Scholar Quest

Scholar Quest

An Obsidian plugin that gamifies academic work with XP, levels, and milestone tracking.

Design philosophy: Gamification should accelerate productivity, not become a task itself. XP is awarded silently in the background; wins surface automatically.

Features

• Auto-detected XP — earn points for reading papers, creating and developing atomic notes, and writing manuscript drafts
• Career calibration — one-time onboarding wizard estimates your starting level from your academic history (degrees, publications, grants, talks, supervision, peer reviews); re-runnable any time via the command palette
• Milestone system — 14 project types with predefined milestone templates; mark milestones complete via the sidebar or command palette
• Sidebar panel — tier avatar, XP progress bar, daily word count with session bonus tracker, streak counter, recent activity feed, achievements, and active projects with pending milestones
• Achievement system — 36 pixel art achievements tied to XP milestones, level thresholds, activity counts, and career events
• Daily streak — opens Obsidian each day to build a streak; displayed with a pixel art flame icon from day 2
• Writing session bonus — earn a one-time daily bonus when you write 500+ net new words in a manuscript
• Daily presence — small XP reward for opening Obsidian each day
• Tier avatar progression — 12 visual tiers from dormant egg to Nova; your avatar evolves in the sidebar as you level up
• Manual log — quickly log off-Obsidian activities (data analysis, fieldwork) in ~2 seconds
• Level system — 12 tiers, levels 1–60; XP per level scales linearly to level 20, then flattens at 6,000 XP/level for long-term play
• Status bar — ambient level indicator: Lv 7 · ████░░ · +30 today
• Fully configurable — vault paths, tags, XP values, milestone templates, and tier names all editable in settings

Getting Started

1. Install the plugin (Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search "Scholar Quest")
2. Open Obsidian — the career calibration wizard appears automatically on first launch
3. Enter your academic history (rough estimates are fine) to set a starting level, or click "Start at Level 1" to begin fresh
4. Open the sidebar via the graduation cap icon in the ribbon
5. Work normally — XP accumulates in the background as you read papers, develop notes, and hit milestones

XP Sources

Tier Progression

12 tiers from dormant egg to Nova. Your sidebar avatar evolves as you level up.

A typical active researcher reaches the flat zone (Wisp, level 21) after about 3 years of active use. A senior professor importing a full career history starts around level 21.

Achievements

36 pixel art achievements unlock automatically based on your progress:

• XP milestones — Getting Warmed Up, In the Zone, Veteran, Established, Well-Cited, Distinguished, Eminent
• Level thresholds — Kindled, Hatched, Risen, Luminary, Nova
• Activity counts — Bookworm, Scholar, Voracious Reader, Prolific, Zettelkasten, Grand Zettelkasten, Wordsmith, Marathon Writer, Endless Writer, Deep Thinker, On a Roll, Relentless, Milestone Chaser, Project Veteran
• Career events — Under Review, Accepted!, Funded!, Graduate!, On Stage, Doctor!
• First actions — First Steps, First Idea, First Read, Milestone Unlocked, First Draft

Unlocked achievements appear as pixel art chips in the sidebar; locked ones are dimmed.

Recommended Vault Setup

Scholar Quest works with any structure, but is designed around:

• Paper notes in a sources folder (Atlas/Sources/ by default), with a keywords frontmatter field tracking reading status via emoji (📥 → 👀 → ✅)
• Atomic notes in an ideas folder (Atlas/Ideas/ by default), tagged with a card tag (cards/atom by default)
• Project notes in a projects folder (Efforts/ by default), tagged by project type (e.g. project/manuscript)

All paths and tags are configurable in Settings → Scholar Quest.

Commands

• Scholar Quest: Log activity — log a manual academic activity
• Scholar Quest: Complete milestone — mark a project milestone done
• Scholar Quest: Show XP summary — see your current level, total XP, and today's gain
• Scholar Quest: Import career history — re-run the career calibration wizard

Configuration

Go to Settings → Scholar Quest to configure:

• Vault paths — sources folder, ideas folder, projects folder
• Tags — atom note tag, project type tags
• XP values — per activity type, writing session bonus threshold, daily presence XP
• Milestone templates — add, remove, or rename milestones per project type
• Manual activities — custom activities with custom XP values

Project Types

manuscript · conference · invited-talk · peer-review · grant · report · thesis · data · software · teaching · workshop · supervision · service · outreach

Roadmap

• Zotero integration for richer reading progress tracking
• Shareable profile card

Development

git clone https://github.com/Zhao-Jun-Yong/scholar-quest.git
cd scholar-quest
npm install
npm run dev    # watch mode — rebuilds on save and copies to vault
npm test       # run tests

Citation

If you use Scholar Quest in your work, please cite it:

Yong, Z.-J. (2026). Scholar Quest: Gamify your academic workflow with XP and levels (v1.0.0).
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19467725

A CITATION.cff file is included for automated citation tools (GitHub, Zotero, Zenodo).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.