As of today, the rough draft of the design sequence for Architect of Worlds is finished. Merry Christmas to me!

I’ve posted a PDF for the third chunk of the design sequence, “Designing Planetary Surface Conditions,” to the Architect of Worlds page on this site. That chunk includes everything from Step 15 (Orbital Period) through Step 27 (Components of Atmosphere) in one document, with a few minor tweaks and corrections from the version that was first posted to this blog.

Together with the earlier sections already available there, this makes up about 37,000 words of carefully researched and somewhat technical world-building tools, available to the public for free for now.

There’s a lot more work to be done before this is a completed book, ready for publication. I intend to write plenty more material:

• How to work with real-world star maps
• How to read and use real-world astronomical data from star catalogs and lists of known exoplanets
• Tips for planning interstellar settings, and placing interstellar societies on the map
• Sidebars for a bunch of special cases (planets that circle pairs of stars, planets of stars that aren’t on the main sequence anymore, planets of brown dwarfs, more exotic things to place on your star maps, odd circumstances that might pop up on planetary surfaces, and so on)
• General world-building advice, including ways to use and make sense of the results of the design sequence

Not to mention going through the whole sequence at least one more time, to double-check all my research, footnote everything, and see if I can make the system easier to use in a few places. Probably with some intensive testing on real-world data to support one or two other projects.

Still. There’s at least a good chance that the first full edition of Architect of Worlds will be available for sale sometime in 2021. Probably later rather than sooner, but we’ll see how it goes.