Does anyone know of any good free world building organizers? I already know about Notebook.ai and WorldAnvil but both of those require me to pay for the features I actually need. (Notebook.ai requires monthly payments to add planets; WorldAnvil requires monthly payments to make your worlds private). Currently I use Google Docs and different folders but it just gets tedious and I still wind up losing stuff. I was using Legends and Worlds but it was continuously giving me "Bad Gateway" and glitching to the point where it was unusable. I'd love something that did timelines too (L&W does this +the world building, when it works...) however I'd be happy if there was something that would help me just sort through the worlds and races and characters and bring them all together a little more conclusively. Is there anything else out there? I wish I had the funds to pay for Notebook.ai or Scrivener or the like but alas I'm barely making bills as is. :/
Pen, paper, notepads and index cards are pretty much all I use. Having folders full notes is nice so I can just pull out stacks of loose leaf and splay them all around me when I'm working.
This is exactly what I'm attempting to avoid. My ideas come to me in waves at random and often inconvenient times. So my notes never get put away like they're supposed to so I had to start taking pictures of them with my phone, uploading them Gdrive and then transcribing them later but even then they still don't get properly put away they wind up in one document even when they have nothing to do with each other and then I might put them into place later, or they might be lost in the void and I just can't find them anywhere. My drive is a horrible mess and I know once I get it "sorted" I will still have to click my way through a billion of files within files that store my individual notes. I really liked the Notebook.ai principle because it forced you to keep all the notes for one thing in that one place and it even asked world-building questions about each place, race, etc to keep you building. I just wish they would allow planets in the free service because that's the majority of what mine is, between that and space stations. I just can't even afford the $9 a month right now and I'm worried I may never finish my graphic novel, I'm trying to stay positive, but i'm worried about investing money in it and not being able to finish it or it take a lot longer to finish than I intend and then I've spent that money for nothing. It's hard because of how sporadic my ideas come. Yes I can put them together and write out scripts but I'll be sitting at work bored out of my mind and then all the sudden in pops several ideas for alien races, planet designs, story arcs, plot twists, etc and we're not allowed to have our phones out at work so I wind up with notepad upon notepad filled with ideas and sketches and they get pics taken and then wind up in a mass general folder. I'm not an organized person. xD I need to get there, but alas I just want something that will entice me a little bit more to be more organized.
OneNote is free, and it's Microsoft's finest effort. If you haven't seen it, give it a look. It's very addictive for all sorts of information. You open a notebook, which has sections, which in turn have pages. Sections can be in section groups, and section groups can contain further section groups. I wish it supported tagging, but you can add flags to your text in a page. That's sort of like a tag. Pages in a section have a hierarchy, if you want, but only three levels. Other than that, it's nigh-on perfect. It might do what you need. Even if not, it's a good tool to have in one's arsenal, and it's a freebie.
Scrivener is also a possible option. Yes, it's for writing, but it has so many tools that it can be turned to a lot of uses. For example, I have a Scrivener project that I use to organize my gardening plans and my garden log.
I've heard of people using OneNote or Evernote and liking it a lot, I was just curious if there was anything else out there for World Building specifically. I decided to try World Anvil because it had the cheapest option at $3 a month to make my own private worlds. I just wish Notebook.ai would come down on their price as $9 is an entire meal for me right now, I can stop getting expensive energy drinks and drink water to save the $3 cause it's something I don't really need but $9 is just at the edge of steep for me... I'm trying to get a better paying job, so we'll see. Thanks for your recommendations everyone!
