Big Walk Tower Order and Keys: Do the Red Tower First

Red tower first. It opens the map room, and the island’s only Folding map and only Compass are marked at that spot, which changes every walk your group takes afterwards. The drawbridge before it wants 4 gourds, each of the four coloured towers wants 5, and the black obelisk after them wants 6, so the whole run is 30. Open the Keys layer and you can see all 47 key markers before you start climbing anything.

Why the red tower comes first

Until the map room is open, nobody in your group has a map. That is the biggest cost in the early game. The island is large, the ground repeats, and one wooded slope looks much like the next when you are standing on it. Groups that go for green, yellow or blue first pay for it by walking the same hillsides twice.

The other three towers do not have that problem. Once the map room is open you can decide the rest of the order on what your group wants next: the chairlift, the tunnels or the train.

There is one case for a different order. If your group is large and already spread out over the island when you finish the drawbridge, take whichever tower most of you are already standing near, then double back for red. Walking eight people across the island to reach the “correct” tower costs more than the map saves.

What each stage costs

The gourds themselves are a separate hunt, and the map marks 46 of them against the 30 the stages ask for. Stands and gourds together is the view for that side of the job.

All 8 keys and where they are marked

There are 8 key markers on the island and not one of them is out on its own. Every single one sits beside a bank of gourd stands, within a few paces. Six banks have one key marked at them and a seventh has two.

The bank of four sits down at the shoreline, which is the drawbridge stage. The four banks of five sit up on high ground, which is the four coloured towers. Keys on their own puts those 8 markers on an otherwise empty map, and it is the fastest way to see how far apart the stages really are.

The map does not label a key with a colour, so it cannot tell you which of the eight is the black key or the white key. What it can tell you is where the eight are and which bank of stands each one belongs to, which is enough to work out which stage you are standing in. If a key has gone missing from your run, the marker for its bank is where it started.

The 39 key slots

The rest of the Keys layer is key slots, and they sit differently. 24 of the 39 are in groups at five of the seven bank sites: a group of 7, two groups of 6, a group of 3 and a pair. The other 15 are marked singly, and 9 of those are still close to a bank, which leaves 6 slots out on their own away from any tower.

Slots on their own is worth a look before your first long walk, because those 6 are the ones a group walks straight past.

The kit marked at every tower

The four banks of five have an identical set of tools marked next to them. Every one of them has Binoculars, a Laser pointer, Goggles and a Flashlight within sight of the stands. One of the four, at 3937, 1901, also has the island’s only Coordinate reader marked nearby.

That matters for how you split a group. Two players walking up to a tower can expect those four tools to be there already rather than carrying them across the island. What no tower has is a spare gourd: only one marker in all seven banks has one on it.

The map room is a denser spot than any of them. The Folding map and the Compass are both single copies, both marked at 3572, 1457, and three of the island’s seven Laser pointers are at the same place. Centre the gear layer on that point to see how tightly packed it is.

What the green tower and the blue tower open

The green tower opens the chairlift. The map has 6 chairlift markers on it, sitting as two groups of three at opposite ends of the island, at 4222, 1924 in the south and 3213, 1374 in the north. The chairlift layer shows nothing marked in between, and the two groups are around three quarters of the island apart.

The blue tower opens the train, and that one goes round. Seven train stations ring the island, spread from the north coast down to the southern end. Six of the seven have a Clock marked at them.

The train runs clockwise and it does not stop at the stations, so getting aboard means jumping on while it is moving. Plan for that the first time, because a group that expects doors to open will watch it go past.

Neither system teleports anybody. You still walk to the station, so what they save depends on where your group already is.

The host holds the progress

Big Walk has no single player mode and no matchmaking, so you play with people you already know and one of you hosts. The save sits with that host. Nobody else can open the island and carry on without them, which makes tower order a scheduling question as much as a routing one.

If the host is only around on certain evenings, do the red tower on the first of them. A group that has the map room can split up and get useful work done in a short session. A group without it will spend a good part of that session finding each other again.