I think I'd like to see what people would do in their leisure time or domestic work . You see so many stories about travel and war, but you rarely see people interact outside of that. And if you do, it's usually not made unique for a setting that isn't Earth.
What cutlery do they use? What does a morning routine look like? In a world where fire magic is commonplace, how do they cook? How would those things evolve over centuries?
Fantasy especially feels stagnant for this, but I think sci-fi is guilty of this too. Are there things in specific works where an innocuous detail made you wonder more about how a setting worked?
Unjust Depths does a lot of this mundane details of life stuff in service of showing the difference between the communist and imperialist societies.
One thing I could ask for is that any author who's showing orbital mechanics at least play a little KSP first.
I just wanna know where the trash goes, and how it gets there, really. Maybe in that vein, what sort of stuff breaks regularly in this world, and how do people deal with it? Maintenance and waste are two big ones for me
That's a good question. I think atla could have interesting potential to explore waste management.
Earth benders could theoretically salvage any masonry and material made of earth.
Fire benders could melt and reuse metal
It's shame that water benders never really used their abilities to improve waterways and plumbing.
For generations, these people existed in a world where they could move elements and they rarely depicted ways to interact with the world outside of violence.
One thing that I wish we saw more of was how things work when they're not functioning, like what can go wrong and how, and the janky ways people go about fixing it. I remember when the first trailers for Force Awakens came out, and people were bitching about how Rey's hoverbike was a shitty design and my reaction was like: yeah. She's on a desert backwater sifting through garbage. She doesn't find a Mercedes, she finds a fucking Gremlin, and patches it together well enough to get around. I want stuff that's poorly designed or that's old and falling apart. I want antigravity packs that are clearly held together with duct tape and bondo. I want magic mirrors that flicker and shriek until you hit them just right, because there's a defect in the scrying array that lets Hell bleed into the feed. Janky cybernetic arms that are discontinued and need DIY fix-its because the parts aren't made anymore.
It makes the world feel more real. People don't go for the perfect thing, they go for what's cheap, and spend their money on booze and junk food. The Murderbot Diaries do a pretty good job of this, with Murderbot bitching about how nothing produced in the Corporate Rim really ever works right. It's great.
Janky cybernetic arms that are discontinued
One of my favourite minute details about Neuromancer is exactly this. A one-off background character, a bartender, is described as having an outdated, clunky old cybernetic arm, which you don't really see in modern cyberpunk. Everyone has shiny and modern stuff, even "last gen" when it shows up is indistinguishable
I remember that. There's a character in the game Observer like that as well, with shitty low-cost prosthetics all the VA equivalent would pay for, it's implied
There's a sequence in Unjust Depths where a character spends a whole day trying to find a place that will service her prosthetic arm and all of the legitimate clinics and manufacturers send her away because it's not their product and she doesn't have insurance (and because she's a racial minority)
One of my fantasy airship characters is a dwarf who is on the airship because, among other reasons, he's dodging creditors who are after him because he never paid for the undead arm he had grafted on to replace the one he lost in a factory accident, and that's easier to do when you have no permanent address and your contract stipulates cash payouts for your share
EDIT: Worth mentioning, this factory accident killed several friends of his and was the result of burgher greed and safety skimping, it also radicalized him and I'm thinking that his other reasons are some light terrorism maybe
I'm a linguistics and anthropology type of guy. I wanna see more worldbuilding with the little things in everyday language and culture.
For example sci-fi authors back then might have predicted the smartphone but probably didn't expect skeuomorphism, like the fact we still have buttons and sliders in UI. Or like how the American accent was actually the original accent of English in England, and only after the American colonies were established, non-rhotacism became associated with higher class in England.
Another example, my Indian girlfriend and I were discussing, in India the electrical switches are inverted to the US standard, so down is on, up is off. She says phrases in the opposite way too, like "come off" to mean my "come on." Maybe something there...
Have you read Embassytown by Mieville? If you're a linguistic/anthropology wonk then I imagine it'll be right up your alley.
You see so many stories about travel and war, but you rarely see people interact outside of that.
leisure time is something that capitalists don't want you thinking about
Just general urban infrastructure is a big one.
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Being able to shrink things or set things on fire would have massive ramifications on waste disposal.
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Being able to manipulate water would have huge consequences on water transportation, indoor plumbing, and so on.
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Flesh-to-stone/stone-to-flesh means meat can be indefinitely preserved.
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Society's relationship towards death would be completely different with resurrection spells. One consequence is that graves probably won't be a thing because permanent death would most likely come from the complete destruction of the body with nothing left to bury.
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Transformation spells more or less mean society is post-scarcity. Imagine being able to transform air into anything other than air (food, water, clothes, metal, wood, weapons, building material, fuel).
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Piss was actually a critically important resource in pre-industrial economies because it was a source of ammonia, phosphorus, potassium, and other rare minerals. Very useful for cleaning.
More capitalism and more jank. I want car crashes because the bus driver had an OTA firmware update fail and his legs get bricked. I want cybernetic eyes that keep getting cool new features but your vision keeps getting shittier after every update because their memory is too low to force you to upgrade to a newer model. I want cheap prostethic lungs that run on disposable batteries and only let you sorta breathe, because the good ones are artificially expensive because of a big stock buyback. And I want brain implants that replace your dreams with ads.
I always like seeing games in settings. It does so much heavy lifting for the worldbuding.
