I used to use tons of notepad documents to plan out worlds. Then started using MS Excel and later switched to using Apache Open Office. Figured I'd upload the spreadsheet I've been using to make zoric and other worlds in case anybody else wants an easy way to organize plans for a world.
First, you do need to download Apache Open Office. It is a completely free open source program like Microsoft Office Suite, but free. https://www.openoffice.org
Second, the spreadsheet: http://www.tuwr.net/~tu/WorldPlanner.ods
Info and Details about the spreadsheet
7 tabs: Buildings, Items, Bui Specific Vars, Building Vars, Player Vars, Server Vars, and Time Vars
Buildings Tab - Planning out your Buildings.dat file
# - Bdat number of the building (useful for scripting) - Best not to change this or it might mess up the Bui Specific Var page
Name - Buildings name
Type - ie, manufacturing, production, retail, etc
Level - if your using level restrictions
Primary Use - if you want to leave notes to yourself about what the building does if the name isn't descriptive
Employee Skill - skill the building will employ
Construction Mats - what is needed to build the building
Buys - write down things the building will buy
Sells - write down things the building will sell
*note - if you click and drag buildings around, use the Data->Sort tool, or add/remove rows, the building listing in the Bui Specific Var tab will get messed up. Using the drop down menus at the top of the spreadsheet to filter what is shown is fine though. If you do want to do the other stuff, you will have to relink the the Bui specific Var tab with the Buildings tab. Basically, the *only* way to change the order of the names is to manually retype them or via COPY (not CUT) and pasting them to change what they have.
Items - planning item details - The list contains all the games default items and their values (copied from tuwr so it may not be up to date, lol). Can use the existing items and values as a reference and just change the items needed or if you want to get more advanced, you could delete all the items listed in the tab and make your own from scratch, including manually changing the type and hunger/thirst values of each item. I did have another tab that kinda helped in doing that but it's not in the download because I'd like to simplify it a bit.
# - Item # the game uses
Name - items name
Type - whatever types you might want to use. Food, Drink, building material, car industry, fuel industry, etc. It's purely for the sake of easier sorting stuff and keeping track of what items are used for.
Made In - if you want to record what building makes the item
F / D Value - the Food or Drink benefit from consuming a food or drink item
Weight - if you want items ot have a weight when limiting inventory capacity
Ingredients - The recipe for making the item, ie, 3 = 5 power, 10 oil
Bui Specific Vars - For recording what specific vars do in different buildings if a var wont have the same use in every building it's used in.
# - Building Number
Name - Building Name (automatically copied from the Buildings tab)
1 up to 128 - Var # usage
Building Vars, Player Vars, Server Vars, Time Vars - For recording what each var is used for in your scripts along with what each value for the var represents. Recording what vars are used for is something that I have found invaluable when scripting.
# - Var #
Usage - what your planning to use the var for
Any Number and # columns - these can be used to record what the var is used for or to record what each specific value of the var is being used for by your scripts.
*For Building Vars, this is to record vars that will have the *same* usage in every building.