GPlates for fantasy plate tectonics???

[virginiarm]

I'm super new here and hoping to make a map for a new world building project. I'm making a world and I want it to be really geologically precise. It needs to have a fundamental history of plate tectonics. I'm not sure where to start though. I've heard a little about GPlates and I'm wondering if anyone has experience with it. Is it something I should try out? Can I make my own map with it?
I'm a hyper-beginner. I think I need to emphasize that.

[Charerg]

The answer is, it depends...

You can draw the basic outlines of various continents in GPlates, and specify where they are located at a specific time in history. For example, I could move continent A to the equator at 200 Mya, and then change time to 0 Mya (Present) and move A to the North Pole. The program would then be able to animate the movement of the continent.

However, GPlates isn't a simulator, so if I wanted the continent to move in a more complex fashion than from point A to B at linear speed, I'd have to specify the location of the continent at various times. So it does require a degree of manual input to get a good result, and because of that the user needs to understand the basic principles of plate tectonics (or at least it's useful to know them).

That said, if you want your world to have a plausible tectonic history, then GPlates is definitely a good way of accomplishing that. To learn more, I recommend checking out these short tutorials by Astrographer:

Using gplates for realistic worldbuilding
Continental Drift the gplates way

He also has a few other posts on GPlates, but those two should allow you to build a basic model.