I'm thinking of having natural paths in my town as either all of my paths, or at least for the smaller pathways that just lead to something out of the way. And I have a few questions:
1. What is the best way to get good natural paths in the first place?
2. How long does it take?
3. Do they last forever, or do you have to run on them everyday to keep them?
1. Making a new character and plotting their house where you want the path to be. Delete that character and voila a faster way of getting dirt paths. Doing this for the horizontal paths is probably the best. If you want to do the vertical ones, you'll probably just have to keep running, get other people to help too (but only trustworthy people).
2. It takes quite a while a few weeks to get a solid path, well that also depends on how wide you want the paths to be.
3. They don't actually last forever, come winter again and most of that path will be replenished all over again because of snow. Also if you don't run on them often the grass will start growing back so yeah you should at least run on them once a week at least to kinda maintain it.
If you track down some natural dirt type QR paths, yes, they'll last until you get rid of them - but they'll require a little maintenance since the seasons change the color of the grass/snow/etc.
I think it's ultimately more difficult to try and wear the paths down manually by running all over them though, because as it's been said above, winter tends to cover them up... and also, good lawd, it's just one hell of a lot of running. So both require their own specific kinds of upkeep; it depends on how much time you want to put into it, I guess.
