At what point do you stop refining a world and accept it as "good enough"?
I've been working on a setting for my D&D campaigns, though I'd also like to keep the option open for other projects in the future—fiction, video games, who knows.
Like many people here, I enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake. I can spend hours working on cultures, languages, ecosystems, and fictional species. Then I discovered Worldbuilding Pasta, Artifexian, and eventually climate simulation tools.
That led me down a rabbit hole.
I spent weeks refining continents, mountain ranges, winds, ocean currents, and climate zones. The more I learned, the more inaccuracies I found in my earlier work.
Recently I started comparing some of my maps against climate simulation tools and noticed that several regions don't behave the way I originally expected. Areas I assumed would become deserts might actually have a fairly mild Mediterranean climate.
And that made me realize something:
Every improvement reveals ten new things that could be improved.
At some point I stopped asking "Is this world believable?" and started asking "Will this ever be finished?"
For those of you who build worlds for games, campaigns, stories, or other creative projects:
- How do you decide that a part of your world is detailed enough?
- What do you absolutely want to figure out before players or readers experience the world?
- What are you comfortable leaving vague until later?
- And how do you feel about retcons?
For example, would you be comfortable changing something major like regional climate, geography, history, or culture after people have already interacted with that part of the world?
Where do you personally draw the line between improving a world and endlessly refining it?
PS Here are some maps from my project.