Placing Geographical Zones Part I

We now have a fully developed world! Or, well, at least the start of one. The major geographical features are in place at the very least. These are imperative to do before you start placing too many plants, animals, and societies because geography has a huge effect on what develops within its arms. If your work in progress requires a lot of attention to the world’s flora, fauna, and people from its far past to now, you may want to go back to each stage of the planet’s development and apply the full regime of world-development tools as early as you need to.

Since I don’t want to skimp too much on details I’ll post this article in multiple parts.

The Sands of Time

First let’s take a look at the types of areas we have in our world. When we last saw this project planet of ours, we’d taken the time to figure out the major points of geography that formed as the crust plates pulled and pushed their way around. Now it’s time to refine that view into something that resembles zones that we can later use to place specific plant life.

Now, the first thing to notice here is that none of these continents is particularly large when you compare our planet to the Earth.

That’s because there is 30% more water on this planet than on Earth. You would think it would take some careful rationalization to have any desert land in our world, then. However, that’s not necessarily true. Take a look at an atlas sometime at the Earth. There are deserts in all sorts of unexpected places if you just assume that desert can only exist far from water. There’s desert land in Texas, which borders the Gulf of Mexico. There’s desert in north Africa going right up to the coastline, and even the tiny continent of Australia has large swaths desert.

The factors involved in creating desert land are wide and varied, and as many things about our planet are, not entirely understood. Sometimes the problem is man-made, where farmers do not properly rotate crops to keep the soil from losing nutrients, or whole-scale foresting rids the landscape of too much plant life. At other times there’s nothing anyone could do about it, and maybe people weren’t even there. In the case of our planet, I am going to put a desert at the tip of one of the continents. You can see it in the image in the next section as a (hopefully) tan stretch of land.

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