Big Walk: The Train, the Chairlift and How Not to Get Lost

Getting around The Island runs on 57 markers in five layers: 7 train stations, 6 chairlift markers, 7 broadcast stations, 12 telescopes and 25 trail stations. Switch all five on at once and you can see everything the island gives you for covering ground and keeping track of each other.

You still walk to a station. What these systems save you is the walk back.

How to unlock the train and get on it

The blue tower opens the train, and it runs clockwise around the island. It does not stop at the stations, so boarding means getting on while it is moving. That is the thing groups get wrong the first time, because standing on the platform waiting for it to pull up does not work.

Six of the seven stations have a Clock marked at them and every Clock on the island is at a station. The odd one out is 3481, 1830 in the north. The train layer on its own shows how the seven sit relative to each other, which is what you want when deciding whether to walk to the next station or wait at this one.

The chairlift: two ends, a long way apart

The green tower opens the chairlift, and the map has 6 markers for it, sitting as two groups of three. One group is at 3213, 1374 near the north coast, low down. The other is at 4222, 1924 in the south east, much higher up.

Nothing is marked between them, and the two groups sit around three quarters of the island’s width apart. The chairlift layer makes that gap obvious at a glance. It is worth almost nothing for a short trip and a great deal when your group has to get from one of those corners to the other.

All 7 radio stations, and why they make good meeting points

There are 7 broadcast stations, spread from the north coast to the far south east, and each one has a Radio marked at it.

Players use them as rally points, and the map shows why that works. There are only seven, they are well spread out, and two of them stand on high ground where they can be picked out from a distance. “Meet me at the broadcast station at 3575, 1666” is a sentence that survives voice chat, which is more than can be said for “meet me by the big rock”.

Send the broadcast layer to your group at the start of a session and agree which one is the fallback if anybody drops out or wanders off.

The 25 trail stations

The map shows 25 trail stations, and they are not scattered. They form five runs of five, and each run sits near one of the places where a bank of gourd stands and a key are marked.

Four of the five runs gain height as they get closer to their bank. The fifth, down at the shore, stays flat the whole way. The trail station layer is the only place these 25 points appear together, and the five runs are easiest to pick out with everything else switched off.

Telescopes and where they stand

The Telescopes layer has 12 markers. Five of them stand together at 3918 to 3924, 1616 to 1617, all at the same height and only a few paces apart. The other seven are on their own, at heights ranging from just above the shore to near the top of the island.

The two highest are at 3670, 1711 and 4181, 1980, both well above the ground around them. The telescope layer shows all 12 in a second, and the three lowest ones have no challenge marked beside them at all.

When somebody gets lost

Voice chat in Big Walk is proximity based, so a teammate who has walked far enough away simply stops being audible. The island also has a day and night cycle, and after dark somebody a short way off the path can be very hard to pick out.

The Gear layer marks what a group reaches for when voices will not carry: 8 Walkie-talkies, 4 Flare guns and 3 Megaphones. All three Cowbells are at one spot, at 3506, 1370.

The habit that beats any of them is agreeing on coordinates before you split up. Every marker on this map sits at a pair of numbers, and they are the pair the island’s single Coordinate reader shows.

Reading the two numbers

The first number gets larger as you go south. The second gets larger as you go east. Every marked point on the island falls between 3099 and 4560 on the first and between 1099 and 2329 on the second, so a pair well outside that is a pair somebody has misread.

The island’s own map is ruled into numbered squares using the same figures with the last two digits dropped: 31 to 45 down the side, 10 to 24 across the top. A board reading 3259, 1883 is inside the square where line 32 meets line 18, a bit past halfway down it and most of the way across.

Once your group says numbers instead of describing hills, splitting up stops being expensive. One pair can work a challenge in the north while another walks a trail run in the south, and neither has to explain which tree they are standing under.