I know, ew. There are a ton of people who do not like this process and this concept, but unfortunately, we kind of have to. On numerous occasions. (No pun intended) The rationale, again, is because we are dealing with a huge world, and we want to be as realistic and convincing as possible. Your characters are people too, and they deserve to have a world that makes sense, at the very least. Not keeping track of the numbers can lead to numerous problems down the line, especially if you're dealing with life-altering events that will be remembered for as long as your characters live.

This list of things you need to start figuring out the numbers for is not exhaustive, but here we go.

1. Population. It can range from the family to big-time rungs like towns, kingdoms, and continents. Even organizations like companies, armies, schools, and palaces.

2. Percentages. Say you have a main race and a few smol ones. You need to figure out why they're called majority and minorities in the first place. How many main-race-individuals would be found in a pool of ten people, and how many smol-race individuals are included in the mix?

3. Death Rate. People need to die in your world for it to make sense. Hoe many people die from natural disasters? From exposure to harmful stuff in your SF world? From sickness? From old age?

4. Money. You need to know how currency starts, travels, and ends.

5. Birth and Infant Survival Rates. Babies can't just survive into adulthood al the time for all people. This could lead to a bloat in population, and if that's the case in your world, you also need to be prepared to face the numbers for that as a consequence.

Even if they're never going to make it to your actual story, assigning numbers to stuff will help you in setting reasonable limits to your world, as well as in visualizing how stuff move and go around inside it.

Here are some tips to help you further in this task:

Use real-life data.
It doesn't have to be on the dot, but look through records of populations or death rates from a specific time period that you imagine to be near your desired setting. Take note of geographical conditions, socio-political set-up, and other circumstances. Try to imagine what would happen or how would the graph look like if you introduce an SF element or something. Look at multiple sources too, in order to make sure that your data is as accurate as possible.

Use what is necessary.
When real-life isn't available, you need to put your foot down on how much/many is enough. Figure out how many people need to work on jobs, handle companies, or teach at schools. How many companies does it take to run an economy on a certain product? When it comes to food consumption, how do people in your world eat? How do they get their meals? How do they trade it? The fastest way to figure this out is to decide how much a single person eats per day and amplify that to how many people are there in a unit of land/place. Keeping track of these details is also what brings you a step closer to building a functional society.

See the big picture.
With numbers comes a strong introduction of the reality of your world. Think in percentages. If a city has a population of a million, 1% of that is still 10,000 people. Be careful in saying something is rare at x% without running the numbers first. 10,000 people isn't unique. Not really.

Be careful in setting it too small too. If you say the ratio of magical vs non-magical person is 1 every 50,000, even if you have a population of 4 million, that's just 80 people. Even if you divide them into factions, it's too small to even build a Hogwarts out of. When they fight, it would look more like that airport squabble in Avengers: Civil War.

Another area to take note of are the death rates. In your constructed world, you should be able to match up death and birth together. With high death rates, your world shouldn't look like how our world look like today. Be careful of building a world where people just live long lives and almost nothing kills them. With so few deaths and a lot of possible births, your world will become so bloated you'll have trouble keeping up with the wonky population numbers. Having knowledge about exponential growth modelling and extrapolation methods will be helpful.

Visualize.
If you must, make charts, graphs, and maps. Keep track of your population in a Google Sheet. Try to see it how God would have from heaven, because that's what building worlds really feels like. Just a dumber version, that is. Google Earth and Maps are valuable tools in helping you test the population of a place as well as figuring out how people can get from Point A to Point B with and without transportation.

And as we close, here are some questions that can help you get close to putting numbers into everything.

- Do these numbers really need to be this high/low? Does the story require it? If you can tone it down or recalibrate it, you probably should.

- Are these numbers sustainable? How could one ragtag group of teenagers deal with an entire empire that's been around for hundereds of years with huge intelligence and plans in the making? Is functionality still plausible of you take what percentage of society from it?

- What happens in real-life if a similar SF phenomenon happened? What about in rebellions and societal disarray? In plagues?

Reference
LRC. (n.d.). Where & How Writers Need To Do The Math. Springhole. Retrieved January 31, 2023, from https://springhole.net/writing/where-and-how-writers-need-to-do-the-math.htm.

As a mathematician, I'm surrounded by numbers from the day I entered my degree. But, even if numbers make you uncomfortable, sometimes, you just gotta. Ask help from a friend or search up simulations in the internet to do the calculations for you. Nevertheless, you can actually do away with this step, but be prepared to face uncomfy questions later down the road. If you're still not traumatized, continue to the next article: General Points in Building Worlds.

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