world building database

[krunchee]

Hi guys is been a while. I guess you could say I've had a little break from writing. I've been trying my best to write ideas down still and keep my head in the game a little.

My question today is whether or not anybody knows of some sort of world building software. I'm not talking about maps I don't think that is so important. What I'm after is something that allows my to write information on everything about my cities regions and countries. A history of the places but even more so data on their economy and dollar value as well as population, royal houses all the little things that make the world tick.

It is more and exercise for myself than anything and I am aware that perhaps Noone else will ever see it.

Thanks in advance,
Zach

 

[Asura Levi]

Hum, It sounds quite like Wiki (wiki templates). But I could have misunderstood what you need.

 

[Mindfire]

I created a thread with a link to download a custom tool I made for just this purpose. (It's a glorified spreadsheet but try it, it works!) Here's my quoted post:

Hey guys! Just thought I'd share this custom excel spreadsheet I use to help keep track of my worldbuilding. It's got different pages for characters, races and cultures, gods, and more. Simple and easy to use if you have even the bare minimum of excel skill.

Here's a link to download through Google. You can preview the file before downloading it, but for some reason the preview looks way different than the actual file. If you don't want to download, just make a Google account and edit it online. Hope someone finds this helpful.

 

[Devor]

I like Office's OneNote a lot. Each "Notebook" has tabs, and each tab has pages underneath. So you could have a Notebook on Worldbuilding, a Tab for each country, and a page for each place inside the country, if you wanted to.

That's not quite how I use it - I have a Tab for Worldbuilding and like 8 pages, one for each of the big topics and two or three for specific regions.

Zoho's free online suit has a similar program. A lot of people recommend Scrivener, which gives each page an index-card summary that you move around for the visual, which can help with plotting. I used mindmapping software at an old job, and I think a program like XMind might work really well for some authors, but probably not for the encyclopedia builders.

You've got to figure out what works for you. Really the best tool is whatever you have on hand so you can get writing.

 

[Nameback]

Excel? You could make different tables for different categories of things to keep track of. One table for characters, with columns for things like age, sex, home, birthplace, parents (with links to other character names), friends, colleagues, profession, etc. Another table for locations, with columns for population, ethnicity, language, military power, etc.