What lives there?

 In the last couple of weeks I've written two new stories and continued on with writing my vetinarians in space novel.  All of that writing is original creation, requiring the worlds of the stories to be created from nothing,

Worldbuilding has several aspects.  First, there's the physical surroundings the characters find themselves in.  What does the interior of my magical tea shop look like?  How would a winged species construct their cities?  And where would they build them?  Even with settings that occur commonly in science fiction, like space stations, there's a lot of creation to do.

The details of built spaces reflect the values and beliefs - and forms - of the peoples who occupy them.  So when a winged species builds cities, it might decide to put them in a range of mountains.  It will be much easier to get airborne if they can catch a thermal to help them rise, so homes on mountainsides where updraughts are likely make sense.  Also, if you fly, you need somewhere safe to land, so I decided that the fliers' homes would have broad terraces for take-offs and landings.

For my magical tea rooms, the species which used it directly affected the size of the building.  It has one entrance for species like humans, dwarves, and fairies, and a much bigger entrance and space for species like dragons and unicorns.  It could also expand its size when there were a lot of large species wanting to come in.  So that worldbuilding was directly affected by what lived in that world.

The same is true of my SF novel.  The chapter I was writing yesterday was about my characters going onto a civilian space station.  It is in a solar system with a dozen planets, only two of which are habitable.  The rest of them are rich in natural resources, and in the materials needed to produce starship fuel.  As you can imagine, miners and techs are going to be the main occupants of that station, and it's likely that a lot of the processes which take place there will produce grimy and messy by-products.  So I decided that the station wold be utilitarian, the walls clad in grey panels.  Shelving would be metal, functional but not pretty.

The world of a story and the creatures and people who live in it are interdependent, each affecting the other,  So I always find that the most useful question to ask when I start to design a world is "What lives there?"