SECTOR DIRECTORY
24 administrative sectors. Center-outward spiral from the Spine. Lower numbers = closer to power.
◆ View Interactive MapThe Core
The core â the beating heart
The Nexus Core is the administrative and economic center of the entire Sprawl. The Lattice â Nexus Dynamics' 2.3-kilometer crystalline arcology â dominates the skyline like a translucent spine, its foundations driven into bedrock where the Financial District meets the Rim. The Spine still functions as a central axis, though now it channels corporate foot traffic between data terminals rather than commuters between offices. Every surface in this sector is a sensor. Every footstep is logged.
Old Town is the Sprawl's living memory â the one sector where pre-Cascade architecture still stands in density, where the streets are too narrow for corporate demolition vehicles and the hills too steep for efficient redevelopment. Good Fortune Financial occupies the heart of Fortune Row from the Fortune Pavilion on Grant Avenue, weaponizing the community banking traditions that built these streets into a predatory lending empire that reaches into every desperate corner of the Sprawl. The neighborhood resists corporate homogeny not through ideology but through geography and stubbornness.
The most prestigious address in the Sprawl. The Rothwell Foundation didn't move into the Terrace after the Cascade â they were already here, their estate consuming an entire city block of annexed Victorians with three underground levels beneath understated old-money grandeur. From the Rim's edge, the city's ruling class looks down on the Dregs sixty feet below. The view is the point. It has always been the point. The Heights exists to remind everyone else where they stand.
The Works is the Sprawl's SF-side industrial backbone â Ironclad foundries, fabrication yards, and worker housing blocks stacked in utilitarian rows along the flats. The Mission's pre-Cascade cultural identity survives in fragments: murals on factory walls depicting saints and ancestors, Spanish spoken in break rooms and shouted across loading docks, small shrines tucked into welding bays. It is a sector that builds things for people who will never set foot here. The Overlook provides strategic elevation overlooking both the Mission flats and the Rim edge, making it valuable to whoever holds it.
Inner Ring
Wider neighborhoods + the eastern waterfront
The Western Shore is the Sprawl's friction zone â too residential to attract corporate investment, too strategic to ignore entirely. The Twin Spires, at 280 meters, hosts critical communication arrays that relay signals across the entire Sprawl, making it one of the few genuinely contested pieces of infrastructure on the SF side. Below the peaks, the Burnout retains its counter-establishment identity, providing sympathizers and safe houses for resistance movements that treat corporate authority the way their predecessors treated the draft board. Fog rolls through the western gaps daily, and the surveillance networks that blanket the Nexus Core thin to nothing in the murk.
Ironclad's eastern stronghold and primary headquarters. The Forge â a brutalist fortress of welded cargo containers and salvaged port cranes â sits on the the eastern waterfront where ships once docked, a monument to the principle that anything can be made into a weapon if you weld it hard enough. The port cranes still operate, loading Ironclad's manufactured goods for distribution across the Sprawl. Combined with the SF waterfront operations in Sectors 1 and 4, Ironclad controls both sides of the bay's industrial corridor. No other corporation seriously challenges them here. The air tastes of iron filings and diesel.
The Meridian is a contested buffer zone â a no-man's-land of competing corporate interests wedged between Ironclad's waterfront to the west and Guardian's enforcement territory to the east. Neither corporation controls it; both project force into it. The old Undergrid stations serve dual purpose as transit hubs and smuggling corridors, their tunnels connecting to routes that neither Ironclad nor Guardian has fully mapped. The Basin, once the eastern sectors' defining feature, is a dry bowl now â its water pumped out during the drainage years â used as an open-air market, gathering ground, and occasional battleground when the corporate proxy wars spill over.
The SF side of Ironclad's industrial corridor, where heavy manufacturing meets the Rim's edge. The old the Breakpoint Naval Shipyard â already contaminated before the Cascade â is now Ironclad's SF-side heavy manufacturing center, and the contamination is a feature, not a bug. Toxic soil keeps land values low. Low land values keep workers desperate. Desperate workers don't negotiate. The equation is simple and brutal, and it has been running since before Ironclad put their name on the gate. Relief, a Rothwell subsidiary, operates "humanitarian assistance" programs from this sector â free clinics and medical outreach that come with biometric data collection built into every examination.
Middle Ring
Bay floor, eastern sectors, the Southern Reach â the middle ground
The heart of the Dregs. When the bay was drained, humanity's overflow was poured into this sunken canyon â miles of improvised housing, stacked towers called The Stacks, markets built from salvage, and a population that no corporation formally claims and no government effectively governs. The Rim walls tower on both sides â the western Rim to the west, the eastern sectors to the east â creating an urban canyon fifty to eighty feet deep that traps heat, pollution, and desperation in equal measure. The Trench runs through the deepest old shipping channels, eighty feet below the Rim, a subterranean corridor beneath even the bay floor settlements. No natural light reaches the bottom. No corporation sends patrols. What law exists here is enforced by the people who live here, and it changes block by block.
The northern bay floor. Shallower than the Deep Dregs â thirty to fifty feet below the Rim rather than eighty â this area was some of the first bay floor to be settled after drainage, which means the settlements here are older, more established, and only slightly less desperate. The old the Northern Crossing Bridge pylons march across the landscape like concrete monuments to a world that had water here, their spans long since collapsed or salvaged but their bases too massive to dismantle. Salvage operations pick through exposed seabed infrastructure â old pipes, cables, foundations of structures that were built on fill and are now twenty feet above the surrounding terrain like islands of concrete in a sediment sea.
The Free Quarter's identity as an intellectual and countercultural center survived the Cascade, though barely and at great cost. The university ruins house independent researchers, underground schools, and resistance cells that treat corporate authority with the same contempt their predecessors reserved for the Vietnam draft. The Wire is still a marketplace of ideas â and weapons, and forged documents, and encrypted data packages. The hills provide defensible terrain that Guardian's patrols have never fully penetrated, not for lack of force but because every incursion sparks broader resistance that costs more to suppress than the territory is worth. The flats below are contested between Ironclad's industrial creep and the bay floor's ungoverned communities.
The most dangerous urban sector in the Sprawl, and Guardian Security's headquarters â two facts that are not coincidental. Guardian is headquartered here because this is where violence is highest, and Guardian creates the conditions that make their product necessary. The Watchtower, a former public housing complex retrofitted into an armored fortress, sits on the Long Mile like a declaration of war against the neighborhood it claims to protect. Protection rackets, enforcement patrols, and street-level survival define the corridor. The Fiber Guild operates from this sector, running the physical data networks that even Nexus depends on. Hector is from here. The rhyme holds: Hector from Sector 12.
Guardian's fortress territory â the high ground overlooking the Gauntlet and the bay floor, converted from affluent suburbia into a corporate military installation wearing the skin of a residential community. Surveillance arrays on the ridgeline provide sight lines across the entire eastern Sprawl: every street in the Gauntlet, every settlement on the bay floor, every approach from the Far East. The hills are defensible by terrain alone â narrow winding roads, steep slopes, dense vegetation â and Guardian has added layers of electronic and physical security that make the sector a panopticon with a view. Former luxury homes now serve as corporate housing for Guardian's officer class, their swimming pools filled with rainwater collection systems and their living rooms converted to tactical planning centers.
The southern extension of the bay floor Dregs â shallower and more exposed than the Deep Dregs of Sector 9, transitioning from the dense canyon of the central bay toward the marshier south bay. Forty to sixty feet below the Rim, the settlements here are sparser, the infrastructure more improvised, the density lower. This is where the Dregs thins out â fewer stacked towers, more horizontal sprawl across hardened seabed. The old the Corridor Bridge is visible to the south, its pylons marking the administrative boundary of the fully drained zone. Beyond it, the ground gets soggy and the settlements get desperate in different ways. People come here when even the Deep Dregs is too crowded, too dangerous, or too visible.
Wellness Corporation's oceanic domain. The fog is constant â thick Pacific marine layer rolling over the coastal hills, turning the sector into a gray cocoon that feels like being swallowed. The Sanctuary, Wellness's ocean-facing campus, is designed to feel like an escape from the Sprawl: therapeutic gardens, meditation architecture, the sound of waves audible from every room. Below the serene surface, extensive sub-level operations run experiments that the gardens are designed to make you not think about. The eastern edge of the sector drops to the bay floor, creating a strange duality â ocean to the west, abyss to the east, and Wellness Corporation in between, selling calm to people trapped between two kinds of depth.
The northern portion of Helix BioTech's research corridor â a landscape of sterile campuses, controlled-access roads, and the constant hum of laboratory ventilation systems. The Corridor connects Helix's southern HQ in Sector 21 to its northern distribution networks, and every block between is optimized for the movement of biological materials, research personnel, and the proprietary data that Helix guards more fiercely than any physical asset. Foster City, built on filled marshland, has partially reverted to wetland at its edges â suburban ruins standing in shallow water, their foundations undermined by the ground remembering what it used to be. Relief operates The Harbor from this sector, a facility that looks like a hospital, functions like a hospital, and also functions as Rothwell's most productive intelligence-gathering operation.
Outer Ring
Periphery â industrial north, southern sprawl, marshlands, restricted zones
The Smelter was industrial before the Cascade and industrial after â the refinery complex was simply absorbed into Ironclad's energy operations, the smokestacks kept belching, and the workers kept showing up because there was nowhere else to go. The sector represents the northern edge of Ironclad's territorial reach, which means it is where their grip is weakest and the contests are fiercest. Guardian patrols push into the residential areas surrounding the refineries, claiming to provide community security that Ironclad's industrial guards don't cover. The fence line between the refinery complex and the residential blocks is where confrontations happen â workers inside are Ironclad's, workers going home are Guardian's, and the distinction costs lives.
The eastern edge of the Sprawl â the place where civilization thins to a membrane and the Wastes begin. The Sentinel rises as the eastern sentinel, its summit bristling with surveillance arrays that watch for threats from the irradiated and abandoned territories beyond. The Undergrid corridor through the the East Bore Tunnel is the sector's lifeline, connecting the edge to the inner ring through a single chokepoint that makes the tunnel one of the Sprawl's most strategically valuable pieces of infrastructure. No single corporation has established dominance here. Guardian runs border patrols. Independent settlements dot the valley floor. Scavengers work the edge, bringing back materials from the Wastes. The sector has the feel of a frontier â not lawless in the romantic sense, but ungoverned in the way that means nobody is coming to help.
The Southeast Bay industrial zone â Ironclad's manufacturing network spreading across the old automotive and tech factory infrastructure. The Tesla factory and Solyndra ruins were absorbed, gutted, and repurposed for fabrication that serves the Sprawl's material needs. The Faultline fault zone runs beneath everything, creating geological instability that manifests as cracked foundations, shifting ground, and sinkholes that open without warning and swallow whatever was built on the assumption that the earth was solid. The marshland border to the west merges into the south bay's transitional zone, where the ground gets soft and the settlements get precarious. Wholesome sends agricultural outreach from the south, extending food distribution networks that map dependency as precisely as they map hunger.
Wholesome's domain â and the most unsettling sector in the Sprawl, not because of its danger but because of its normalcy. The Deep South Sprawl presents an illusion of suburban life that would be comforting if it weren't so clearly manufactured. Vertical farms rise in geometric rows. Agri-domes glint in the sun. Parks are maintained. Community centers host programming. Children attend schools that teach approved curricula. The Greenhaus, Wholesome's massive glass-and-steel agricultural campus, produces enough food to feed a million people, and that production capacity is the trap â Wholesome controls food production and distribution for the entire southern Sprawl, which means they control who eats and who doesn't, which means they control everything.
The southern anchor of Helix BioTech's research corridor â where the future of human biology is decided behind security perimeters and biohazard airlocks. The Helix, a sprawling glass-and-biome complex, occupies what was once Sand Hill Road venture capital territory, its living walls and greenhouse towers concealing the most advanced genetic engineering laboratories in the Sprawl. The Institute's campus has been absorbed into Helix's research infrastructure â lecture halls converted to sequencing labs, libraries converted to data vaults, the quad used for controlled-environment biological trials. The sector is sterile, quiet, and utterly controlled. You are in Helix territory when the air smells like nothing at all â no dust, no chemical, no human scent, just filtered absence.
The transitional zone between the drained bay and the South Sprawl â where people go when even the Dregs push them out. The ground is unstable. Buildings lean on pilings driven into marsh mud that shifts with the tides that still exist in the shallow water to the south. Platform settlements extend across the marshland on improvised stilts, connected by plank walkways that flex underfoot. The old Cargill salt evaporation ponds persist as surreal, rainbow-colored shallow lakes where chemical concentrations have intensified over decades of neglect, producing colors that shouldn't exist in nature and don't â magenta from halophilic archaea, jade from copper leachate, a sulfurous yellow that means don't touch the water.
The non-restricted portion of the Perimeter â the last sector of recognizable civilization before the drone patrols begin. The Gateway serves as the gateway community, the final transit point for anyone crossing the dam from the western Rim or heading north into territory where corporate administration thins to nothing. The sector lives in the shadow of what lies to the south: The Perimeter, whose drone patrols are visible on clear days, whose silence is audible on quiet nights, and whose existence the residents of the North Bay have learned to treat as normal the way people near volcanoes learn to treat tremors as normal. Transit across the dam connects to the western Rim, making the sector technically accessible, but the Rothwell influence in local property markets ensures that accessibility is theoretical for most.
Designated Former Military Zone 7. Entire area off-limits. Entry prohibited. Approximately 200 autonomous drones maintain continuous lethal patrol coverage. They do not issue warnings.
