I thought that too, my friend told me about worldbuilding and I had heard that GRRM had used a binary star system for one of his books and so I thought I would choose a different astronomical phenomena... only to find out it was already a popular idea. It hasn't stopped me learning a tonne about geography and biology though and while originality is always good, narratively, having a built world is nothing compared to writing ability. Your world can be boring as hell but as long you have interesting characters and some meaningful text, people will like it.
I used to do fictional writing a while back, and have always had a keen interest in geology and the study of worlds, so while I may not be writing any more I just wanted to tell you that every single vid of yours I've watched has been a great source of educational entertainment, and it's been making me think more and more about getting back into writing again!
Thanks for explaining that part about the Coriolis effect. My geography teachers never bothered to say why it had the three different cells. They just sort of hand-waves it by saying "Coriolis effect" and didn't say why. I studied geography at A-level, but you managed to teach me something interesting in the first two minutes of this video, that is directly related to my geography syllabus that I somehow managed to go 4 years without learning.
It's also useful to keep track of prevailing winds if your fantasy (or soft sci-fi) world has any unique airborne stuff...or unique landborne stuff that can be turned into dust, for that matter.
And modifying wind patterns for land mass isn't all that much additional work, usually. The first 2 links in the doobly-doo are for Geoff's Climate Cookbook, though a lot of the same processes have already been covered by Edgar here on Artifexian. The Climate Cookbook is more for the accuracy/verisimilitude focused worldbuilder with extra time. Edgar's technique is a lot more practical.
Equally taking note of global-scale disasters like volcanos, celestial impacts or more modern nukes, antimatter or whatever. Could also help model spread of airborne infections if you're doing some viral outbreak.
I discovered your channel years ago when looking up conlanging stuff, but only recently subbed because these worldbuilding videos are absolutely top notch.
BonaparteBardithion since habitable planets will have mostly common gases (carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen,etc) and gas is transparent ... Light will scatter to the blue spectrum hence thats why it would be the most common color. I could be wrong though
I really love these videos. They have inspired me to do so much more worldbuilding. First, I was just making a little island civilisation and I was going to make them a language but now I am going to make a whole world for them and figure out how their weather is and how that will affect their architecture and what types of plants and wildlife they have.
Oh yes, I saw the Catatumbo lightning mention coming when you were talking about Mordor everlasting thunderstorms. It's great to have my country on the spotlight! :D
Nice! Where would you like to go first? I'd suggest Colombia, because it has a very accurate Latin American culture (also it's a lot safer than its Eastern neighbour).
Ratchet4647 I'm pretty sure that if people want to go to a place thinking of the words "Latin America", Colombia may look the most like what they're imagining. I may be thinking stereotypically though (I'm Latin American, however)
You really have good instincts for when and how concepts need visual representation. You explain just enough but not too much. And it's really nice that you reused the world you made before. It really helps tie things together in my brain.
You've posted some great videos on astrophysics, geography, language and a bit of vexillology, but do you think you'll ever do something on biology? Evolution, ecology, something like that? I think it'd be met with positivity by your current fans, but also attract a whole new audience of people. Since some spend a lot of time in their worldbuilding developing things like fauna and flora, I was wondering if you'd post any content on that too.
I just realized my first fictional planet had continents almost entirely in the Temperate Zone, but had an average temperature of only 11 Degrees. Makes me wonder just how cold the north and south cold zones would be, and if the Hot Zones would be considered what we call ‘Room Temperature’.
Yeah - for example, the ITC follows (with a time lag of a few weeks, and distorted in shape by the landscape) the latitude where the sun is in the zenith over the seasons - thus, your planet's axial tilt determines the limits of latitude within which it will move, and thus also the latitudes of the cells associated with it.
No the cells are not effected by axial tilt. Think about it, in the video the number of cells increased the faster the planet rotated irregardless of axial tilt. Axial tilt will determine the locations of the tropics of cancer and capricorn and the artic circles not the cell boundaries. On Earth these happen to be the same but just look at jupiter. Axial tilit plays a role in seasonality not in the latitudanal extent of the cells.
Wow, I need to go and look more into this, it's quite interesting! Also having just watched the Hello Internet podcast on Guns, Germs, and Steel, I heard you say Jared Diamond and just reflexively sighed, so that's a thing too. Great video, I love your worldbuilding series!
A little late to the party but this specific video has saved my life as a writer. Currently working on a world & story heavily featuring sailing and diverse island ecologies, and this is exactly the starting point I needed for setting up the global climate. Awesome stuff.
Quick Question: The world I'm working on has an axial tilt of 60 degrees. So, The tropics and the poles are switched. Would this effect the direction of the cells? Like winds would move upward towards the tropical poles, or would nothing change?
So happy to see Pixie and Azelor's tutorials over on the Cartographers' Guild referenced in the description :D Expanding massively on Bricka's "Creating and Earth-like Planet" (I think that was the title), which is sadly now fairly difficult to find online from what I can remember, they've put so much work into creating something easily accessible to the world-builder and which is easy to follow :)
I would recommend checking out David J Peterson's channel (as well as his book, THE ART OF LANGUAGE INVENTION) he's a professional conlanger and is the creator or Dothraki and High Valyrian both from Game of Thrones, the languages from Defiance, the language in Marvel's Thor; The Dark World, as well as many others.
This is something I really would not have thought about on my own! Turns out one of my character's country would be a really crappy place to live... Really hot, frequent storms, hurricanes, so I might need to tweak that! Other than that, how would the planets rotation angle affect this? If my world's is tilted roughly 10 degrees, how does that work?
tilt affects how seasons work. bigger tilt = bigger daytime/nighttime change between summer/winter. Bigger tilt also means the planet is colder overall, because winters are colder = more snowfall which reflects more sunlight. Summers also get hotter, which means they radiate more heat away. The size of the polar caps may also affect oceanic currents, if one or both of the caps at least partially covers an ocean. Water can transfer much more heat than winds. They follow the same rules as atmospheric circulation, except there may be continents in the way. In combination with the excentricity of orbit it also affects which hemisphere is colder. When planet is closer to the sun it moves faster, so that season will be shorter and vice versa. In case of earth, it is closest to the sun in January, which is why winters are shorter in the northern hemisphere.
Im not an expert, but im making a world that also has a 10 degree tilt so heres my guess. As the tropical belt isnt as large (because of the lower tilt) the very hot area around equator would be smaller and not as hot. This would probably mean milder weather compared to here on earth but tropical storms would still happen. This is also affected by the placement of your oceans and landmasses as storms tend to die out once they hit land. Im guessing the general lower temperatures from the lower axial tilt would result in tamer weather, but it depends on a lot of things that im not qualified to answer with my high school C-level natural geography.
Mathias Hansen Okay, that seems good. I was scared I would have to change large parts of my setting because of something so arbitrary as winds and stuff.
I like that this counts as studying Like that's not even a stretch or exaggeration I have exams in Global Change and Introductory Marine Geology over the course of the next 1-2 weeks and this is important in both of them.
Glad to see that here at Artifexian we follow the Cave Johnson School of Projectile Sciences: "We fire the whole bullet! That's 65% more bullet per bullet!"
Thank you so much for this video and the links in the subscription... thanks to them I finally got some motivation to get back to my current fantasy world after a few months of having none and now with the tutorials I will be able to know so much more about it:) I hope you will give me many more inspiration in the future. Still at the stage of drawing my second detailed wind map. Doing something right really does take a lot of time... but I think it will be worth it. Heck it already is:)
I was waiting for the shoe to drop on Lake Maracaibo as you described your modified Mordor. "That description is starting to sound like that one lake in South Amer- there it is."
The round casing doesn't follow the bullet on its trajectory, Edgar, it gets ejected. It was jarring watching the whole thing travel north after supposedly being fired.
I’m building a fantasy world, called Pentrine, that’s actually just a few continents ringed by massive walls. These concave walls are roughly two miles high, with opaque “curtains” rising off them that reach into the upper atmosphere. No wind can travel over or through these curtains. I’m having difficulty finding reputable sources that discuss such fantastical ideas. Would they create enormously powerful downdrafts or updrafts depending on location and season? Would they be raked with constant storms and tornadoes? I have no idea. But I need to figure out the gist of it by saturday, and it’s fun to think about. Thanks for this video.
Don't mind the historians. Jared Diamond's book, Guns Germs and Steel, has inaccuracies but it's still brilliant. Well done in getting that key point of animals and crops not crossing zones clearly explained.
Another fun fact about tornadoes. They can only really happen in plains like areas. The wind needs an even ground, otherwise there would be too much disturbance and couldn't keep it's shape.
One thing that's worth pointing out here is that the subtropical highland climate can, and does, yield plants well-adapted to temperate climates (despite the subtropical highlands occurring in the tropics themselves). This is why potatoes, a plant that is indeed native to Peru, thrives in e.g. Canada.
just thought of something The stormlands of ASOIAF is bordered to the south by mountains, to the east by the sea, and just north of a desert. It's aptly named
Awesome video it is a very complicated subject but you did a good job pulling out the basics. Only thing I 'd have mentioned explicitly would be the descending cells being dry even if it might be self explanatory for some mostly to be consistent (as you mentioned similar processes for tidally locked worlds.
As I understand it, you can't have just one big Hadley cell in each hemisphere (as shown at 3:04). Surface winds would be easterly all over the world, so there would be a net eastward force on the atmosphere as a whole. Surface drag has to balance between easterly and westerly zones. Slower rotation would tend to eliminate the polar cells, though, and to weaken the global zonal pattern relative to more localized patterns like land/shore circulation and the somewhat analogous patterns around differences in altitude.
Artifexian hahahahah YOU BET they'll draft you so badly, you won't be able to defend yourself anytime soon. next thing you know, you're a full-time flattard explorer (with a Prussian helmet), sent out to check the world's edge, and if the turtle has awakened. "turtle? there is no turtle, this world is carried by a disabled toothless crocodile" yeah, well, worldbuilding...
I have a flat and circular world (a la Discworld) and first you need to figure out how your sun is moving. Is it looping over and under your world? Is the world itself spinning? You'll get different insolation patterns depending. For example: if lopping and spinning, you'll get a circular pattern of insolation like the center of your world is the north pole and the outer rim is the south pole. If looping and stationary you'll get horizontal bands across the world. Or, you could "cheat" and have the sky basically be magical (an illusion or construct) and you can get any kind of variation on a circular pattern you want.
I love coming to your content and referencing it over and over. I do have one question though, I am currently working on a world with an axial tilt of 125 degrees as such my tropics are at 55 N and S, while my polar circles are at 35 N and S (assuming I calculated those correctly). How would I go about plotting winds and such? Would I just apply the same principles discussed in the video but opposite hot/cold zones and backwards winds?
The western coasts at 60° latitude (with an Earth-like rotation rate) tend to get a lot of precipitation, especially if there’s a nearby mountain range to the east. This is why Bergen is so famously rainy.
And much like portal turrets, you shoot the whole bullet, casings, powder and all. More bullet per bullet. That mistake always makes me laugh, loving your videos though!
Awesome worldbuilding video. I've been kinda stuck on one of my maps because I want to know where crops should be able to grow and what types of other plants & animals will naturally be in different regions.
What does it mean for the sun to rise in the west and set in the east? Those are normally understood as relative directions, defined by the planet's rotation: east is the half of the sky where the sun rises, north is to the left of east, and so on. If you've got a sun rising in what you're calling "west" you can just flip your map around and have things match the usual convention.
I use OneNote to write these things down as a personal reference book. You could do something like that. :D I also find it easier to understand what's being said that way.
Edgar, love your videos and the content is very helpful. Do you have references for the paper or website where you found the cell latitudes for different rotation speeds?
Late question regarding precipitation: We know that, on planets with 3 cells per hemisphere, including Earth, the latitudes where air pressure is high due to cooler winds (such as the Subtropical Ridges located between the Hadley and Ferrel Cells) tend to be pretty dry (with the Sahara Desert being one famous example) compared to the latitudes where air pressure is low due to warmer winds (such as on the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the Amazon Rainforest is located), and that much of this is due to the Coriolis Effect, right? Would a slower rotation speed make the Coriolis Effect seem weaker, causing (in addition to there being fewer cells per hemisphere) the differences in prcipitation levels for wetter and drier latitudes to be less pronounced (with only the amount of sunlight primarily affecting precipitation levels)?
More stuff I've been loathe to work out. Well, now I must figure out how this will work with a torodial world. Offhand guess: The rimward side would operate much as any spherical world, except for the polar region. The polar rings would operate similarly to the tidally-locked world. Figuring out the hubward side is where my mind breaks.
"The U.S. is a great example" D: *cries in harvey and ike* the rain and storm patterns of southeastern Texas have been likened to monsoon like conditions. R.I.P. I guess storms thrive in our bipolar weather.
Britain had a very large empire in the tropics, but the places that were settled in a big way i.e. The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and South Africa are all wholly or partly in the temperate zones, and Australia and Canada have their populations concentrated in their most temperate parts. Even in India, New Delhi is in the far North of the country and the British enclave at Shimla was right up in the Himalayan foothills.
I would really like to see a deep analysis on the one piece world using those principles to find out, for example, how long is the day there and other parameters that could interfere with the super crazy weather over the grand line and the new world.
AGHHH IM EARLY!!!! do you think youll do a video on conlanging based on biology? as in how a language would be affected by a species biology? also: the youtube channel factidraw copied your intro just so you know
