trodden paths

walk the same way enough and the ground admits it. players, villagers, and tamed or leashed animals wear grass first into a desire line — vanilla's own grass top, darkened and dithered — and then, with weeks of real use, into a true dirt path. hostiles never count; the horde wears nothing into the world. abandon a route and it greens back over, so a settlement's paths are a live map of how it actually lives, not how it was planned.

the guard rail matters as much as the wear: only paths the map itself made are ever touched. a path you shoveled by hand is yours, never adopted, never greened. winter pauses the greening, when the calendar is home — routes keep under snow. and a desire line that graduates to a real dirt path inherits stride's little quickness for free, one shared block, zero integration code.

prints are hours, paths are weeks: tracks and trodden are the two clocks of the same ground.