At the moment, there is no active road maintenance clan in Shartak. In the past we had The Shartak Road Crew and the Civilized Highway Society. The latter is still active, but with only two active members and an idled founder, it's outlived its usefulness, at least as far as coordination goes. I'd like to propose a new clan, not only for maintaining current roads (chopping jungle, adding signposts), but extending the road system for maximum player utility, and beautifying Shartak with more fruit trees and possibly even resource cache rest stops.
Getting from one end of the island to another is a real pain. It's easy enough on the western peninsula with the Durham-York Memorial highway and the recently added Durham Detour, which links the shipwreck-Dalpok road to the DYM, but once you hit York it gets tricky. The York end of the road is in a state of disrepair with jungle outgrowth on a lot of spots and missing signposts, making it pretty easy to lose your way. As far as I can tell, there's no road that links York to Derby, much less Durham/Shipwreck to Derby. It looks like there's been a few attempts to link York to Dalpok/Wiksik, but they all fall short of their destination. On the Native side it's even worse. The CHS discusses a proposed Mountain Loop Highway that bridges Dalpok to Raktam, but I've never been able to find it, so I don't think it ever got built. I know there's a road that links Raktam to Wiksik but last I checked the road stops before you're halfway through, and then you're surrounded in D7 jungle. A lot of that is probably due to low-traffic on the road coupled with slack effort to chop down jungle outgrowth. In short it's all a big mess.
What I want to do is extend the DYM past York, with an intersection at
-70.403,+26.350, which is the point where the path slopes diagonal into the York Peninsula. From what can I tell it will probably have to head diagonally above the swamp, with a river ford crossing at around
-70.350,+26.386, and then more-or-less continue straight east until Derby, with an intersection to Wiksik. Ideally I'd also like to add detour paths linking the highway with any nearby ruins to sleep the night, but we'll have to wait and see. My main concern is Durham-York-Derby, but I'd definitely be interested in adding more consistant roads between the native villages as well, if there's support from Native characters and plenty of driftwood on hand.
As I say, there's more to it than road engineering. I'd be interested in projects to add and maintain fruit trees to places that get a lot of traffic for one reason or another, preferably near roads, lakes and the Hazen River. I'd be interested in adding marked resource caches in various places, either near roads and ruins, or at particularly dangerous areas like swamps. Caches would contain useful items dependant on location, so FAKs/HH, rifles, bullets/blowpipes, darts, machetes, gps kits, etc, with a written obligation to refill if possible. I'd also like to build roads that link villages to faraway resources like grasslands, swamps, and freshwater sources. I've already started doing that in York, building a Swamp Trail and adding bullet caches in various spots around the swamp. Lastly, I'm somewhat enchanted by this idea of island conservation (if that's even possible), so maybe starting fires in heavily forested areas but limiting the area it can burn, protecting grasslands, etc.
This is largely going to be an informal, word-of-mouth project; I'm not bothering with making an in-game clan for it though I'll probably announce it in the
Almanac. What I really need is two things
1) driftwood, lots of it and no strings attached.
2) some show of support. It's definitely not a full-time gig. But if you're like me and you don't have trailblazing, well, it can be damned slow-going to travel off-road, so help is appreciated even if it's only for a day or two at a time.
Thoughts?
Here's the
CHS guide from the Wiki, which is pretty useful.
