New in Notebook.ai: Planets, Deities, Technology, Governments, and more

Hello! Andrew from Notebook.ai here with a long list of exciting new worldbuilding features to share. So let’s just jump right into it!

As of today, there are four new types of pages you can add to your worlds:

Planets are, by far, the most-requested page type to add to Notebook.ai. For those of you with stories spanning multiple worlds, you can now detail out each world in your universe with the new Planet page.

Besides planets, technologies have been our second-most requested page type, and now worldbuilders across all genres (but especially you, sci-fi friends!) can now create and outline technologies, who has access to them, how they are used, and much more.

Of course, what use would being able to create awesome technologies without creating evil governments hell-bent on misusing them? Any stories from dystopian sci-fis to utopian fantasies to modern alt-histories (and everything in-between!) now have access to create governments, define their structure and members, and more.

Lastly, we’ve also just released a planning page for deities to complement the existing religion page. You can create gods, goddesses, and more, defining their strengths, weaknesses, powers, influence, family, and other qualities.

I’ve also been hard at work for the past month or two adding many, many other new features and improvements under the hood, but you may have already noticed a few of the more obvious ones that are new, but went out a few weeks ago: three new page types for Countries, Towns, and Landmarks.

We’ve heard loud and clear that the generic location page doesn’t quite fit one-size-fits-all like we’d hoped. While it works for a few locations of various types, we wanted to give our advanced worldbuilders more tools to create the wonderful places in their world. Countries and towns (below) are a first step towards creating a hierarchy of locations, and pair extremely well with the new planet page as well.

After you’ve added the countries of your world, you’re probably going to want to drill down into the towns (or — of course — you can also use this for cities) in your world, too. Towns give a specialized page for listing citizens, public officials, and a few other fields. And, of course, you can always add your own too!

Finally, we’ve also added landmarks, which work extremely well for the natural structures of your world like mountains, rivers, ruins, and more.

In addition to all of the new page types, you’ll also notice that some of your existing pages now have extra fields for you to fill out or links you can add (for example, you can now link your magic pages to items to give them effects). Each of these new fields also have writing prompts associated with them, which will appear on your dashboard (or your personal writing prompt page), and each of the new pages above also have writing prompts for each and every one of their fields.

There are also several new quality-of-life changes. You’ll notice that viewing your pages now more reliably show you cards about your other pages that mention the one you’re looking at. You’ll also notice that the dropdowns to link to other pages now filter the options to pages in the same universe (so, Frodo’s character linking dropdowns will include Bilbo and Sam, but not Harry or Hermione). You can now link towns in characters and locations (for example, a character’s hometown) instead of just location pages.

The site is also now loading blazing-fast, up to 300% faster than it was last month. We had some scaling issues, and we conquered them. And yes, that is a challenge: invite your friends! :)

You’ll also notice some cool smarts from time to time as the notebook helps build relations for you. For example, indicating that one planet is near another will automatically mark the other planet as near the first one (reciprocating the relationship so you don’t have to create it on both pages). You’ll also find various ways to link technologies together that’ll automatically create the reverse relation.

And last, but certainly not least, you can now choose which page types are active for your notebook. If you want to use countries but not planets, that’s cool. If you want to use creatures but not governments, that’s cool too. Just click “Customize pages” in your sidebar and you’re given the option to turn each type of page on or off — customizing your notebook to your world, rather than customizing your world to your notebook.

So what’s next?

So much. But here’s a few larger projects I want to tackle sooner rather than later:

• A rewrite of custom fields. We’re all enjoying being able to add custom categories and fields to pages right now, but there’s a ton of room for improvement. Being able to edit fields, reorder them, add them to existing categories, and being able to create links to other pages are some of the big wins I want to include here — soon.
• Design and usability improvements. I’m certainly no designer, but I’m pretty proud of some of the design work I’ve done so far. However, there are many places I’d love to improve, especially on mobile devices. Improving the design offers new opportunities to peer into your own world from new angles, and I’m very excited for what’s coming in this area.
• Forums improvements. The forums have been a massive success in bringing together worldbuilders from all over the world and from every genre under the sun (and, well, thousands of alien suns in thousands of other universes!). You can expect additional forums being added, maybe some contests (with fun prizes?), and a more streamlined design with the rest of the site (as well as some improvements to help you keep up to date on what’s unread, instead of having to dig through to find that last unread thread).

Of course, we’re still in the very beginning of what is capable with Notebook.ai. The site is holding up well with over a hundred thousand users across the globe now, and I hope to soon leverage our diversity towards continuing to design the best worldbuilding software out there.

It’s an exciting road forward, and I can’t wait to see where we go from here. We’re all creatives: I’m sure some of you have a million ideas of where you’d like to see Notebook.ai head and what you’d like to do with it.

And I’d love to hear all of it. :)

Thanks for sticking with me through the past year and, as always,

Happy worldbuilding!

Andrew

What is Indent Labs?

Indent Labs is, at its core, a collection of ambitious open-source natural language processing projects aimed squarely at moonshots in the field of writing. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could generate quality stories from outlines, or automatically outline a story? What about generating a story as you make decisions on behalf of a character?

The first word processor showed up in the 60’s and revolutionized writing through technology. Isn’t it time for another shift forward?