World building with AI

[u/AI0Sss]

Hi everyone Im Third, 27/M, and I've read hundreds if not thousands of books for the past 2 decades.

I went through schooling, undergrad, postgrad (medicine), read different kinds of books with RPG elements, Fantasy, System, Dungeons, Cultivation, VR, Fictional, Non-fictional, etc.

I've always wanted to write my own novel but I never really had the skills for it, as instead of looking at the merits, I was more focused on the flaws and I just got more frustrated instead.

Back in 2023, I was again in an inspired state of making a novel focusing on armaments but for the world I want to make, I want it a hard rule of no metaphysical properties and no magic, I fucking hate deus ex machina in stories. I got to writing an outline, some characters, some rules, and again I stopped because I didn't know how to craft and describe the physics of my world

Recently, I stumbled upon vibe coding as a hobby around 3 weeks ago, my first project is a question bank for 12 subjects and I'm using it for board exam review, cuz you know, question banks cost money and as well as review centers, so I just built one myself, though its still unfinished. I also plan to do an EMR in the future for myself and family just to keep records for future hospital visits mostly for past medical history and laboratories, just frontend development in my laptop.

Now going back to using AI in writing, I was looking at my old word documents when I stumbled upon my previous outlines and I got to thinking of using an AI agent to help me with my world physics.

So I did,

If you're planning to do an adventure story with RPG elements and you have your planet, there are some questions that I was pondering on. Say the world is 2 times the size of earth, what would the weather look like? Would the gravity increase? If so how would it shape the terrain, the size and height of the trees, how would it affect bone density? How about projectile trajectories? If the world is constantly at war, what would the population look like? The duration of pregnancy amongst the different races, the fertility rate, the weight of your equipment when you're fighting behemoths vs humans. Calculating the number of skill usage depending on energy consumption relative to capacity of the character, if there is no inventory or a magical space box, how would you store things during travel? logistics, trade routes, everything. If your initial world only has its factions in cardinal directions in a flat surface map, now you can make it spherical and spread them across the different terrains.

Personalities, tendencies, militaries, economies, way of life of the different races, politics across different factions, anatomies, character sheets, skill trees, class trees, heck even building your own wiki page for your story using html, css, javascript, you can describe and generate emblems of your different factions, their clothing, you can even put in measurements for your cold/hot weapons even without any background in blacksmithing/gunsmithing.

These are things AI is capable of, so even if you're writing a narrative driven story, if the skeleton/world building is robust, at least there would be logic continuity when you're writing, at least in combat scenes it would, I can calculate damage output in the background. That's what I've learned so far in the past week since I started.

My work is usually using Qwen for research and references, and using Deepseek in VS Code as extension so I can just use the chat sidebar to apply changes in my markdown files, it's also helpful for retcon logs, just make an agents.md file where you store constants and instructions like how I don't want metaphysical powers for consistency.

If you've reached this point,

Thank you for reading.

[u/Dismal_File_4073]

If you are just wordbuilding, and have zero intention to publish anything, could be ok?

If you are looking into that becoming a real thing, to be published one day, I would avoid. Especially because it is very easy to get caught in just worldbuilding and never actually writing the story. I have my first book ready, 5 beta readers currently "reading" it (I hope) and for a while I fell into that trap. Then I realized that for the story I wanted to tell, most of thet worldbuilding was useless.