How do I write better worlds using Mystcraft?

Solution 1:

I am no expert, but as I have some experience myself and because I see that a lot of people are looking for this info i will post what I know.

The general order in which pages should be placed is:

1. Biomes you want (it helps to put in some biomes twice)
2. Biome Controllers (like Large Biomes, Tiny Biomes, Single Biome)
3. Terrain Modifiers (like Flat, Caveworld, Normal)
4. Celestial bodies. The stars, suns and moons (It's important to know that if you want to control where the celestial bodies rise and set or position/speed you have to put these pages directly in front of the object they control. Example: Full Length, Rising, East, Normal Sun)
5. Lighting
6. Weather
7. The Sky (clouds, etc.)
8. Additional features (villages, obelisks, caves. If you want to decide the materials of the tendrils or whatever then place the modifier page before the Tendril page.)

Note 1, that if you want to change the colour of anything in your world, then put the colour page immediately before the page it controls/affects.

Note 2, that this order may not be the optimal one, but it seems to work for me :) You should always experiment yourself :P

Solution 2:

(Note to people who haven't used mystcraft in a while, the method for getting symbols has recently [version 0.10+] changed from randomly generating worlds to finding symbol pages in the overworld, see this wiki page for more details)

From the mystcraft wiki page on writing stable ages the basic approach you need to take to is:

The simple question to ask yourself, as a writer, is:
“Would this age make sense if nothing from this category was included?”

To write a stable age you need to ensure that at least one of every category of primary symbol is included in your descriptive book, there is not AFAIK a definitive list of primary symbol categories.

Here is a list of symbols from the Mystcraft site that explain their functions to some degree.

Direwolf20 has a mod spotlight that covers all the details of how the new writing system works

Primary symbols are those that specify basic properties of the age such as time flow, lighting, biome, etc; in short any feature of that you would expect a 'real' world to have.

As Dan says there are also some symbols (Dense Ores being the most common example) that are guaranteed to introduce instability into the age.

If you want to practice writing stable ages then you can generate a new creative world which will make a 'Creative Spawned' notebook available that will contain all symbols automatically. Using a separate world will also allow you to easily avoid any problems from bloating your save game with a large number of unwanted worlds