The seasons bring all sorts of gluts and short-term experiences: for example, more apples than we can hope to eat, and the joy of walking through the cherry blossoms. It's not all feel-good stuff though. Hot and dry weather can make grasshoppers change into locusts, and very few of us want that; in some parts of the world, ants grow wings and fly when they sense a storm coming. What seasonal events happen in the ecosystem of your world?

Oceans are a fascinating part of any sci-fi or fantasy world. They're a fruitful void: at once a spookily dark and forbidding place, but also a place of great beauty and bounty. You can drown in an ocean, but you can also enjoy a delicious fish supper. What are your oceans like - did you make them simply as ways to keep two countries part, or do you really invest in making your oceans an area to explore in themselves? Do you have mythical oceanic monsters such as mermaids or kraken? Do you have whirlpools or subterranean oceans? Tell us about them!

Cutlery's great for getting food from your plate into your mouth. It seems a basic thing to say, but not everyone uses it. Some cultures use chopsticks or eat with their hands instead.

Different forms of cutlery can have cultural quirks: upmarket dinner parties are notorious for dinner settings with several knives that are meant to be used with specific courses. Some etiquette rules around chopsticks are designed to avoid connotations with funerals. Autistic folks will sometimes share in-jokes about favourite spoons, or spoons they really, really don't like. What are the cutlery rules in your world, if any?

Humans like to make their robots approachable, whether we make them into unthreatening-looking humanoids, or something else. A range of rather sweet robot dogs is available to those who want a robotic companion that still hit people in the feels. On the other side of the coin, Bigdog was developed for military use and acts in some ways as a robotic dog. Are there any robot animals in your world?

Technology is fantastic for facilitating communication over greater distances. For us, telecommunications and the internet do the job very well, but perhaps things are done differently in your story. How do your people communicate over greater distances?

The world contains a few very slow-growing things. Cacti grow very slowly indeed, making cactus 'forests' a treasure of nature. The very oldest creatures in the world at the stromatolites of Australia; aside from those, humans are pretty much the slowest to mature. What if something else in your world matures more slowly? What in your world is slow-growing, and why?

Cities are a bit strange, aren't they? They're centers of population, but they always seem to have two sides to them: The glamourized side that makes them look like the best place in the world to be, and the poor side that shows the immense rot, decay, and corruption that inevitably grows in a city. Works of fiction have taken both of these to extremes, like the city of Rivendell from Lord of the Rings and Night City from Cyberpunk 2077. Rivendell is idealized while Night City is a mockery. So what do your fictional cities look like? Are they idealized? Are they hubs of crime? Or is it somewhere in between?

Signs of welcome are a wonderful little detail that differ from one culture to the next. Welcome mats are a simple one. We have short, ritualistic conversations that we have with people we meet on the street: "Hi! How are you?" "Fine thanks!", and it can be considered a faux-pas to actually give a detailed answer - in many cultures, a variation of "Fine thanks" seems to be all that is welcomed. How odd! How does one individual greet or welcome another in your story?

As a society advances, so may its approach to making, preparing, and consuming food. We humans have developed hydroponic labs to efficiently grow greens, made meat grown from tiny slivers of flesh grown in a petri dish instead of killing a whole animal, and even experimented with 3D printed foods. What is the most stechnologically advanced food in your world?

This week we're looking at poisonous or venomous plants and animals. There are plenty of real-life examples, especially among vulnerable creatures: frogs and fish make good eating, so some have developed toxins to make themselves less so. Plants are literally rooted to the spot and need to protect themselves somehow. Then there are the venomous examples: snakes, spiders, and duckbilled platypi (yes, I know!) What are the notable examples on your world?

I'm getting to the end of my stockpile of them. Would you guys like me to start them again from the top, or give you a break and resume them in 3-6 months' time?

Is your planet alive and aware that it's crawling with life? How does it accept the reality of being host to ephemeral lives? Does it attempt to guide them? Exploit them? Both? Bender the Robot playing host to the Shrimpkins, as an example of both. What about Pratchett's giant turtle, with four elephants standing on its back, with the Disc on their backs? What kind of personality would it require to be crawling with the planet equivalent of fleas, and not reach for the nearest bottle of pesticide? Play Gaia or God on this Worldbuilding Wednesday.

Coming of age can be a time of celebration for many - or a dreaded moment that can be even harder to postpone than to complete. It may tie in with puberty, the capacity for independence such as being strong enough to hunt on one's own, or a person's age as counted by a calendar. What does the culture in your story do about coming of age?

Technology can be divided into hardware and software, with hardware being the 'nuts and bolts' of your technology, and software being the programs and data that run on it. Are there any specific software programs that are used in your world - fictional equivalents of Microsoft Office or computer viruses, perhaps?

Most cultures have staples of one kind or another, but let's not forget the non-essential but incredibly popular favourites: tea and coffee! While nobody needs these to live, they definitely have an impact on quality of life. Do you have these foods and drinks in your world? What impact does caffeine have on your species? Do you have different drinks alltogether, and what are they?

This prompt is half-geographical, half political. Fences make good neighbours, they say, especially when your neighbouring species are prone to violent outbursts. How do you keep your orcs out of your elves, your sentient termites out of your treants, and your preds out of herb turf? Even two friendly species are going to have some zoning issues if there's too much casual overlap, so on this Worldbuilding Wednesday, how did you plan out your territorial boundaries, and how are they enforced? This might be with the enforcement of political borders, but natural borders like islands with a nice big bit of ocean in between, or mountain ranges, can be natural borders.

Post-industrial civilisations use iron, steel, plastics, carbon fibre, and other strong materials for building. Pre-industrial societies don't have access to most of these materials. One solution is plants that create strong materials, with bamboo being a classic example. Does the society in your story use bamboo tech? Perhaps they make things out of wood, or perhaps something else entirely.

Today we're wondering what are the oldest plants in your world? Ancient woodlands lurk in Europe, with oak trees that existed in medieval times, and the Amazon's oldest trees form the cornerstones of their ecosystems. What are your oldest individual plants, and what do your ancient woodlands look like (or perhaps woodlands isn't the right word? If not, then what is?)

Let's take a look back at the unknowable past and the stories people tell about how your world got there. Assuming your planet formed the way we understand them to (space dust, gravity, add magic to taste, bake for 11 billion years or until done), do the natives on the world actually know how the world formed? What stories do they tell about the origins of the planet and why it doesn't simply fall out of the sky like a thrown stone?

Babies are one of the biggest new starts we encounter in life. Because of this, cultures create traditions around welcoming a baby into the world. Among the more familiar ones are baby showers and christenings, but other cultures may have different ones. In Turkey, a special drink is prepared for mum to stimulate milk production, and in Ecuador, fathers will give their sweaty shirts to wives and girlfriends in labour to mop her brow with during birth to give her strength. Perhaps in your world other traditions hold. What are they?

Artificial gravity is an important feature of having a presence in space for any creature that originated on a planet: planet-based organisms simply weren't built to cope with long periods without gravity. For those of you with stories that involve space travel, how do you achieve artificial gravity, or have your characters found a way to live without it?

From time to time, humans discover fossils. They wash up on beaches or are found on designated digs. We find everything from full dinosaur skeletons to mysterious little fragments which leave almost everything to scientific deduction - or failing that, imagination. We find countless ancient shark teeth and a cornucopia of long-dead shells, footprints and lumps of long-hardened tree sap and fossilised poops. All of it gives us different information - and raises different questions.

What prehistoric creatures existed on your world, and are they found in the current day? What do your modern day people think of them?

A dominant species is any species that has overcome the standard survival challenges of finding food and avoiding being eaten. When a species can survive that well, it tends to become much more common and have an increasingly noticeable impact on its environment. For humans that means climate change, the plastic problem, deforestation, and a number of other effects. For another species it could mean something entirely different. What major impact does the dominant species in your world have on its planet?

What do the characters in your story aspire to become? What's the ideal way of life for them? Does it involve money and/or land? Or is it something more obscure or specific?

At some point, humans decided that Earth wasn't enough for them and that they wanted to live among the stars - perhaps permanently in mobile ships, perhaps on a different planet. For that, space travel is in order. We assume that other, alien civilisations might do the same. How advanced is space travel in your world?