Your first advice really is the most valuable in my opinion. I often tend to lose myself in "feature creep" because i start thinking way too big right away.
This is a detail that makes Tolkien stand out from fantasy writers in general. He did not immediately start off with the high-stakes quest to destroy the Ring of Power and prevent the global domination of Sauron, rather he started with details about the hobbits and Hobbiton. From "The Hobbit" to "Return of the King," the "Lord of the Rings" series progresses from details that are easy to understand, as though reading a children's book, to much more complicated details about Middle-Earth.
I started with a star and a planet to go around it. I made the planet bigger and more massive than Earth too so i had a bigger map to play with. And *then* I started focusing on one region of one continent. 😂😅
Well, I made the bulk of my world just one big supercontinent. Is that cheating? I mean, I did eventually get into diversifying the terrains, then ecosystems, and finally who lives in them, so...did I still cheat? And lately, I have been writing chapters of a story where the MC is trying to learn everything they can about this world that is new to them - and I continue to try (and mostly fail) at making them more than just info dumps. It does not help that the world goes through major technological advancement that leads to several massive cultural shifts, effectively forcing me to do this all over again I guess this self-inflicted repeating marks me as being at least a little insane, but hey, as one of my very first creative writing lessons, if you feel like you have gone or are going insane from creating, you break out the secret wee-a-pawn. And what is this "secret wee-a-pawn"? *_YOU CHEAT!!!_* (Had to ring in the new year somehow)
