Scholar Quest
yangshaojun44 downloadsGamify your academic workflow with XP and levels.
- Overview
- Scorecard
- Updates8
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 (credentials, publications, grants & patents, recognition, supervision & service); 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)
- Install BRAT from the community catalog
- Open BRAT settings → Add Beta Plugin → enter
Zhao-Jun-Yong/scholar-quest - 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
- Install the plugin (Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search "Scholar Quest")
- Open Obsidian — the career calibration wizard appears automatically on first launch
- Enter your academic history across credentials, publications, grants & patents, recognition, and supervision & service — rough estimates are fine — then click "Set starting level", or click "Start at Level 1" to begin fresh
- Open the sidebar via the graduation cap icon in the ribbon
- 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.
| 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
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).
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.