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Complete Drifter's Guide coverage for the Deep Frontier. 61 new entries from hop 3 (Cairnside) to hop 23 (Abzu), plus updated gttr-deep.md index with all 61 deep systems. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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THE DRIFTER'S GUIDE TO THE REACH — SCHUILHOEK
SCHUILHOEK is three hundred years old, feeds itself and one neighbor, and has not filed a population update with the Concord Assembly since its centennial, which was two hundred years ago.
The Hiding Nook
The name is Dutch: shelter corner, hiding nook. It was not chosen with irony. The founders came through Cairn, found an amber-lit pocket behind the empty hub, filed a charter, built gates between the worlds they meant to farm, and proceeded to farm them. No colonial press release. No Commission fanfare. The wave-3 settlement timing reflects the founders' calculation that the route through Cairn — a hub with no residents, no local demand, no commercial traffic terminating there — would generate no incidental attention. This calculation has been correct for three centuries.
The K1V primary runs warm for a K-type star, close enough to G-type territory that the light is amber-gold rather than deep orange. Long growing seasons. Reliable solar output. Four worlds cultivated across three centuries of patient attention, each with its own microclimate and its own specialization: root crops and grain on the innermost world, leafy staples on the second, soft fruit discovered on the third only sixty years into settlement, and pasture on the outermost body where the low gravity suits the livestock in ways no one fully understands but which has been producing consistent results for two hundred and forty years.
What Gets Inherited
Families tend specific worlds across generations. Children learn the soil they will farm the way they learn the language they will speak — not as acquired knowledge but as given fact. What constitutes a bad year, how to absorb it, what the other three worlds can carry while one recovers: this understanding is distributed across four worlds and ten generations of families who have farmed the same ground and calibrated their practices against the same failure modes.
The midsummer market rotates between the four worlds on a four-year cycle. The festivals have accumulated over centuries — some Dutch in origin, some not, some the product of specific agricultural crises that became, in retrospect, tradition. The community's governance, the Raad, meets in the market building on the innermost world and has been meeting in some form since the settlement's second decade. It does not have formal Assembly recognition as a governance structure. It does not require it.
The Population Number
The Assembly's administrative records list a population figure that was accurate at the centennial and has not been corrected since. No one at Schuilhoek has submitted fraudulent documentation — they simply have not submitted documentation of any kind, and the Assembly's apparatus has not prioritized verifying a system that generates no complaints, files no disputes, and asks for nothing. The discrepancy between the registered figure and the actual figure is, at this point, substantial.
As traffic through Cairn increases and the pocket's isolation decreases, there are institutions in the Reach that are beginning to attach numbers to what Schuilhoek knows. Three centuries of multi-world agricultural data — cultivar records, soil documentation, failure modes and the solutions developed to address them, the knowledge of how K1V stellar output affects photosynthetic yields across the growing spectrum — has no equivalent anywhere. The Raad has not decided how it feels about this becoming valuable to people outside the community. The Raad has not had to decide before.
Practical Information
Schuilhoek is four hops from Gateway, at the far end of a route that runs through an empty hub and attracts no incidental traffic. Visitors arrive by specific intent. The community is self-sufficient and has been for most of its history; external trade exists but is not a structural dependency. Cairnside, one hop back through the spur, purchases food here through an arrangement that the community describes as a working relationship and neither party has seen any reason to formalize.
Adams of the Guide rates Schuilhoek: Three centuries of knowing exactly what you need and declining to explain it to anyone.