Can someone explain people who “world build too much”?

It happened to me because I love Worldbuilding.

I get in a roll and keep developing stuff until I get tired of doing so.

Add a dash of anxiety for not being perceived as "legit" enough in certain fantasy circles, a spoonful constant self-sabotaging perfectionism and a healthy sprinkle of "What-about" and you have a perfect stew of overcompensating worldbuilding.

I mean, I worked on and off for ten years to flesh out Centris' world.

Now that the joke remarks are out of the way...

I don't think there is anything I did for Centris that doesn't serve a purpose. If it didn't serve a purpose I wouldn't have done it. Even if its only to help me get into the headspace of the characters of giving me a sense of immersion into the world.

For example. A thread in this forum asked for Coffee or Tea for your characters. This was my reply

Novus (Left) is totally a caffeine gremlin. Or at least the closest thing in the setting, which is a chewing herb with similar properties. The only drink made from it involves turning it into a dust and mixing it up with a bird egg white. You cook the whole thing in water and the mix of egg white and herbs raises and forms a film over the liquid. You leave it jellify and get cool, you cut the upper layer and cube the rest. Each of this gelatin-esque cubes is dissolved in water and re-heated to drink.

Callis (Right) has a very sensitive tongue and avoids hot and flavorful beverages. He is in favor of cold milk infusions, usually common place in fall and spring, using the snow from the early and late snowfalls to cool it. Most herbs used by him are really soft in flavor and lack any spice or sweetness. Is more like a health drink than something to enjoy.

So far these beverage haven't appeared in Centris. But I get a lot of info about how the world works, how the character work and how they interact with the world that helps me write them, even if these drinks never appear in the book.

I think some people (maybe even myself included) struggle with trying to find a balance between what is necessary and what isn't.

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I sort of gotten a bit frustrated with modern criticism (like CinemaSins) which says that a story has to explain everything or else it's a "plothole" or whatever. Put sometimes there are things that aren't important to the overall story. Like in Disney's Beauty and the Beast, what happened to Belle's mom is not important to the overall narrative of the story. Why she is missing can be something fans can be curious about and even make fan theory or fan fictions about if they wanted to. I think expecting creators to spoon feed you everything ends up with stories which come off a bit too bloated.

Sometimes it is good to just give your audience pieces and let them figure out what is going on. You could also leave it a bit open ended to let people have their own interruptions.

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Worst comes to worst, you can always make a spin off that goes deeper into the lore which hardcore fans can seek out if they are curious.

I'm proud of myself for figuring out how to fit this dude's little secret into my saga

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Backstory or setting detail, and the story you tell in your story, aren't the same thing, and you can't write a truly great novel or write and draw a great comic without both.

Some people put tons and tons of work into their background and setting, creating a really richly detailed world and knowing their characters down to their favourite flavour of milkshake... but they get so invested in hashing all of that out, or writing the fictional history of every continent in their Fantasy world that they either never get around to making an actual story and end up with something more like an RPG setting guide, or they tell a poorly structured story that doesn't start in an interesting place and meanders around, because they enjoy just existing in their world and around their characters so much, they don't realise it's less interesting for other people.

But then there are people on the other end of the scale, who write a rip-roaring story where stuff is going down! People are going places! Stuff is blowing up! ...But they never put any real thought into any background or characters, so everyone is a generic archetype you've seen in a million other comics or anime or light novels, every place is described or drawn with minimal detail... You know like those Isekai comics where every background is that same overused 3D model of a castle that's in every Isekai, and like.. no thought was put into the worldbuilding, so the clothes are all just that sort of... generic "Fantasy dress" you only see in webcomics, where peasants dress in sort of early medieval style clothes, but then the maids and butlers all dress like they're from Victorian England and the male royalty wear early 20th Century formal military uniforms? It's boring, uninspired, it looks like everything else and has no personality. It's basic.

The latter is easier to read, but you'll have forgotten it immediately after reading it. Specific detail is what gives a work personality, and yeah, you can't get too bogged down in it if your goal is to make something the audience can enjoy, but you shouldn't neglect it unless you truly don't mind your work being disposable. Some creators are fine with their work being just a "snack" that somebody consumes and discards, because it can make money, but others want to make stuff with a bit more staying power. If you get that perfect balance of both, that's when you get stuff that really sticks in people's minds, like Fullmetal Alchemist, or Final Fantasy VII.

I do wish that isekai characters would wear different clothes every now and then (I'd love to see a cattlepunk or afro-futurist isekai.)

Bruh, just say you don't know how to make your world interesting outside of making reading material. It's okay, we won't tell anyone, promise

this is a joke, do not come after me pls i don't do well with confrontations

some of us just like figuring out little things, it makes the world come alive! I don't think it's garbage to enjoy worldbuilding, and while I'm definitely not extensive with it, I think it's cool when people know all the little things about their world because they love it so much.

While yes, you can't include every detail, I don't think it's stupid in the slightest. It really is about how you present your information to the audience.

I can explain people who world build too much!

Take JK Rowling, for example. Do you know how wizards relieve themselves of their bodily wastes? I do! Thanks, Rowling!

EDIT - I probably don't want to bring up the subject of JK Rowling right now because she just gets worse every time you hear from here

Yknow people buy Dnd books all the time, people have jobs about the lore of Tolkien books, I'll bet everyone here had a dragonology or wizardology or whatever book as a kid, the angelarium and all future tomorrow's and warhammer and scp archives are all just lore and people love that shit! It gives them a new world to explore the depths of and a new perspective on reality through the lense of an authors (usually multiple authors) imagination. I get that when you're reading through a fiction on ao3 that seems like a standard love triangle you can be blindsided by the info dump of the last 13 wars and revolutions of a minor island off the peninsula of who-what-where-now? But lore itself is fun, in its own way and can be used in lots of interesting ways to tell stories that you can't with just a few characters, like alot of people have said previously in this thread its not what you write its how you write it.

I tried to work with writers for some years and I read a lot of the
giant world - no story / story which is not understandable scripts.
As an artist I enjoy a very detailed character description and this is something which is, in my opinion,
very important. I like to know every little detail about the character and that´s also something which
is interesting to read for me. From their parents/where they were born over how they grew up to
what´s in their fridge, which medicine they take, what they read etc
And again, this is just my perspective as an artist reading scripts: there are many scripts with
crazy big, detailed worlds with characters you can´t count with nothing interesting happening in
the world. I love scripts with 1-3 main characters which focus on the characters and not on the world(s)
around them. What do they want, how do they get it, what gets in their way etc the normal storybuilding
blocks and not 50 characters in universes that I don´t understand, how is the reader of the comic or novel
gonna understand that?

What? No, I was just talking about that tweet explaining how wizards defecate.

To go back to the main question : Can someone explain people who “world build too much”?

One very down to earth reason for me is that I like to keep my mind busy thinking about my world/characters.

Since it takes much longer to write my stories than to create them in my head I keep adding stuff to my world every day.

Some people like that kind of story.
A friend of mine loves the movie Dune, citing its world building in particular, while I was bored by it being more of a character guy.

Ideally a story should have a balance of good world building, plot and characters,
but I find that I can forgive a dull plot or shallow world if the characters are engaging.

So I think there's an audience for a world building focused story, even if it's not you or me.