World Building: How Natural Resources Can Shape Your World

What makes a story? In the broadest possible sense a story is when someone wants a thing, struggles to get the thing, and then at the end, whether they get the thing or don’t get the thing, they change or grow along the way.

Natural resources are the thing of all things — the goal of all goals. They are what we have built our entire civilisation around. They are the catalysts for expansion, exploitation, belief, rebellion, and innovation. Where and how we live is almost completely determined by us wanting things and progression is us overcoming obstacles in order to get them.

Natural resources are the perfect thing for you to mine (that’s right, you heard me) when telling your story, and your world building should utilise this.

This blog will help you make resources meaningful — not just as lore, but as plot. Not just as scenery, but as stakes. Not just as things, but as goals.

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1. Buried Treasures: What Does Your World Offer?

Every substance your world produces — metal, crystal, oil, salt, unicorn tears, or the self important overly ambitious dirt known as clay— has narrative weight. If it can be mined, harvested, refined, or fought over, it’s worth building a story around.

• What kinds of minerals, metals, gems, fuels, and magical materials exist?
• Are any resources rare, dangerous, unstable or limited?
• Are there materials unique to this world or setting that play a central role in how magic, warfare, or society functions?

If the empire is built on coal, the loss of it is a national crisis — looking at you Britain. If the lifeblood of all magic comes from condensed hot air drawn from this blog, then this blog becomes something worth dying for.

Your world isn’t just producing resources; it’s depending on them. As with character flaws and magical abilities, limitations are what makes them interesting.

Stories thrive on tension and conflict. Resources create it immediately: scarcity, competition, dependency, and desire.

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2. Location, Location, Exploitation: Geography and Power

Where resources are found defines who has power; and who wants to take it.

The uneven distribution of resources is one of the most direct ways to build conflict into your setting. A desert with one oasis. A nation with the majority of the world’s yttrium, needed to make many essential devices. A mountain range that hides a goat called Barnaby who has magical milk.

• Where are resources located?
• Are they buried, guarded, hidden, cursed, or fought over?
• Do some people extract resources from others' land? Through trade, conquest, colonialism?

Geographic imbalance sets the stage for invasion, alliance, theft, siege, extraction, and rebellion. Who has what is set up? Who wants what is the plot?

A once peaceful nation with nothing but obsidian might become a sword-making powerhouse. A city with nothing to offer may be forced to turn to piracy.

Use resources to drive desire. Use geography as an obstacle to that desire.

“He who controls the spice controls the universe" — Baron Harkonnen, Dune (Film, 1984)

Whoever taxes the spice controls the people.

Resources are leverage. In war, in peace, in marriage, in divorce.

• Who controls each key resource?
• Are there monopolies? Embargoes? Black markets?
• Are there governments, guilds, religious orders, or bands of outlaws?
• How do resources shape alliances, invasions, and power plays?
• Can control be lost, bought, inherited, or sabotaged?
• Is access determined by birth, merit, money, magic, or coercion?

As with geographical distribution, resource control is story fuel. It drives motives and shapes and topples empires. It creates conflict between classes, castes, races, nations. It is the source of corruption, reform, revolution and resistance.

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3. Location, Location, Extraction: The Technology of Extraction

How you extract a resource says a lot about your culture.

Do people dig by hand? Use invasive fuel guzzling drills? Summon earth elementals by singing Rick Astley's 1987 number 1 smash hit Never Going to Give Up? The method of extraction shows how developed your inhabitants are, and their ethics and attitude towards the environment they inhabit.

• What tools, technologies, or spells are used to extract or refine resources?
• Who works the mines or harvests the forests?
• Are the systems just or exploitative?
• Is there resistance to any of the extraction processes?

Thinking carefully about the extraction processes in your world can help you explore class conflict, environmental destruction, and technological progression.

Give your society rough hands with dirty finger nails and or soft hands and fat fingers. Make their relationship with resources and the manner in which they extract resources say something about them.

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4. From Field to Fork: Everyday Resources

Resources aren’t just about empires and war. They are, of course, used in and affect everyday life.

What people build with, cook with, heal with, trade with; those are foundations of daily life.

• What do people use for food, fabric, shelter, tools, and fuel?
• Are some materials considered precious, taboo, or sacred?
• Do certain professions revolve around a key resource?
• How are resources connected to tradition or community?

What your different inhabitants wear — whether the finest spun silk or the roughest sackcloth — what they live in — whether a jewel incrusted castle or a simple mud hut — what they eat — whether Kraken caviar or worm head soup — all helps colour the fabric of your world and the people living in it.

The use of resources in medicine can also say a lot about your world.

• Do people rely on a special healing leaf, or on industrial vaccines?
• Are fungi, bacteria or honey crucial in the development of penicillin or antibiotics?
• How are these resources extracted and distributed?

Your world feels real when your resources aren't just hoarded by kings — but woven into the lives of your butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers.

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5. Fuelling Progress: Economic Foundations

What powers your world, powers your plot.

A society built on whale oil is different from one powered by solar sails, or elemental fire. If magic is a resource, who owns the supply chain? If electricity runs on rare crystals, what happens when the crystals run dry?

• Which resources are critical to industry, trade, transportation, or magic?
• What are the key exports and imports?
• Are there monopolies, guilds, cartels, or state-run extraction systems?
• What happens to those without access?

Resources don’t just shape trade: they shape inequality, dependency, and desperation.

A struggling mining town might gamble the stability of the very ground they live on to mine even deeper. A noble house might lose its influence when a stronger, cheaper alloy is discovered.

The plot thickens not when resources exist, but when someone relies on them and something threatens that supply.

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6. The Cost of Progress: Environmental Impact

As my boy, Sir Issac Newton put it, ‘for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Resources are no different. Prosperity and progress always comes at a cost.

Deforestation, poisoned rivers, drained marshes, disrupted magical ecosystems — these aren’t just side effects. They’re consequences. And consequences create stakes. And stakes create story.

• What has been damaged, lost, or corrupted due to resource extraction?
• Are animals extinct? Magical realms wounded? Seasons thrown off balance?
• Who does this affect?

Environmental impact can become plot: the forest god awakens. The coral reef withers. The storms come more often. The dry season lasts too long.

Environmental impact is the price of progress. And stories can be built on the tension of this changing world.

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7. Running Dry: Sustainability and Survival

“He who can destroy a thing (spice) controls it.” — Paul Atreides, Frank Herbert’s Dune

Nothing lasts forever.

And the end of a resource can be the beginning of a story.

• What happens when a vital material is almost gone?
• Are people seeking alternatives? Hoarding the last reserves?
• Are new resources being discovered or created?

A collapsing mine. A dying tree. A magical well that’s lost its magic. These are not just environmental events — they are plot hooks. They drive migration, panic, reinvention, or war.

Scarcity forces change. Change drives story.

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8. Power of Nature: Renewable Resources

Renewable resources — nuclear, wind, sunlight, or the tears of Manchester United soccer fans — offer a different kind of power (disclaimer: It's football not soccer but Americans…).

Renewable resources are often more sustainable but no less political. Sacred solar groves, wind-harvesting towers, deep ocean mills, or Old Trafford Stadium may become sites of great political, military, economical or even sacred importance.

• What renewable resources exist?
• How are they managed, shared, taxed, or hoarded?
• Are some cultures more harmonious with nature, while others strip it bare?
• Are magical resources or energy finite or limitless? If renewable, how are they renewed?

In storytelling, renewables can offer cultural contrast. One society might produce 35% of the world’s pollution and another is spending a considerable amount of the time cleaning out yogurt pots. One society may worship the river it drinks from; another may dam it and sell the water. Both claim righteousness. Conflict begins. Story time.

The story of nature is the story of balance. Resources — and how people treat them — can tell you who a culture is before a single word of dialogue.

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9. Sacred Stones: Cultural and Religious Meaning

Resources gain narrative weight when they carry symbolism. This is true thematically and internally. A stone may represent time, or stability within your writing and it may represent time and stability within your world.

Think of how you can marry these external themes with the internal use or place of any given resource.

• Are any resources considered holy, cursed, or symbolic?
• Are there taboos around harvesting or using them?
• Are certain rituals or holidays tied to specific materials?
• Do rival cultures revere the same resource for different reasons?

Beyond the practical think bout the sacral or ritualistic resources. If a local dye is used to mark coming-of-age ceremonies, or a rare flower is burned for burial rites, then that material means something. It ties resource to emotion, not just economics.

If one culture burns magical trees as fuel, and another buries their dead beneath its roots, conflict is inevitable. Story time.

Use sacred materials to drive belief, identity, tension, and misunderstanding. Let them spark wars. Let them heal wounds. Let them divide and unite. Let them create conflict and tell a story.

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Conclusion

Natural resources are the fuel of civilisation and the engine of conflict, culture, and change. When welded into your world building with care, they can do more than just decorate your world, they can drive your story.

From the sacred to the every day, resources shape how societies live, fight, love, and die. They influence power structures, spark wars, birth religions, and define identities. They are not just things characters want; they are the reasons characters must act. 

So when you build your world, don’t stop at naming your magic metals and your talking trees. Ask who needs it? Who suffers for it? Who profits? Who believes in it? Who burns it? Who protects it? Who lives and dies without it?

Let natural resources create tension, conflict and change and, in turn, they will help bring your story to life.

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More World Building

Are you keen to dive even deeper? You can download our World Building Worksheet and World Building Document for free from our Resources store. These documents explore everything you’ve just read, and much, much, much, much more…

Other blogs in our World Building series include:

• How to Build a Map That Shapes Your World
• How to Choose the Right Genre (and Make It Your Own)
• How to Build Characters That Shape Your World

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