current conworld I have been using Obsidian. It’s great for non-linear note taking. The downside is that the result is less shareable (unless you pay for sync).
I’ve always wanted to create a publicly viewable wiki. I LOVE digging through fan wikis, even for franchises I’m otherwise unattached to. All my knowledge of D&D and WH40K comes from walking through various fan wikis.
To that end, I’ve been exploring other options. Mediawiki seems to be the gold standard since it’s what Wikipedia uses. However, its designed with a lot of user management and permissions features that work well for a massive user base, but are less relevant to someone who wants a non-linear read-only browseable repository of info.
Dokuwiki looks like a popular alternative. No database to manage, though the fact that a lot of expected features like tags and moving pages have been relegated to 3rd party plugins isn’t great. The more plugins, the harder patch management becomes.
Tiddlywiki so far looks the most promising. It assumes only one user is editing pages, so no user permissions to manage. It also runs as a single monolithic HTML file, which has upsides and downsides, but that means I can upload that single file to a simple free web host like Neocities. If the wiki gets very large I anticipate performance issues, as the entire wiki is sent when the page is requested and everything runs client side, so the more I add the worse it will feel. But it’s very stable, has been around almost as long as Wikipedia itself, and unlike Obsidian is open source.
i’ve got all my stuff in google docs and tumblr. I really need to get around to organizing the chicken scratch of notes i have into something presentable. I’ve considering making my own website but, I’m kinda lazy and fiddling with code is not my thing so my desire to make is pretty low.
I just use LibreOffice Writer for odt, Folio (Linux) and Print Notes (Android) for markdown, and Syncthing to sync between my devices. If I need to share it with others, I either copy a specific file or just share the zipped root folder.
Good question. I started with a single LibreOffice Writer document, then tried to organize things using CryptPad. It’s pretty similar to Google Docs, but not owned by Google. Different documents can link to one another.
Not long after that i tried Obsidian, and it’s ok but i like something easier to customize and share.
Now i use HTML, writing everything from scratch and using Neocities to host it. This makes pages pretty easy to present (i could just share the HTML files if i didn’t have a site host) and i have nigh unlimited options for how i want information to be displayed.
I’ve also briefly tried Fandom, but even with adblock their site is unpleasant to use.
I still use a single giant Writer document for unorganized notes and small ideas, but i organize things as i write them in HTML (or here).
The cannonball tree reminds me of a similar tree on Yih, or rather two kinds of tree. Both are referred to as “redfruit trees”. One grows harmless bright red fruit to lure seed dispersers, including presapient yinrih. The second mimics the first tree, but its fruit contains potent neurotoxin that kills anything that eats it. The body drops to the ground and decomposes, allowing the tree to absorb the body’s nutrients.
For how I document, well it’s pretty loosey-goosey, other than locations I don’t really have much structure. Each note just kinda has whatever I think is important with lots of links so I can find it again. I do try and keep ideas fairly atomic - a single idea per note, so that they can be used as building blocks for other notes/ideas.
For organization I am not using tags, I am using folders, and I change up the heirarchy as needed. For a while I had a Flora and Fauna folder, but the world I am building has a lot of non-earth creatures and plants, so those needed to be split out and given more ease of access, so now I have two separate folders at the top level. Right now I have:
- Culture
- Factions
- Fauna
- Flora
- Magic
- Materials
- Regions
- Species
- Ideas (random thoughts go in Ideas before they are made real)
Stick with Obsidian and use the Digital Gardens plugin - it is perfect for your use case. Practically it gets your obsidian vault (or just the notes you select) up on the web in an extremely similar format for free with pretty minimal effort.
