how 2 write gud :)

AUTHOR'S NOTE: for the world building chapters, they will be posted in the order that I believe one should world build. you don't by any means have to follow this order, but it's there if you do

I realize this probably isn't gonna be the best hook or most interesting chapter because it's gonna be filled with science. (for future readers that will have access to more chapters, you can skip ahead if you don't want to read this) Boring as it might seem to some people, it is important to base some fiction on things that are familiar so that the readers have a better understanding (I'll go deeper into that whenever the 'write what you know/writing realism' chapter happens). All that aside, let's discuss how to build the landscape of your fictional world!

—BIOMES—

Weather your world is on earth but with magic, orbiting the vast reaches of space, or placed in a completely different dimension, the biomes usually tend to stay the same. Now, keep in mind, this is not a bad thing! Again, it helps your readers to latch on to something familiar in this new world, and they will be better able to explore it along with the hero. If you do want to ad an element of uniqueness to your world, I would suggest keeping the traditional biomes, but add a special tweak that sets them apart and makes them seem a bit more magical. For example, you could have a kingdom where half of the land consists of floating islands, a planet who's surface is covered entirely in water and the inhabitants are aquatic, or massive deciduous forests with fuchsia colored leaves that glow at night. As a more specific example, look at the movie Avatar (the one with the blue cat people, not the last airbender). Pandora has all kinds of fantastical elements that aren't found on earth, but the biomes are still the same. they have rain forests, but half the plants glow and some of the trees can store ancestral memories. They have mountains, cliffs and natural stone arches, but half of those mountains and cliffs float. They have savannas, but the grass is pinkish-red and the trees are massive. same environments, different quirks.

So, with that in mind, lets get into detail about the different biomes you can choose from. There are six main kinds of biomes; desert, grassland, aquatic, tundra, cave, and forest.

—Desert—

There are arid deserts that are hot and dry year round, these are the kind of deserts that are mostly sand or rocky with the typical desert foliage like cacti and tumbleweeds. Then there are semi-arid deserts that are hot during the summer, but will cool down and even rain a little bit during the winter. these will also have the typical desert foliage, but it will be more sparse and will give way to more open plains with sagebrush. Next are coastal deserts, which, as there name suggests are on coastlines, but still receive hardly any rain and are more akin to foggy weather than anything else. They are mostly sandy and rocky, and most of the foliage is cacti. Finally, there are cold deserts, which have sandy or rocky terrain and little foliage other than sage brush ( or in the case of Antarctica is mostly snow and ice), the only difference is that the temperatures are frigidly cold, causing these deserts to receive a lot of snow.

—Grassland—

There are two kinds of grassland biomes; tropical and temperate. Tropical grasslands are like the ones you would find in Africa, where there is a variety of plant life and small patches of forest. On the opposite end of the scale are temperate grasslands like you would find in the American Midwest, where it's mostly grasses and a whole lot of nothing else for miles in every direction. Tropical grasslands are also a lot hotter in temperature than temperate grasslands are.

—Aquatic—

There are also only two kinds of aquatic biomes; marine and freshwater. Freshwater biomes consist of inland lakes and rivers, and are a lot smaller than marine biomes. If one of your fictional species lives in a lake, then it would have to be a large one, and the terrain containing the water would slope down to the bottom in a bowl shape. This isn't to say that lakes don't have underwater cliffs or precipices, because some do, but a bowl is just the typical lake shape.