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 in project files
• Career calibration — onboarding wizard estimates your starting level from your academic history across 6 categories; paste your ORCID iD to pre-fill publications, grants, peer reviews, talks, and awards automatically; re-opens with previous values pre-filled so you only update what has changed
• 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 — open 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 any project file
• 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 — browse a searchable catalog of 52 activities across 10 discipline categories (wet lab, fieldwork, teaching, outreach, clinical research, and more); build a personal shortlist; log in ~2 seconds via the command palette
• 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, milestone templates, and tier names all editable in settings

Installation

Community plugin catalog (pending Obsidian review) Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search "Scholar Quest"

BRAT (available now — recommended for early adopters)

1. Install BRAT from the community catalog
2. Open BRAT settings → Add Beta Plugin → enter Zhao-Jun-Yong/scholar-quest
3. Reload Obsidian

Manual Download main.js and manifest.json from the latest release, place both in .obsidian/plugins/scholar-quest/, and reload Obsidian.

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 — optionally paste your ORCID iD to pre-fill most fields automatically, then review and adjust; or fill in manually. Click "Set starting level", or "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

Activity	XP	How
Paper skimmed	20	Reading status field set to 👀 for the first time (once per paper)
Paper completed	50	Reading status field set to ✅ for the first time (once per paper)
New atomic note	30 → 15 → 5	New file with atom tag; diminishing returns after 10/30 per day
Atomic note developed	10	+50 words or +1 wikilink (once/hr per file)
Writing progress	20	Per 100 net new words above peak in any project file
Writing session bonus	50	Once per day when 500+ words written
Daily presence	5	Opening Obsidian each day
Project milestones	20–300	Via sidebar or "Complete milestone" command
Manual activities	15–50	Via "Log activity" command — 52-activity catalog

Career Calibration

The career wizard awards starting XP across 19 fields in 6 categories. Re-opening it (via "Import career history") pre-fills all previous values — only update what has changed, and the XP difference is applied automatically.

ORCID import: paste your ORCID iD (or https://orcid.org/... URL) at the top of the wizard to pre-fill publications, grants, peer reviews, invited talks, awards, and editorial roles from your public profile. Fields that were auto-filled are highlighted with an accent border. Three fields have no ORCID equivalent (students supervised, theses examined) and remain manual.

Category	Field	XP
Credentials	PhD	1,200
	Masters	400
	Postdoctoral positions (count of positions, not years)	400 each
Publications	First-author papers	500 each
	Co-author papers	150 each
	Authored books / monographs	2,000 each
	Edited volumes	700 each
	Software / datasets released	350 each
Grants & Patents	Grants as PI	900 each
	Grants as co-I	200 each
	Patents granted	450 each
Recognition	Invited talks / keynotes	200 each
	Conference presentations	100 each
	Major awards / honors	400 each
Supervision & Service	PhD students supervised to completion	300 each
	Masters students supervised to completion	150 each
	PhD theses examined (external/internal)	150 each
	Peer reviews completed	80 each
	Editorial board roles	300 each

A fresh postdoc (PhD + 3 papers + a few talks) starts around Level 8. A mid-career researcher starts around Level 13. A senior professor with a full career history starts around Level 24–25.

Tier Progression

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

Tier	Name	Levels
T1	Dormant	1–5
T2	Stirring	6–10
T3	Kindling	11–15
T4	Breaking	16–20
T5	Wisp	21–25
T6	Flicker	26–30
T7	Blaze	31–35
T8	Inferno	36–40
T9	Drake	41–45
T10	Wyrm	46–50
T11	Dragon	51–55
T12	Nova	56–60

A typical active researcher reaches the flat zone (Wisp, level 21) after about 3 years of active use.

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:

• Reference notes in a sources folder (Atlas/Sources/ by default), with a frontmatter field tracking reading progress — set it to your skimmed value (👀 by default) when you skim a source, and your completed value (✅ by default) when you finish it
• Developed notes in a notes folder (Atlas/Ideas/ by default), tagged to mark them as eligible for XP
• Project notes in a projects folder (Efforts/ by default), tagged by project type (e.g. project/manuscript)

All folder paths, tag names, and frontmatter field names are configurable in Settings → Scholar Quest.

Commands

Command	Action
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-open the career calibration wizard (pre-fills previous values)
Scholar Quest: Open Scholar Quest panel	Open the sidebar

Configuration

Go to Settings → Scholar Quest to configure:

• Vault paths — sources folder, notes folder, projects folder
• Reading tracking — the frontmatter field and the values that mean "skimmed" and "completed"
• Note tracking — atom tag and the frontmatter field it lives in
• XP values — writing rate, session bonus threshold, daily presence, and more
• Manual log activities — build a personal shortlist from a 52-activity catalog; browse by category or search
• Milestone templates — add custom milestones per project type (built-in milestone XP values are fixed; custom milestones capped at 200 XP)
• Tier names — rename the 12 tiers to whatever suits you

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
• Social layer (leaderboard, mission board) — planned after community adoption

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 (v1.5.0).
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19467725

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

Data Access

Scholar Quest reads file paths and frontmatter from your vault in two specific situations:

• First-run vault scan — on initial install, all markdown files are scanned once to award historical XP for papers already marked as read and notes already tagged as atomic. This is a one-time operation; subsequent XP is awarded incrementally as you work.
• Project milestone initialisation — on each startup, project files in your configured projects folder are scanned to ensure milestone records exist for them.

No file content or metadata is sent outside Obsidian. All plugin data is stored locally in .obsidian/plugins/scholar-quest/data.json.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.