Worldbuilding 201: Struo, Elements, Materials, and Substances
Greetings and salmonella!....D’OH! No diseases this time around! Maybe poisonings, but not in details! Today we are going to discuss how to make up your own elements and materials. Buckle up, chuckle nut! This is gonna be a wild ride!
What are the things?
As usual, we have to define a lot of wordy words. I am going to make up some new terminology as I wish to be as diverse as possible to include all imaginable systems you can make up.
I am first defining the word “struo”. It comes from Latin and means “I build”, and a few other definitions, but most are close enough that I like it! With it, I refer to anything with any kind of system you’ve conjured up that is capable of forming structures with each other (molecules, alloys, and salts in the real world) and has enough variety to give rise to all things familiar. In the real world, the struos are the elements that are the most obvious ones. You could technically say it can be protons, neutrons, and electrons as well, which is true! Struos can build larger struos, so which one is relevant to the discussion depends on the system you imagine, construct, or do, and the context it is used in. I will assume substruo and superstruo are sufficiently self explanatory.
Now I feel we can discuss materials and substances in a more general sense that can fit any imagined system to deal with the material world. Materials are clearly substances that can be interacted with at macroscopic scale! ...Wait, that is both self-referencing and wrong; the molecules inside our cells are not macroscopic! In all honesty, defining these is muddy, but I will try. Materials and Substances are collections of superstruos that may be homogeneous or heterogeneous, and if there is sufficiently much of it, then it can be interacted with by a person.
Does this mean anything fits? No, you cannot for example with the struo of electrons collect any amount of it alone to interact with humans because the repulsive forces between them makes them very cranky to be together. But the superstruos of elements, which is also a struo at this scale, CAN be collected together and be interacted with. A good example of substances is metals. Iron is one solid piece of pure iron atoms (struos), assuming no impurities, which is a huge assumption, but hey! If you c-anne-’t guess, just note that it is still solid even with impurities. Even a lone kind of struo, as long as they can bunch up together and not scream murder and explode away from each other, can make a material. Another example is sodium chloride, just two elements. Then you get complicated beasts like life itself, but let’s not go there.
Terminology and nomenclature
I am going to start this section off with a wee bit of a rant. There is a series I love, and they have flip drives (which jump through pre-existing wormholes). Any time they talk about building them, they talk about “rare elements”–yeah, we all know what they mean! The madeupium that allows the interstellar travels! But that is not now people talk. When you are reasonably knowledgeable about it, you use the relevant mineral names or the group they fall into! It is clear that the author didn’t want to go into the details, but at the same time, it makes the dialogue unbelievable. Making up some element names that everyone knows are made up would just feel so much more natural.
Okay, rant over. When you make substances and such, one major component is how old is it? Very old substances have very unscientific names. So you can do a lot of strange naming there, and a lot of it can be based on associations and functions rather than by what it is. Like “King’s water”: it is a mix of two acids, but because it could dissolve gold, it was associated with kings and such and looks like water!
If you go more scientific, it is very complicated, and I will get into it in another post. But for any element you make, an -ium ending works very well! Winchellium! See, that works perfectly!
Green rock vs Minovsky materials
This is another important distinction to make about your struos. I am using the term Minovsky from the trope of Minovsky physics. In Minovsky physics, things are very precise and understood, and in Minovsky materials, it is the same. They have very specific, defined properties that do not change. Materials are allowed to have multiple properties (it makes them more interesting, after all), but the point is that Minovsky elements do not get new properties all the time. The more you add properties as the plot needs it to pre-existing materials, the less it becomes a Minovsky material.
Instead, it becomes a green rock. This is a term for any material, thing, or whatever, that has any property that the plot needs in the moment to either complicate the situation or solve it. Notice that this is dependent on how it is treated. If the material constantly gets properties, it is a green rock; if it is given limited properties and they are all known and never change, it is a Minovsky material. For a while, a material might appear to be a green rock before it is shown to be Minovsky when the creator stops adding new properties and they become well established and known.
Struos as cogs
Now, I started pretty in depth at the parts that make a world tick. If one does not wish to get into the details about things, that is a fine thing to do in worldbuilding and writing. I go here cause I love me some details! Anyway, now let us discuss struos as cogs–check this blog post about the concept. In most stories, being as detailed as I am is not necessary, but I like doing it as it gives a way to tie your substances together in a neat package that you can control. How many of us haven’t seen various substances and all, and there is an endless barrage of new materials and struos and more being added, and it all has no sensible relations beyond the author's “I say so”? That is fair as it is a story, and the author dictates. But wouldn’t it be neat if there was some system behind that which tied it all together, even if most of it is unstated, but that you believe could be behind it? It also helps avoid issues of the periodic table being full or the substance being shown to be impossible, which can seriously ruin some people’s willing suspension of disbelief.
Abandon the periodic table
We all know the periodic table from memory… What do you mean you don’t!? Urgh, well here it is!
It is bigly! Even when I studied chemistry, we didn’t have to memorise all of these because they are A LOT! Even base non-synthetic ones are over 90! No factorial. Now why do I bring this table up when the title is about abandoning it? Well, this is all the struos in the real world that make up everything. It is what enables life, enables all forms of modern technology, it is what has enabled the progress of humanity. I remember once hearing someone say, “Each era is named after the material they have mastered to use”, and for you humans, today is the era of silicon.
Now, in scifi with all the technologies and such, reducing or completely overhauling the periodic table is unwise to do because the richness of properties that all these elements give cannot be understated, nor can how it is used and needed in technologies. For scifi and such, I will discuss a different way a bit later. In fantasy, however, the amount of elements required for life sustaining itself and life as in how humans live is considerably less so. Let me remove as many elements as possible from the table to cover what fantasy would require.
Looks a lot emptier now, huh? Sure, all elements have technically played a role in the existence of you humans, but who cares about that in fantasy? Do you really need neodynium to understand and function in a fantasy world? What matters the most are the elements you interact with easily early on and those that make life possible. That’s assuming you use biochemistry like humans have, but in fantasy, who knows? Anyway, here are 20 elements that I’ve reduced to; it is important to note that it is the properties of these elements that we want, not the atomic structure itself, despite their connection in our world. An entirely new made up struos system would likely have to accommodate these 20 elements in order to replicate a world that is similar to Earth's history up to industrial revolution for the most part. Or at least close enough, one can also make it so the struos system enables more and all above these 20 are fictional elements, I’ll get more to that later. My dear friend has offered to come up with one! Anne, go ahead and give them a taste of how such a system different from atoms could be like!
(Anne:) For this example, let’s go back to the world of Aermundi, which Vivian and I have been expanding throughout these blogs. You can read about the world in this practicum on fantasy diseases. Basically, the world is sustained by life mana and surrounded by twelve mana poles, each emitting a different type of mana that we understand as Fire, Water, Ice, Earth, Air, Metal, Electricity, Light, Darkness, Time, Space, and Void. While it might be tempting to have different struos near each pole, it makes more sense for them to be essentially the same around the entire world. Oxygen needs to be oxygen for life to survive, right? If it’s a different element in part of the world, that poses major problems since gases aren’t exactly known for their ability to remain stationary!
One thought is just to replace the atom with a part based on life mana. Instead of protons, neutrons, and electrons, have provits, neuvits, and elevits (vit being from vita, or life). And you could do that. You could replicate the entire periodic table that way. But where’s the fun in that? Let’s throw the whole thing out and start a brand new system of how things are put together and what materials make up the world!
Since life mana is the foundation of all life, it stands to reason that it would be a part of all elements. And since the other mana, while strongest at each pole, also distribute across the globe, it’s fine to imagine that even the part of the world across from each pole would have some. So what if mana existed as a unit, subatomic, that combined within what we’ll call vitaspheres? Each vitasphere–a natural result of life mana–is like a soft glass ball that contains different proportions of the various mana types, which are like liquids that resist mixing within the spheres. Basically, you know those lava lamp things? They were popular when I was in college (and when my parents were in college; maybe it’s a college thing?). It’s like that, with different types of liquids touching but never mixing, only this is inside a sphere and not a lamp.
More universal elements like oxygen and hydrogen contain mostly life mana that’s easily found everywhere along with air mana that easily spreads across the surface. However, elements like metals might be concentrated in different areas. Gold, unfortunately, is found almost exclusively near the metal pole, but this rarity adds to its value. This allows me to maintain a currency that values gold! See how that fits in with the standard fantasy trope of gold coins?
Once we’ve established that all of the basic elements are mixtures, some more universal than others, we can start to figure out the basic elements that are essential to life up until the industrial age, since most fantasy is set earlier. And in addition to those basic 20 elements that Vivian identified, we can come up with brand new elements that may or may not have the same properties as existing elements! The possibilities are endless once you get that basic struos done. With that being decided, I’ll pass it back to Vivian for more options!
(Vivian:) Thank you! Lady Verbosa does it again! Anyway, as you can see, a struos system doesn’t necessarily need to explain EVERYTHING. Did Anne go into how the copper mana ball thingy interacts when it encounters an iron one to make an alloy? No! Even I get bored then. But that is besides the point; the fact that we HAVE our own system now means that we can keep the parts of interactions that gives us what is familiar, and then throw out the real world stuff the moment they become inconvenient, and no snotty little hyperfan can come up and say “Well, Ackchyually that is not how that alloy works”. To which I say: my system, MY RULES!
Expand the periodic table
Unfortunately, this method of rehauling the entire periodic table is not viable for all settings. If it is set in modern times, scifi, or even, heck, industrial time and beyond, having the whole system overhauled stops working because more and more of the relevant technologies involved include elements that you removed, and it becomes more relevant it is exactly as known. Of course, you can try if you want! But what if you don’t wanna re-invent the entire periodic table but still be able to add more materials, elements and substances to your world?
Island of stability
Fear not! For I am here! The first bit you have to decide on is this: is it just a few or many elements you wish to add? If it is a few, the solution is simple: Island of stability! Now what in Divinum is that? As many of you know, and if you don’t, the heavier the elements, the more unstable they get. Anything beyond Uranium has no stable isotopes, or variants of the atom. So it is all radioactive! OH NOES! I hear some scream, but radioactive does not equal danger. If you take uranium for example, dry hump it, sprinkle it over your food, and camp on it for a year or so, it will still pose no danger to you. This is because uranium has a half life of over 4 billion years, so it is really slow.
But as I stated, it gets progressively more unstable, and there is a hypothesised place where it goes from so unstable it is worthless to stable enough that it might match uranium or be sufficiently close to be useful. You can easily plop down 3 new elements in the island of stability to have whatever properties you want! That’s at the risk of getting dated, if you humans ever find this spot in real life. You can stretch it to half a dozen even, and after that, all combinations with other elements are limited only by your imagination in their properties!
Need even moar
If you are like me and love making up things and adding and doing more, just having that puny amount to work with is too limiting. I WANT MOAR! Then going along the proton numbers hoping for another island of stability is dumb. It is not coming for a very long time and doing those leaps and bounds to get there is not feasible, and keep in mind, all of this is artificial. You cannot have mining operations and the likes, and where is the fun if you cannot kill miners in a mine!
So what can we do if we cannot cram more protons into elements and have the system nature gives you poop out more elements to use? We can of course just handwave away, and in some cases, that is fine! But where is the fun in that? This is once more one of those cases where creativity is limitless. A few suggestions I can come up with to spark imagination are:
Additional quantum numbers. Ordinarily the electrons have 3 and spin. These 3 are their atomic shell + 2 that describe “orientation”. If you add more, you can start doing lots of shenanigans.
Additional dimensions that atoms can start accessing for differences using the ordinary quantum numbers.
More particles that can replace electrons (Muon can, but it is short lived).
Additional particles that can go into the nucleus to stabilise it further down the line (thus it is not an island of stability, but a continent of stability that extends out from the normal continent of stable atoms you are familiar with along the island and beyond)
Add more quantum states to protons and neutrons that are similar to the previous.
Higher dimensions there too, for the same reason.
Just to name some quick ones that came to mind. With these, you can easily make as many elements and even alter pre-existing ones to do more jobs and become “different elements” on their own as well! Actually, let me give you a mini practicum on what I have done!
Minipracticum: Nentrofied Elements
I discussed my nentro system in an earlier blogpost; the one I did it in I am sure is Aquatic civilisations. Now what in tarnation is this? Well, it started out at first as I just wanted a system to do energy transfer, storage, etc. But of course you know the rules! Rule #5: Re-usage is better than adding new cogs. So I expanded my nentrosystem, and I got the subatomic particles Nentron, Vorson, and Iteron. They derive their names from spin, linear, and still in Latin, respectively.
So I had my system of power storage, transfer, and such. But I needed a metal stronger than Titanium–Hexonium as I called it–but wait, where did that come from? And I sat down and thought about it. It then hit me: I could do the third option from the list above I suggested with those 3 extra particles! Have Nentrons, Vorsons, and Iterons be able to replace electrons to create stable atomic structures, and tada! I have a whole slew of new elements I can make! How many more… 2 times 10 to the 48th power… that is a lot. I think I am safe for all my elemental and material needs.
Summa Summarum
When it comes to materials and things within a world, there are many ways one can go about it. My struo concept should not be viewed as an absolute or anything, but as a tool to analyse and conceptualise what you want. As chaotic as nature seems in the real world, there is logic behind the insanity, which is why groupings work. None will be perfect, but they are useful, and if you wish to make your world more ordered and structured so it can appear similar to ours, then I hope what I have discussed today is a good start for it. There will be more material-related posts to come, you can bet on that! Good luck!
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Copyright ©️ 2023 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as struo, the periodic table, ways to expand the periodic table, islands of stability, green rocks, and Minovsky materials are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as Nentrofied elements, Hexonium, Nentrons, Vorsons, and Iterons and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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