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Use the Roads

Increases road preference for the player faction from 0.3 to 0.6.

Back around the 0.95.x updates, the devs reduced the road preference for the player faction, meaning characters would pathfind over long distances in straighter lines. Personally I missed the older level, where if you issued an order from the map, the characters would make their way there sticking to lower/flat ground, and using the roads they find on the way, which meant they also tended to hop from town to town, and encounter fellow road users (and not wander so much into the wilds and straight through beak thing nests)

This means, for example, characters will walk around a mountain rather than bee-line straight over it in many cases.

Movement issued on the screen (as opposed to map) is still direct, so you can go off the trail and explore what's out there, of course, or issue a direct shortcut.

This is all personal taste - back on the old levels HEAPS of people complained, because the routes are sometimes odd (for example, Shark to Clownsteady does a straight S then W via the Slave Market, rather than the obvious, and shorter, SW, and the detour around the mountain range north of Vain is HUGE), but I always liked it. Made me feel my little characters are doing their best to find their way through the world, and feeling out the routes, following tracks, occasionally getting lost because they have the map upside down, and (realistically IMHO) not scaling a mountain if they can walk around it.

There's a little strangeness in the Great Desert because you can't see the roads, so your guys will just hit a seemingly arbitrary point then turn right abruptly. But you'll run into more caravans on the same track.

NOTE:
Some users have reported that this mod's effects persist through removing the mod, and importing the game. Seems odd that it'd survive importing, but if you find that's the case, you can delete this mod, and run your game once with this reset-to-vanilla-value mod: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/workshop/filedetails/?id=3345667570 Easy fix.

If the change does in fact persist, then you shouldn't need to keep the reset mod installed either after saving the game.