Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
[IMAGE: https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/alonicus/23tH5eLPaqvcPDdq9FKF6CjccpPyvVFqJoiULatXRyUqxSDkFDgaM1SSaR9yTRi5wLn9h.jpg]
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Containers
How do people in your fantasy or scifi setting move things around ?
You can tell a lot about a civilisation from the way they move goods around. Nowadays, we use things like cardboard boxes and disposable plastic mailing bags for small goods, and standardised shipping containers for bulk transport over long distances. The former are cheap, disposable, and easily handled, but not really re-usable or good for the environment. The latter are highly reusable, but require a lot of infrastructure - cranes, specialised ships and lorries, port facilities etc. In the past, we've used barrels (economical, reusable and mostly bio-degradable, but cumbersome and not hugely standardised), and in earlier times things like pithoi (two-handled clay urns, very practical and reusable, but a bit fragile). In the bronze age, tin, copper and bronze were transported in ingots cleverly shaped a bit like an ox-hide thus having a handle at each corner, which were also idea as ballast in ships.
So how are goods in your world moved ? Are there any unique solutions to unusual types of produce, or to specific terrain challenges ? Is the packaging reusable, or easy to repurpose for something else (perhaps scifi cargo pods being sent to a colony that can be emptied out and hooked together to make habitats), or perhaps the society prefers to use containers that are just thrown away after a single use because they are cheap. How standardised are they, and does the choice of container create any issues in terms of infrastructure, resource use or pollution ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂