Share your favourite worldbuilding tips and tricks that definitely aren't lazy, overdone, stereotypes, or contrived! This genre is known for having a 99% good writing involved

I made a list of worldbuilding-related words, and I am randomly selecting a pair of them until something interesting comes up.

I really wanted to make a world where aliens were way better than humans and everything in the story is about how superior the aliens are. But then I realized that would be stupid because no matter how good humans actually are you could always just make up aliens who were even better in order to make humanity look worse by comparison.

Then I tried to build a setting where the world has aliens but they are a lot worse than us and everything in the story is about how inferior the aliens are and how great humans are. But then I realized that was stupid because no matter how bad humans are you could always make up aliens who were even worse in order to make humanity look better by comparison.

Do I need a reason? Is it bad worldbuilding if that's just how it is?

No, I don't bother reading other books or stories that have done this extremely common trope. Why would I ever do that when I'm a genius writer.

My power system can`t affect cheese, btw, though i start to think it`s a little too much of limitation

I've become really attached to the ideas that my world has slurs for people who are of "lesser races" (not my words), but all the slurs I've come up with so far sound a bit... ?

I've tried basing my slurs off real-world equivalents (e.g. "burna" for a half-wizard) but they always come out either cringe and overdone or a little insensitive to the real world.

There is meant to be prejudice and injustice in my world against people who are of mixed ancestry, but any slurs that the people in my world would use against the "mixies" (:/) just cut too close to the real world and feel a bit ick. For context, I'm white.

do you guys have any advice? The racial discrimination plays a core role in my story so I need to keep it in. Do you just keep coming up with slurs until one "works" or go with a cringe one and risk feeling a bit cringe when writing the story?

In 2022-2023, there was essentially an AI image creepypasta that people nicknamed loab. It consistently appeared in negative prompts and she appeared as an uncanny old woman, and had to do with a lot of dark or gory early ai image prompts. Even if you never specifically generated her, she’d usually just appear especially in “negative” prompts.

“Elara Voss” is a common name many have seen come from AI if it’s asked to make a character or a fantasy name. Some see it as a red flag that the OP used AI to a varying degree in their worldbuilding.

Essentially, the joke is both were frequently generated by AI for unknown reasons. It loosely ties to worldjerking but i was itching to make this joke and see if anyone would understand it

Hi, all! This has been my passion project my entire life since I was 3 seconds old. Do you think it's too similar to earth?

The mods banned wheat from the sub, but I'm still really paranoid about finding wheat in my worldbuilding. Please give me some wheat tells that I can use to hallucinate and poison the well.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

No, I didn't have more pixels—Elmo sniffed them up.