"What are we going to worldbuild about today?" NOTHING. You need to stop. If you find yourself thinking about the historical name of a little village on the edge of your 150-planet star map, it may be a sign that you are wasting your time.
A big disclaimer right away - if you are just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding, then this article isn't for/about you. Have fun! However, if you are planning to use your world for anything that isn't a 1200 page compendium detailing it, then I have some important words for you.
I know that a lot of people won't want to hear this. But when you spend most of your creative time creating your world and don't actually DO anything with the stuff you create, you are not being productive. You are simply
procrastinating. There, I said it.
Do we absolutely need to know every detail of your world's history?
Do we absolutely need to know the name of this forest and every species of flower inside it?
Do we absolutely need to know the exact amount of taxes that peasant Bob pays per month?
I could go on with these questions - the gist is, you should ask yourself "do we absolutely need to know" before you're going to write a detailed article about something. If the answer is yes, if it's relevant to the story/game/campaign/whatnot you are creating, then go ahead. Figure it out in as much detail
as needed. But not more than that.
Enough is enough.
There may simply be a point in your world's creation where you've explained and described everything that needs to be explained and described for now. If you feel aimless and unmotivated to work on your world, this may be the case.
Don't worry about this - take a break from worldbuilding, work on something else. Write your story/campaign/game/etc.
Don't force yourself to continue worldbuilding past this point! If more needed worldbuilding pops up, you will know. You won't find out if you don't actually
use your world - in the worst case, you will end up spending time and effort on articles that are literally irrelevant because you don't know what to actually focus on.
The opposite end of the spectrum
Of course, there is also such a thing as worldbuilding too little. I don't want you to stop entirely after reading this article. I just want you to put consideration into your worldbuilding and focus on the important topics.
Maybe your world is still very new, and you still have to figure out most things. In that case, please worldbuild away - but like I said, focus.
Imagine you'd have to explain your world to a stranger. Focus on the things that would be necessary for an outsider to know to understand your world.
"But Arty, you are also guilty of this!"
I know, I know. I am a big procrastinator myself. Some of the articles in my world are about topics that are literally not relevant to anything I've ever created for it.
But! There's another reason I do occasionally write articles that are not relevant to my stories - yet! Because I plan for the future, and I use these articles as an idea pool for topics that I could feature in my stories sometime soon.
Pan (AS Lindsey)
First of all: rude. Secondly, some very sound advice here. I have to keep reminding myself that the point of all this, for me personally, is to create stories, not to get lost and develop every language and every culture and every competing origin story and every currency exchange rate and and and... Unfortunately, we're not blessed with infinite time. Or a small army of researchers and editors to handle the minutia for us.
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I fully agree! (On all points ^^)
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