Back to the Original Plan, I Think

Ok, there's definitely a difference between orange routing paint, which means land is unroutable due to terrain height, etc., and blue routing paint which is manually put on the world by the creator to mark an area as unroutable to sims.  I covered the cliff with the blue paint...

and when told to go to the tattoo shop in the valley, my little test sim freaked out and said he couldn't do it.  I even walked him to the edge of the cliff to make sure it wasn't due to any obstacles in his way.

He was still about to order pizza and get his newspaper okay.  The NPCs just popped into and out of existence.  I tested the response of the firefighter NPCs by having Ed experience a little cooking accident...

and firetruck showed up without a problem.  Fire was put out, although Ed got pretty singed.  I put the subway stations in place on both the plateau and the valley.  It didn't seem like a viable solution.  Whenever I told Ed, up on the rewards plateau, to go to Slocum's Ink in the valley, he would say there was no routable path.  However, when I clicked on the subway station in the valley and told him go there, he would take the subway without a problem.  I don't know if he would have taken the subway willingly if there had also been a street route to get there.  I may test this just to know it, but I don't want to do that in the world if I don't have to.

Out of curiosity for the firefighter career, which requires you to go to others' houses without being able to choose your transportation method (no choosing to teleport if you have that ability), I built another house in the reward area and moved in a resident.  Then I had Ed join the firefighter career.  When it came time for him to go to work, his carpool showed up without a problem.

The ride then blinked out and reappeared in front of the [completely undecorated] firestation.

I don't know if it was because of the massive amounts of trees, the game trying to populate the world with NPCs, or it trying to figure out how he could respond to a fire in an area without a road, but the game started slowing down at this point.  A lot.  I'm a bit concerned about it because it is just happening with this world, but I'm not going to focus on it until real testing starts in case it's resolved by some of the things I fill in later, like NPCs.

Anyway, Ed did receive one emergency to respond to and, as far as I'm aware of, the only resident in town should have been the sim living up in the reward area.  I wasn't able to check because of the lag and abruptness, but I suspect that it was for this sim because the alarm shut off and the emergency disappeared almost immediately.  I think the game started the emergency for this sim and then analyzed it, realized there was no way for the firetruck to get there, and shut it off.  It didn't seem to count negatively against him and I double-checked that the sim in the reward area still had his house and no apparent problems from having an unaddressed emergency.  It's good to know that while people living in the reward area will be inaccessible for this type of activity, it doesn't actually cause problems for them or the firefighter sim.  There should only be about 4 residences in the reward area anyway, so the majority of emergencies should be down in the valley and accessible.

Well, this has certainly been a learning experience.  I think this is turning out pretty similar to how I first imagined the reward area, and it's good to know that NPCs are not impacted.  It's possible that some other issue may come up during testing, but I'll face that when I come to it.  If all else fails, it's easy enough to blaze a trail through the forest and add a road to that area.