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 — 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 (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

Activity	XP	How
Paper skimmed	20	keywords frontmatter: 📥 → 👀 (once per paper)
Paper completed	50	keywords frontmatter: → ✅ (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 in a manuscript 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

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. 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:

• Reference notes in a sources folder (Atlas/Sources/ by default), with a frontmatter field tracking reading progress via three values — unread, skimmed, and completed (emoji or text, your choice)
• 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 the frontmatter field names 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, notes folder, projects folder
• Tags — note tag, project type tags
• 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)

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 (v1.2.0).
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19467725

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

License

MIT — see LICENSE.