Pangarap: Building a world from the ground up

[Tiluchi]

Hello all!

I've recently started a rather ambitious worldbuilding project, trying to design a planet with more or less realistic geology, climate, and biology (not to mention history, politics, and culture, but that will be a much later stage, if I ever get that far). Thankfully, this is something that's been done several times here before by much better cartographers than myself, so I have a lot of resources and references at my disposal. I, uh, also have the advantage of having done this myself once before, as I posted a very similar WIP to this one myself back in 2016. While I got quite far in my last project, to the point where I was more or less finished with climates and starting with the actual presentable map itself, there were a couple of issues overall with it that discouraged me from continuing.

With that in mind, I'm starting more or less from scratch, without so many preconcepts of what I want the world to look like, in hopes of allowing the world to build itself a little bit more rather than trying to stretch the laws of geology and climatology to fit my predetermined goals. I started with a very, very rough sketch of what I wanted the continents to look like- as few details as possible, just very basic outlines of the continents to guess their size, shape and placement:



That was enough for me to plug into GPlates in order to plot the plates and movements of the continents from the breakup of "Pangaea" up to the present day. As I want Pangarap to more or less mirror Earth in terms of flora and fauna and their distribution (i.e. no macaws and hornbills being found in the same place, or corn and rice being farmed alongside each other without a very good historical reason), I wanted to be able to trace the continents from the supercontinent stage to their separation into equivalents of Gondwanaland and Laurentia, then up to the present day. Beyond that, it's very hard to get accurate plates without plotting at least a little bit of the history on GPlates and seeing what they look like on a globe.

Here's the basic position of the continents as the original supercontinent is just starting to break up:



Then about half of the way to the present day (I'm deliberately excluding times because my knowledge of geology doesn't extend to being able to accurately estimate time or rates of plate movement), with a northern and southern supercontinent. I'm assuming that those continents that are pretty close to each other are more or less connected.



And, finally, the present-day configuration of the continents, GPlates style:



From there, I was able to sketch the basic plate boundaries, first on GPlates on a globe and then on the full map. For anyone attempting something this in the future, I highly recommend sketching the plates in GPlates and linking them to the continents- it makes it much easier to draw them accurately in equirectangular format, as well as to view the basic movement and figure out which type of boundary you should be drawing. With a better idea of plate boundaries I was able to draw slightly more exact coastlines and add some more islands and island chains. It's not quite complete yet, as there are a lot of island chains and things like that I want to add, as well as maybe some large islands down in the south pole (I just really hate drawing things at the poles, as the distortion is hard to compensate for!).

Here are the coastlines with continent names, which are pretty much just placeholders until I can pin down history and linguistics:



And the plate tectonics I have so far, based on my reconstructions in GPlates. This also isn't entirely complete; I want to add some more microplates to the island chains in southeastern Narra and southeast Talisay, as I can already tell that's going to be a morass of rifts and converging microplates similar to Southeast Asia and/or the Caribbean region on Earth. I'd also like to add some more features like aulacogens, cratons and hotspots. However, I'm hoping for some feedback before getting too far ahead of myself here, in case there's anything majorly wrong with my tectonics.



Edit: I should probably specify just in case: this follows the usual color scheme of Red = divergent margin, Green = transform boundary, Blue = subduction, with the arrows pointing in the direction of subduction, and purple = convergent boundary.

That's what I have for now! Would love feedback, questions, criticisms or commentary on general land shapes and (especially) the geology so far before I forge on.