Low Tech Solarpunk Ideas for a Fantasy Setting

There will be some overlap between this page and others, because a tremendous amount of solarpunk involves reexamining old ways to see if they make sense in a new context, or when combined with another practice, or with modern updates. Because these techniques are old, and the fantasy genre has a rich history of anachronistically mixing historical elements to make a good setting or interesting story, it probably makes as much sense as ever to pluck these ideas from their location and time and mix them together.

Because solarpunk societies fit their climate and region, one of the best ways to find relevant technologies (includeing architecture, city planning) is to read the history of similar regions to what you're writing. (After all, there wasn't generally much choice but to adapt to the climate, weather, and available materials.) But it's also fair to say that some practices which flourished in one place and time could have worked in similar circumstances elsewhere but never did (such as the Chinese wheelbarrow).

Food Preservation

Moving and Using Water

Wind

The Sun

Solar panels might be out but there are plenty of other interesting ways to use solar power.

Solar Concentrators - There's a ton of different designs (from parabolic mirrors to giant lenses) for use in all kinds of purposes, but the important thing for a fantasy setting is that they're generally pretty simple. Mirrors (which in this case would probably be polished metal because making big sheets of smooth glass is hard), a framework, and mathematical formulas for the overall shape, and you can produce incredible heat – up to 3,500 °C. In real life wood and coal met most of society's heat and metalworking needs, but a society that went all in on solar concentrators could find all kinds of clever configurations, layouts, and scales to use them at. Small, concave, handheld mirrors for starting fires, Scheffler reflectors bouncing light into households, bakeries, or common kitchens to run ovens, parabolic troughs on rooftops heating water in pipes, perhaps cities specifically built where the local rock formations allow for massive solar furnaces or even something like fields of mirrors being manually (or magically) aimed at the right furnace. A mix of some or all of these could give a fantasy region a visually distinctive character.

If you want to go a bit later in the timeline, solar concentrators were even used to generate steam which was then used to drive water pumps for agriculture. And to run a basic refrigerator.

If you want to get even fancier, Caustic Soda Locomotives and solar steam generators existed contemporaneously and though they never were IRL, they could be combined to set up solar powered steam trains with 1800s technology.

Agriculture

Working with Trees

Architecture

Solarpunk structures will generally be designed to fit local conditions and use local materials - especially in a lower tech setting where there's less choice to do otherwise. (Although a setting where an overuse of magic serves as a stand-in for oil and allows for lazy one-size-fits-all design at an environmental cost could be cool). Architectural designs and urban planning from basically all of human history prior to the last few hundred years probably qualifies as long as the climate and available materials are similar to your setting. This section will call out a few interesting examples but there's simply so much out there it won't be comprehensive.

Societal Systems

There's a ton of alternative ways to organize and run a society, many of which have been done at some place and time, sometimes successfully for hundreds of years. Capitalism doesn't like acknowledge that other systems can work and our current society has done a fair job of burying some of this history. This is one area where I hope we can expand this article in the future, though I'll acknowledge that I'm not terribly qualified to gather and write up these snippets of other cultures.