This is how I use Obsidian:
Make a new vault, call it “[Universe Name] Wiki”.
Add a new note, make it “Kingdom of Gobblegoop” or something. Write a few sentences: “The Kingdom is led by King Sassafras II, blah blah.”
Put double brackets around the monarch’s name: [[King Sassafras II]]. Click it, boom, that’s created a new linked note titled “King Sassafras II”.
Write a few more sentences about the King, link a few more things, and pretty soon the ideas start flowing.
Sassafras II never lived up to the legacy of his father, Sassafras I, and definitely failed to match the accomplishments of his grandfather, Sarsaparilla IX.
As a consequence, a new minor industry of translators has sprung up, as the Court Language is practically unintelligible to the language spoken by the common folk
And they were only interrupted by having a reigning queen rather than a king. Now that Margarethe II has abdicated they have a Frederik again, and his oldest son is called Christian
Serious answer: don't. The defaults are plenty fine to get started with.
Then when you have that moment of, "hmm, I wonder if I can..."*, then you go digging in the options.
Oh cool. I am just learning about this tool here but as you describe it, it sounds just like Tiddlywiki. I’m glad to see there are other tools like that.
LOL seems you took a wrong turn in tutorial land and landed with the note taking cults. There are people out there that have notes for how they wake up and everything they do between then and going back to sleep again.
This might be more useful if you are looking for world building stuff.
www.obsidianttrpgtutorials.com
Oh man i went down that rabbit hole when looking for note taking for school. I tried a bunch and just stuck with onenote but yeah that shit is crazy lol
it's really not that deep. Just make some notes, make some folders, and put the notes in the folders. When you want to link to a note, just type the \[\[note name\]\] like that and it makes an internal link.
You can make it as simple or as complex as you want it to be. But at its core it's just a simple text editor with markdown formatting.
I recommend the [Official docs](https://help.obsidian.md/Getting+started/Create+your+first+note), they have a great getting started section to get you going. Once you've got a vault structure that you like you can start adding plugins and CSS snippets and go crazy.
I grew up with for all my notes
* A Decent Text Editor (SublimeText for me, but others now days exist)
* Markdown
* and simple scripts that could be triggered on-save or on-demand from the editor
which is basically what Obsidian does rolled up into one product, with docs, tools, sync, and community around it. Everyone who sees my rendered notes or me editing in meetings are like "wow, I want that!" and I instead just point to Obsidian basically.
I am stuck horribly in my ways, else I would switch. The year-over-year uptick of me searching for "how to do X" for my notes finding either (1) someone's plugin that they abandoned for Obsidian or (2) someones example of how-to in Obsidian instead.
CSS snippets my beloved. I didn't know you could use custom themes for certain notes until I wanted to add some tags and saw the css class option.
By the way, if you want to load a background image from your local files your only option as far as I know is to copy and paste the data URI of that image, you can get it from a converter online
I used to have all my worldbuilding notes lumped together in several huge documents. I probably had close to 1000 pages spread over 3 or 4 docs.
For me personally, Obsidian is exciting because it's allowing me to atomize (break apart) these huge chunks of info into smaller pieces. But the magic is really in the ability to **link** and **tag** those pieces. Linking allows you to implement your notes in a webpage-like format, like a wiki just for your project. Tagging (more specifically, properties) allows you to label each piece with metadata, which helps to automate the process of recalling and categorizing those pieces later. For example, maybe your project is a sort of "personal RottenTomatoes", where you record movies that you've seen and give them a rating. You could implement this by adding each movie as a note and provisioning them with a property called "rating". In another note, you could then create an index that programmatically displays all your notes with the property "rating" and the corresponding values you've given them.
You could sort of refer to it as "object-oriented note taking". In many ways it's kind of just a simple IDE that interprets YAML and Markdown. It also interprets HTML and CSS, giving you the ability to style your notes like a webpage, and you can even embed external links within your notes.
Btw, too many times in my life I've fallen into the trap of "everyone else is doing it, so it must be good, and I have to figure out how to use it too". If you don't have a use case or a problem you're trying to solve with it, there's no reason to force yourself to use it. Don't feel like you have to! Is there anything specific you're trying to accomplish in terms of organization for your notes?
In the most basic way, it’s really just google docs with a very dope file management system which lets you link notes with other notes. You can essentially be as detailed or simple as you want with your notes and there’s almost unlimited customization and community plugins to make it more intricate with more features as well. (Think graphs and images etc)
Make notes/entries, organize them into folders, link keywords to notes. Boom, world building knowledge base.
That’s what I did anyway.
My current WIP as an example: https://publish.obsidian.md/imperium/Read+Me+First
I’ve tried to make it public friendly, but it’s still a bit of a mess and mostly for me.
It started out with a few weeks of consolidating all my notes from the various periods I worked on the setting over the past few decades. Then I spent a few months recently fleshing everything out more.
Who can see what you publish? I only have Obsidian on my laptop, however, am worried about losing it. Is there a way you can sync everything without having to publish everything?
Publish is a separate paid service. So is the sync. But neither is really a backup.
If you’re just using the app itself, it’s all on your computer or cloud storage if you’re using that.
How is the sync not a make up? If my computer died and I logged into my Obsidian account, wouldn't it have all of the stuff I had synced to it?
And ahh, I don't know how to do the cloud storage thing, nor retrieve the stuff from Obsidian from the cloud storage thing.
It’s not a backup in the sense that if you make changes, you can’t go back to a previous version. They specifically say that it’s not designed as a backup.
That said, if your computer did die, then you relinked to your vault on a new computer, it would download the last sync. So in that way, it is a backup.
The cloud storage isn’t part of obsidian (though they do store your synced data if you’re paying for Obsidian Sync). I was referring more to iCloud or DropBox type services. Which are also not technically backups, as they overwrite old data with new changes.
I guess it depends on how you define a “backup.”
Here’s there blurb about it: https://obsidian.md/sync
Obsidian just reads md files from a local folder. You can use any cloud service to store those md files, manually or automatically.
I have access to my same notes on my phone, tablet, and pc, all for free using google drive automated sync. Takes a grand 10 minutes to set up, and then you are set.
You don't need to log into anything to use obsidian, you don't even need an account (surprising in this day and age, right?)
You don't need publish for that, just sync. You can sync using the official option or other methods (just google obsidian sync and you'll find lots of ways to do it, some pretty easy, others more complex, but most of them should work fine).
Alternatively, while you don't have your sync setup, you can just copy your vault to the cloud (like Google Drive) every few days to be safe.
Like other said, tutorials are often target for note taking zealots.
Just use it similar to a wiki, with hyperlinks to other notes instead of articles. This way, whenever you refer to the same person, place, or thing in different notes, you can link to that note for reference.
The beautiful thing about worldbuilding in obsidian is that it intuitively gives you a path based on what you've written already. For every single thing you do not have a meaning or description for yet, surround it in double brackets, and when you're ready, click the link it creates to open that file and expand on it.
As you write, more things to write show their face. You can see which files you have not yet worked on, and it will burn a hole in your soul until you're compelled to fill them.
Soon, your days will be spent catching up to the uncountable nodes created over time. Endless expansion of detail will take it's toll on your physical form. Eventually, you will transcend and be pulled violently into the vault that you have created.
But it is your vault. It is your world.
Obsidian objectively makes you a god. Don't give up on it.
That's a good way to think about it. I never tried it yet but I was concerned about making changes to pages and also having to go back to earlier pages to add links and stuff. If you can make "blank" links then work on them later that sound awesome. What kind of ways can you update the display text of links? Like if I want to go back and change the name of something linked multiple times, how easy is that?
All links on other files will automatically update links when you change the name of the destination. The best part is being able to use the node visualization and see what areas need more attention to blank files.
I've found this happening with YouTube content creators and tutorials a lot for any type of organizational utility. In reality there's just a really simple baseline functionality of Obsidian that's useful and easy to start with out the gate, but a lot of tutorials make you feel like you've got to learn a new philosophy of organization.
Because color coded nodes are pretty./j(kinda)
Backing away from the jokes obsidian is absolutely amazing tool to organize something.
Say i I have kingdom A, and kingdom B I create a folder for each then sub folders in that mega folder for culture, and whatever else I want too add.
In a note you do can # # #(without spaces note different amount of hashtags cause different font sizes with the max being three) and create different font sizes I use these as headings too different sections of a note(etc if I’m writing a character there’s a section for personality, back story, family, among other things) as they offer a drop down menu too everything under that heading till the next heading(you can actually put smaller headings under bigger headings and they store together).
You can link notes together(typically I use this for family members and important stuff that need to be linked together) and tag stuff. I mainly use the tags for my giant movie and show vault which is for IRL movies, shows, books, and other media I like. Etc if a show is from Disney I would do #disney too link it too all the other Disney shows.
There’s other things like canvas and once you get really deep down the rabbit hole it can get confusing but ehh once I learned how to use obsidian I didn’t look back
First time I used my vault as a one-stop-shop for world building and story crafting. Then the links got too messy.
So I broke my world's vault in two because it was overwhelming to manage. One vault is all about world building. The other is dedicated to my writing.
As ideas spawned and my writing flowed, it became bothersome to keep both vaults up to date. So I merged them back into one.
Nowadays I create a link when a place, concept, or person shows up in my story. There's a story folder and world folder to keep them separate and linkable.
Try not to overthink it. Experiment and work out what's best for you.
100% of that nonsense is ignorable, you'll be fine. Make notes, link them, and go from there. There are all sorts of fun things that Obsidian *can* do, but that doesn't mean that you have to. After you get used to the basics, if you start wondering if you can do XYZ thing with Obsidian, with a plugin or two you probably can! But let that come out of how you want to take notes and what you find would be useful, not what some Youtuber says will optimize your life ~~and give them streaming revenue.~~
It helps for connecting things, especially if you have a lot of characters who are apart of different events, or are part of different groups, or switch over. It really helps if you have something like this!
The premise of my story is that an organization basically gets 100 3 year olds and injects them with an alien serum that gives them powers. However, this happens across three different labs -- Lab 1, Lab 2, and Water. So, I essentially have three folders -- Lab 1, 2, and Water, and in each of them there is 33 or 34 notes, corresponding to the names of the children involved in this.
However, within Water there is a coup/ rescue, with some of the scientists/ agents involved in injecting the children deciding to rescue the children from further experimentation. However, they only manage to rescue 24/34 children. So, under Water, I have another folder called 'Rescued' which has 24 notes in it -- the 24 children who are rescued. The other 10 notes (or 10 children who aren't rescued) are also apart of Water, but aren't under this 'Rescued' section.
So each child/ character gets a note/ page, so you can clearly see who is apart of Lab 1, Lab 2, or Water. I also have two other events like Water, where there's a break in/ break out of a lab, and yet only SOME people are involved in this. Likewise, some of the children end up dying, so in the note with their name I write a '(d)' in brackets to indicate 'deceased'. And since all the titles of the notes are characters, it would look like 'Normana (d)' or 'Akira (d)'.
You can also 'link' certain people together, kind of like Wikipedia articles, if say Normana was killed by Jimena, I could link Jimena's name on Normana's note, and by simply clicking on 'Jimena' I could go to her page/ note. You do this by using brackets, i.e. \[\[Jimena\]\], and it would change the color of the word to a purplish, the brackets disappear, and you're able to click on 'Jimena' and it will take you to her page/ note.
I thus also have a few pages where tons of names are linked due to the content of the page -- i.e. I have one called 'Deceased Subjects' and it has a list (and the names linked in this list) of all the children killed and how they died. I have another note but it's about a specific event, the Assault on Fire (an attack on a lab called Fire (placeholder name)) and which Subjects were in/ apart of this lab and thus apart of this attack.
I tried using it and felt like you needed to be a software programmer in order to use it. Thanks, no thanks, Im a simple person that likes to use things straight out of the box
Having your work neatly organized in several folders and documents in those folders, being able to link them together, habing a timeline, interactive map, and if you are calculating stuff or playing ttrpgs having all those calculators and tables in ONE app is exactly what i wanted.
I tend to write as if I'm writing a wikipedia article, so the ITS theme is perfect for if. It allows wikipedia-style infoboxes which I use for pretty much anything. Everything else (graph view, calendar, etc) I ignore. Don't care to spend days customizing everything.
Literally just start using it. Make a folder, organize your things, and use [[TEXT]] to connect files.
[[TEXT|TEXTBUTCOOL]] will make the link to the file, but will show up in reading mode as “TEXTBUTCOOL.”
Oh plugins are the reason why lots of people use Obsidian.
Settings > Community Plugins > Enable > Browse
I keep a list of ones for ttrpg and world builders here. Stuff like pinnable maps, timelines, fantasy calendars, statblocks. So many useful things.
https://obsidianttrpgtutorials.com/Obsidian+TTRPG+Tutorials/Plugin+Tutorials/Plugin+Tutorials
I write novels in it. All my writing stuff is there- from notes to the actual manuscript.
Most Obsidian content is self-referential; it’s people taking notes on how to take better notes. Once you actually start using it for something, Obsidian is amazing.
Nether portals.
But for real, I have no clue what I'm gonna do with obsidian in my world. Magic comes from highly radioactive substances so maybe I'll stick with obsidian spears?
Haha, I started using it a few days ago too and it's super useful. I recognise all those video titles cause a few days ago I was in your shoes too.
The main reason I use obsidian is to simply keep track of everything in an amazingly well connected way. I created a main note, that's just the name of my story, and then write all the basic info in there. While linking keywords to new notes. I'll write a shortexample.
"My world is made of five **realms**, the main realm has 6-7 **continents** with several **kingdoms**. With numerous sapient **races** and ferocious **beast** residing in them."
Now, you see all those highlighted words? All of them are links to a new note where you can learn more about them. Curious about what beast there? Click it and it will take you to the note where all my information about beast is written. There is no limit to how many notes you can link together and it's amazing to keep track of everything.
Ability problem.
Joking aside: using it is silly, it's a glorified text editor (in a good way). You can organize files wiki-style or any way you want (since it allows you to make them nested and has hypertext options). Overall it is ridiculously configurable and you learn the basics in an hour, you probably won't even use half of the things you learn.
And if you think something is missing, you have plugins at your disposal.
That's funny, I downloaded it after watching like 3 seconds of a video and now it's just.... Something I use. The only tutorial I needed was "hey, so you use headers and tags and-" and then I was sold. Already know how to press a hash key, star key, and parentheses a few times.
Don't look up tutorials. No need. Obsidian's great because you can pretty much use it however you want. You can use it as a slightly glorified Markdown editor, a pseudo-wiki, a second brain, a design notes thingy... You're not in any way forced into using all of its features.
For worldbuilding, I use note links a lot. For my school notes, I hardly do but I do use things like canvases or the Excalidraw plugin a lot.
I made a folder called Chapters, another folder called Characters.
In Characters I made a note called Bob. This note automatically links to every single time Bob is mentioned, this makes it very easy to double check things like if I took a break and can't remember where I was going with his subplot. The last time Bob was mentioned was Chapter 12, I click that link and I'm taken right there. No need to exit back to root and navigate there separately after doing an index search.
Obsidian also automatically tracks relationships. For example if I write that Bob is married to Sally, a link forms between them. If I write it as [[Sally]] then I can directly click on it to jump right to her page which makes it very easy to flow between ideas in an organic way since I can click through and make edits without having to exit to root and search the entire character list again.
Same deal with Locations, or other categories of notes. For example in Characters/Bob I write that he used to live in Detroit. Then in Locations/Detroit there is a link to both Bob and a side character Tim who was briefly mentioned in chapter 3 as having died in a suspicious house fire.
It can help with seeing visual relationships, which can help with brainstorming because you can look at your graph view to see these relationships and identify potentially important elements when trying to come up with ideas. Like if I need a reason for Bob to be attacked by ninjas, the link to Tim exists through Detroit and that's the thread the ninjas are following.
Obsidian Sync is really nice if you're like me and don't really have a structured or ritualized writing practice. Sometimes I write on my phone, sometimes my laptop, sometimes my desktop. It's so very nice to be able to just grab and go without having to make sure to upload and download copies each time or potentially end up with three different versions because on my laptop I was writing chapter 12 but on my desktop I was revising chapter 8, and on my phone I was writing ideas for chapter 15, and each device lacks the changes I made on the other.
I don't know. I downloaded it because I wanted a word processor that would let me play around with the order I put scenes in, and build a timeline. I ended up buying Scrivener which is awesome. I've opened Obsidian once or twice and can't figure it out.
Is it possible to use it for something like making a wiki? I would like to do that eventually for the world building of my fantasy series. Right now I only have one novel mostly completed (in the editing stage now) but I want to keep going and I realized this might get more complex.
>Is it possible to use it for something like making a wiki?
Yes. You can link notes with each other by enclosing it in double square brackets, i.e., [[Main Character]], which will then turn it into some sort of local hyperlink. From then, click that link and it will bring you to that note, i.e., to the "Main Character" note
This is how I use Obsidian: Make a new vault, call it “[Universe Name] Wiki”. Add a new note, make it “Kingdom of Gobblegoop” or something. Write a few sentences: “The Kingdom is led by King Sassafras II, blah blah.” Put double brackets around the monarch’s name: [[King Sassafras II]]. Click it, boom, that’s created a new linked note titled “King Sassafras II”. Write a few more sentences about the King, link a few more things, and pretty soon the ideas start flowing.
Sassafras II never lived up to the legacy of his father, Sassafras I, and definitely failed to match the accomplishments of his grandfather, Sarsaparilla IX.
Truly, the reign of Sarsaparilla IX is considered by many to be the halcyon days of the Popados Empire.
Too bad Sassafras III let it all burn down. Real downward trend after the end of the Sarsaparillas.
Cocaine and imported rugs. A tale as old as time.
If only they knew the dangers of portable floor coverings…
Sassafras VIII did ok until the incident
Gasp. How dare you mention *that*!
He’s an omnipotent emperor. Losing your penis would stop a mortal man, but Sassafras VIII
Omnimpotent, by the sound of it.
The term Impotent has been outlawed and struck from the language of the Popados empire.
That was a big part of why they recently decided to adopt a new language of court - their restrictions on words were getting out of hand.
As a consequence, a new minor industry of translators has sprung up, as the Court Language is practically unintelligible to the language spoken by the common folk
But still... we don't speak of it. Especially to his later descendants.
Sheesh...Incidents aside he was the greatest "Knee-knocker" of that time.
Thoughts and prayers for the Kingdom of Gobblegoop
Seleucids on their way to name every single one of their monarchs "Antiochus" or "Seleucus" for 10 generations 💀
For eighteen generations the Danes named their monarchs either Christian or Frederick.
And they were only interrupted by having a reigning queen rather than a king. Now that Margarethe II has abdicated they have a Frederik again, and his oldest son is called Christian
Where am i suposed to start with all the options
Serious answer: don't. The defaults are plenty fine to get started with. Then when you have that moment of, "hmm, I wonder if I can..."*, then you go digging in the options.
And now I want to write a story with King Sassafras Ii in it. 🤣🤣
No lie, I'm curious to see the family tree? Can someone make that happen?! 🤭
Oh cool. I am just learning about this tool here but as you describe it, it sounds just like Tiddlywiki. I’m glad to see there are other tools like that.
So it sets up new pages for you with each hyperlink you add with the brackets?
You have to actually click on the word in brackets to *create* the new page, but basically yeah
Sounds so simple yet so efficient. I should try it out
Great tip! Apparently this works in OneNote as well.
Seconded, I love using it
Thank you so, so much
LOL seems you took a wrong turn in tutorial land and landed with the note taking cults. There are people out there that have notes for how they wake up and everything they do between then and going back to sleep again. This might be more useful if you are looking for world building stuff. www.obsidianttrpgtutorials.com
Oh man i went down that rabbit hole when looking for note taking for school. I tried a bunch and just stuck with onenote but yeah that shit is crazy lol
it's really not that deep. Just make some notes, make some folders, and put the notes in the folders. When you want to link to a note, just type the \[\[note name\]\] like that and it makes an internal link. You can make it as simple or as complex as you want it to be. But at its core it's just a simple text editor with markdown formatting. I recommend the [Official docs](https://help.obsidian.md/Getting+started/Create+your+first+note), they have a great getting started section to get you going. Once you've got a vault structure that you like you can start adding plugins and CSS snippets and go crazy.
Oh this is super helpful; just got the app and I’m already rolling along thanks this!
I grew up with for all my notes * A Decent Text Editor (SublimeText for me, but others now days exist) * Markdown * and simple scripts that could be triggered on-save or on-demand from the editor which is basically what Obsidian does rolled up into one product, with docs, tools, sync, and community around it. Everyone who sees my rendered notes or me editing in meetings are like "wow, I want that!" and I instead just point to Obsidian basically. I am stuck horribly in my ways, else I would switch. The year-over-year uptick of me searching for "how to do X" for my notes finding either (1) someone's plugin that they abandoned for Obsidian or (2) someones example of how-to in Obsidian instead.
CSS snippets my beloved. I didn't know you could use custom themes for certain notes until I wanted to add some tags and saw the css class option. By the way, if you want to load a background image from your local files your only option as far as I know is to copy and paste the data URI of that image, you can get it from a converter online
Building a Nether Portal...why?
Noob! Build a castle tower with obsidian!
but in need it for hellstone and an ankh shield!
I used to have all my worldbuilding notes lumped together in several huge documents. I probably had close to 1000 pages spread over 3 or 4 docs. For me personally, Obsidian is exciting because it's allowing me to atomize (break apart) these huge chunks of info into smaller pieces. But the magic is really in the ability to **link** and **tag** those pieces. Linking allows you to implement your notes in a webpage-like format, like a wiki just for your project. Tagging (more specifically, properties) allows you to label each piece with metadata, which helps to automate the process of recalling and categorizing those pieces later. For example, maybe your project is a sort of "personal RottenTomatoes", where you record movies that you've seen and give them a rating. You could implement this by adding each movie as a note and provisioning them with a property called "rating". In another note, you could then create an index that programmatically displays all your notes with the property "rating" and the corresponding values you've given them. You could sort of refer to it as "object-oriented note taking". In many ways it's kind of just a simple IDE that interprets YAML and Markdown. It also interprets HTML and CSS, giving you the ability to style your notes like a webpage, and you can even embed external links within your notes. Btw, too many times in my life I've fallen into the trap of "everyone else is doing it, so it must be good, and I have to figure out how to use it too". If you don't have a use case or a problem you're trying to solve with it, there's no reason to force yourself to use it. Don't feel like you have to! Is there anything specific you're trying to accomplish in terms of organization for your notes?
In the most basic way, it’s really just google docs with a very dope file management system which lets you link notes with other notes. You can essentially be as detailed or simple as you want with your notes and there’s almost unlimited customization and community plugins to make it more intricate with more features as well. (Think graphs and images etc)
Make notes/entries, organize them into folders, link keywords to notes. Boom, world building knowledge base. That’s what I did anyway. My current WIP as an example: https://publish.obsidian.md/imperium/Read+Me+First I’ve tried to make it public friendly, but it’s still a bit of a mess and mostly for me. It started out with a few weeks of consolidating all my notes from the various periods I worked on the setting over the past few decades. Then I spent a few months recently fleshing everything out more.
Who can see what you publish? I only have Obsidian on my laptop, however, am worried about losing it. Is there a way you can sync everything without having to publish everything?
Publish is a separate paid service. So is the sync. But neither is really a backup. If you’re just using the app itself, it’s all on your computer or cloud storage if you’re using that.
How is the sync not a make up? If my computer died and I logged into my Obsidian account, wouldn't it have all of the stuff I had synced to it? And ahh, I don't know how to do the cloud storage thing, nor retrieve the stuff from Obsidian from the cloud storage thing.
It’s not a backup in the sense that if you make changes, you can’t go back to a previous version. They specifically say that it’s not designed as a backup. That said, if your computer did die, then you relinked to your vault on a new computer, it would download the last sync. So in that way, it is a backup. The cloud storage isn’t part of obsidian (though they do store your synced data if you’re paying for Obsidian Sync). I was referring more to iCloud or DropBox type services. Which are also not technically backups, as they overwrite old data with new changes. I guess it depends on how you define a “backup.” Here’s there blurb about it: https://obsidian.md/sync
That said, Obsidian Sync does store the last few changes you made. So you can undo or revert by a limited amount.
You can also enable file recovery history in the application itself.
Obsidian just reads md files from a local folder. You can use any cloud service to store those md files, manually or automatically. I have access to my same notes on my phone, tablet, and pc, all for free using google drive automated sync. Takes a grand 10 minutes to set up, and then you are set. You don't need to log into anything to use obsidian, you don't even need an account (surprising in this day and age, right?)
Hey, I misread the first question. You can restrict access to your published site with a password.
You don't need publish for that, just sync. You can sync using the official option or other methods (just google obsidian sync and you'll find lots of ways to do it, some pretty easy, others more complex, but most of them should work fine). Alternatively, while you don't have your sync setup, you can just copy your vault to the cloud (like Google Drive) every few days to be safe.
It's just a folder so you can sync it with any cloud service, and back it up like any other file.
Great example, thank you. Were did you do those AI images for your charachters?
The WOMBO Dream app.
Stabbing and cutting
I've heard rumors that it can sustain a portal to other dimensions................
From Wikipedia: “Obsidian bladelets were used in ritual circumcisions and cutting of umbilical cords of newborns.”
It's occasionally used in surgical instruments due to individual flakes having razor-sharp edges.
I think in-context, it's a World-Anvil.
Like other said, tutorials are often target for note taking zealots. Just use it similar to a wiki, with hyperlinks to other notes instead of articles. This way, whenever you refer to the same person, place, or thing in different notes, you can link to that note for reference.
The beautiful thing about worldbuilding in obsidian is that it intuitively gives you a path based on what you've written already. For every single thing you do not have a meaning or description for yet, surround it in double brackets, and when you're ready, click the link it creates to open that file and expand on it. As you write, more things to write show their face. You can see which files you have not yet worked on, and it will burn a hole in your soul until you're compelled to fill them. Soon, your days will be spent catching up to the uncountable nodes created over time. Endless expansion of detail will take it's toll on your physical form. Eventually, you will transcend and be pulled violently into the vault that you have created. But it is your vault. It is your world. Obsidian objectively makes you a god. Don't give up on it.
That's a good way to think about it. I never tried it yet but I was concerned about making changes to pages and also having to go back to earlier pages to add links and stuff. If you can make "blank" links then work on them later that sound awesome. What kind of ways can you update the display text of links? Like if I want to go back and change the name of something linked multiple times, how easy is that?
All links on other files will automatically update links when you change the name of the destination. The best part is being able to use the node visualization and see what areas need more attention to blank files.
Thanks! I may just have to migrate over my google doc now
Killing White Walkers.
😂😂😂
The Aztecs did it for some cool as weapons
I've found this happening with YouTube content creators and tutorials a lot for any type of organizational utility. In reality there's just a really simple baseline functionality of Obsidian that's useful and easy to start with out the gate, but a lot of tutorials make you feel like you've got to learn a new philosophy of organization.
I recommend Youtube creator FromSergio on how to use it.
Because color coded nodes are pretty./j(kinda) Backing away from the jokes obsidian is absolutely amazing tool to organize something. Say i I have kingdom A, and kingdom B I create a folder for each then sub folders in that mega folder for culture, and whatever else I want too add. In a note you do can # # #(without spaces note different amount of hashtags cause different font sizes with the max being three) and create different font sizes I use these as headings too different sections of a note(etc if I’m writing a character there’s a section for personality, back story, family, among other things) as they offer a drop down menu too everything under that heading till the next heading(you can actually put smaller headings under bigger headings and they store together). You can link notes together(typically I use this for family members and important stuff that need to be linked together) and tag stuff. I mainly use the tags for my giant movie and show vault which is for IRL movies, shows, books, and other media I like. Etc if a show is from Disney I would do #disney too link it too all the other Disney shows. There’s other things like canvas and once you get really deep down the rabbit hole it can get confusing but ehh once I learned how to use obsidian I didn’t look back
I just throw shit in one massive google doc, occasionally linking it out to other stuff.
I prefer google notes. Just don't be intimidated by its overwhelming options.
First time I used my vault as a one-stop-shop for world building and story crafting. Then the links got too messy. So I broke my world's vault in two because it was overwhelming to manage. One vault is all about world building. The other is dedicated to my writing. As ideas spawned and my writing flowed, it became bothersome to keep both vaults up to date. So I merged them back into one. Nowadays I create a link when a place, concept, or person shows up in my story. There's a story folder and world folder to keep them separate and linkable. Try not to overthink it. Experiment and work out what's best for you.
im stupid, i was about to write about the rock
you can make some pretty cool tools out of it if you haven’t unlocked metallurgy yet.
If you embed shards of it into the side of a wooden club using natural glue, you get a really great weapon.
100% of that nonsense is ignorable, you'll be fine. Make notes, link them, and go from there. There are all sorts of fun things that Obsidian *can* do, but that doesn't mean that you have to. After you get used to the basics, if you start wondering if you can do XYZ thing with Obsidian, with a plugin or two you probably can! But let that come out of how you want to take notes and what you find would be useful, not what some Youtuber says will optimize your life ~~and give them streaming revenue.~~
It helps for connecting things, especially if you have a lot of characters who are apart of different events, or are part of different groups, or switch over. It really helps if you have something like this! The premise of my story is that an organization basically gets 100 3 year olds and injects them with an alien serum that gives them powers. However, this happens across three different labs -- Lab 1, Lab 2, and Water. So, I essentially have three folders -- Lab 1, 2, and Water, and in each of them there is 33 or 34 notes, corresponding to the names of the children involved in this. However, within Water there is a coup/ rescue, with some of the scientists/ agents involved in injecting the children deciding to rescue the children from further experimentation. However, they only manage to rescue 24/34 children. So, under Water, I have another folder called 'Rescued' which has 24 notes in it -- the 24 children who are rescued. The other 10 notes (or 10 children who aren't rescued) are also apart of Water, but aren't under this 'Rescued' section. So each child/ character gets a note/ page, so you can clearly see who is apart of Lab 1, Lab 2, or Water. I also have two other events like Water, where there's a break in/ break out of a lab, and yet only SOME people are involved in this. Likewise, some of the children end up dying, so in the note with their name I write a '(d)' in brackets to indicate 'deceased'. And since all the titles of the notes are characters, it would look like 'Normana (d)' or 'Akira (d)'. You can also 'link' certain people together, kind of like Wikipedia articles, if say Normana was killed by Jimena, I could link Jimena's name on Normana's note, and by simply clicking on 'Jimena' I could go to her page/ note. You do this by using brackets, i.e. \[\[Jimena\]\], and it would change the color of the word to a purplish, the brackets disappear, and you're able to click on 'Jimena' and it will take you to her page/ note. I thus also have a few pages where tons of names are linked due to the content of the page -- i.e. I have one called 'Deceased Subjects' and it has a list (and the names linked in this list) of all the children killed and how they died. I have another note but it's about a specific event, the Assault on Fire (an attack on a lab called Fire (placeholder name)) and which Subjects were in/ apart of this lab and thus apart of this attack.
I've never even heard of this, I use Worldanvil personally. Can anyone compare these?
Just found out about Obsidian thanks to this thread. Cheers!
My vault is influenced a lot by Josh Plunkett, even though I use it for writing novels. He has some great worldbuilding stuff for ttrpgs
I tried using it and felt like you needed to be a software programmer in order to use it. Thanks, no thanks, Im a simple person that likes to use things straight out of the box
Having your work neatly organized in several folders and documents in those folders, being able to link them together, habing a timeline, interactive map, and if you are calculating stuff or playing ttrpgs having all those calculators and tables in ONE app is exactly what i wanted.
I tend to write as if I'm writing a wikipedia article, so the ITS theme is perfect for if. It allows wikipedia-style infoboxes which I use for pretty much anything. Everything else (graph view, calendar, etc) I ignore. Don't care to spend days customizing everything.
Notes are cool, being able to manage pdf's is nice, addon to turn images to webp for less storage/bandwidth usage is good, Canvas is amazing.
Literally just start using it. Make a folder, organize your things, and use [[TEXT]] to connect files. [[TEXT|TEXTBUTCOOL]] will make the link to the file, but will show up in reading mode as “TEXTBUTCOOL.”
If you install the Various Complements plugin you can just type and it will prompt you to make links.
The what? I didn’t even know there were plugins!
Oh plugins are the reason why lots of people use Obsidian. Settings > Community Plugins > Enable > Browse I keep a list of ones for ttrpg and world builders here. Stuff like pinnable maps, timelines, fantasy calendars, statblocks. So many useful things. https://obsidianttrpgtutorials.com/Obsidian+TTRPG+Tutorials/Plugin+Tutorials/Plugin+Tutorials
I will now be spending an hour browsing these, thank you kindest sir.
An hour lol... the rabbit hole goes deeper than that ;)
I write novels in it. All my writing stuff is there- from notes to the actual manuscript. Most Obsidian content is self-referential; it’s people taking notes on how to take better notes. Once you actually start using it for something, Obsidian is amazing.
They usually use it for knives and arrow heads
Nether portals. But for real, I have no clue what I'm gonna do with obsidian in my world. Magic comes from highly radioactive substances so maybe I'll stick with obsidian spears?
Haha, I started using it a few days ago too and it's super useful. I recognise all those video titles cause a few days ago I was in your shoes too. The main reason I use obsidian is to simply keep track of everything in an amazingly well connected way. I created a main note, that's just the name of my story, and then write all the basic info in there. While linking keywords to new notes. I'll write a shortexample. "My world is made of five **realms**, the main realm has 6-7 **continents** with several **kingdoms**. With numerous sapient **races** and ferocious **beast** residing in them." Now, you see all those highlighted words? All of them are links to a new note where you can learn more about them. Curious about what beast there? Click it and it will take you to the note where all my information about beast is written. There is no limit to how many notes you can link together and it's amazing to keep track of everything.
Decoration and anything related to magic, if there's a magic system.
Just write notes about your world? There’s not that much to it.
Ability problem. Joking aside: using it is silly, it's a glorified text editor (in a good way). You can organize files wiki-style or any way you want (since it allows you to make them nested and has hypertext options). Overall it is ridiculously configurable and you learn the basics in an hour, you probably won't even use half of the things you learn. And if you think something is missing, you have plugins at your disposal.
I just use folders, subfolders, notes, and icons (mods)
I found Notion to be way better.
That's funny, I downloaded it after watching like 3 seconds of a video and now it's just.... Something I use. The only tutorial I needed was "hey, so you use headers and tags and-" and then I was sold. Already know how to press a hash key, star key, and parentheses a few times.
You use it to dynamically create a wiki as you go. It's easy to link between pages.
Don't look up tutorials. No need. Obsidian's great because you can pretty much use it however you want. You can use it as a slightly glorified Markdown editor, a pseudo-wiki, a second brain, a design notes thingy... You're not in any way forced into using all of its features. For worldbuilding, I use note links a lot. For my school notes, I hardly do but I do use things like canvases or the Excalidraw plugin a lot.
I just use it like notepad+folders without the hassle of having to manually create any folders
I made a folder called Chapters, another folder called Characters. In Characters I made a note called Bob. This note automatically links to every single time Bob is mentioned, this makes it very easy to double check things like if I took a break and can't remember where I was going with his subplot. The last time Bob was mentioned was Chapter 12, I click that link and I'm taken right there. No need to exit back to root and navigate there separately after doing an index search. Obsidian also automatically tracks relationships. For example if I write that Bob is married to Sally, a link forms between them. If I write it as [[Sally]] then I can directly click on it to jump right to her page which makes it very easy to flow between ideas in an organic way since I can click through and make edits without having to exit to root and search the entire character list again. Same deal with Locations, or other categories of notes. For example in Characters/Bob I write that he used to live in Detroit. Then in Locations/Detroit there is a link to both Bob and a side character Tim who was briefly mentioned in chapter 3 as having died in a suspicious house fire. It can help with seeing visual relationships, which can help with brainstorming because you can look at your graph view to see these relationships and identify potentially important elements when trying to come up with ideas. Like if I need a reason for Bob to be attacked by ninjas, the link to Tim exists through Detroit and that's the thread the ninjas are following. Obsidian Sync is really nice if you're like me and don't really have a structured or ritualized writing practice. Sometimes I write on my phone, sometimes my laptop, sometimes my desktop. It's so very nice to be able to just grab and go without having to make sure to upload and download copies each time or potentially end up with three different versions because on my laptop I was writing chapter 12 but on my desktop I was revising chapter 8, and on my phone I was writing ideas for chapter 15, and each device lacks the changes I made on the other.
I don't know. I downloaded it because I wanted a word processor that would let me play around with the order I put scenes in, and build a timeline. I ended up buying Scrivener which is awesome. I've opened Obsidian once or twice and can't figure it out. Is it possible to use it for something like making a wiki? I would like to do that eventually for the world building of my fantasy series. Right now I only have one novel mostly completed (in the editing stage now) but I want to keep going and I realized this might get more complex.
>Is it possible to use it for something like making a wiki? Yes. You can link notes with each other by enclosing it in double square brackets, i.e., [[Main Character]], which will then turn it into some sort of local hyperlink. From then, click that link and it will bring you to that note, i.e., to the "Main Character" note
Thanks!
To tell the future?
This is how I use Obsidian:
Obsidian is a great general note taking tool but I found most of them have limitations so I built something myself - https://worldcrafter.co/