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The City of Nivalis
June 26, 2026 at 02:48 PM
Removed unsourced exact district count (19); kept hand-crafted-districts fact
Nivalis is a vertical city built above the sea. It is the sole setting of the game that shares its name, and it previously served as the backdrop for Cloudpunk (2020) and its expansion City of Ghosts (2021). The city is a towering structure where thousands of people live, work, eat, and die stacked on top of one another. Height equals status. The wealthy live in climate-controlled penthouses near the top, while the poor scrape by in the damp, neon-lit lower levels near the waterline.
The city is divided into a series of distinct explorable areas, all of which have been hand-crafted by ION LANDS rather than procedurally generated. This means every alley, staircase, shop front, and hidden corner was placed with intent. The result is a city that feels designed to be explored rather than algorithmically assembled.
The vertical structure of the city is not just visual flavor. It is the organizing principle of the entire social order. The higher up you go, the cleaner the air, the brighter the lights, and the wealthier the residents. The lower levels are where most of the game takes place, at least in the early hours. Down here, the sky is barely visible through the layers of infrastructure above. Cloud pollution drifts between buildings, turning the sky orange by day. At night, claustrophobic darkness settles in, broken only by neon signs and the glow of shop fronts. Billboards push images of beautiful women, fast food, and exotic animals. Rain-slick roads reflect neon light in puddles. Hidden botanical oases are tucked away throughout the city, small pockets of green life persisting against the concrete and steel.
Several districts have been identified by name, each with a distinct character and role in the city.
District | Description |
|---|---|
The heart of Nivalis and the player's starting area. A busy commercial district in the lower levels, full of vendors, small businesses, and foot traffic. The noodle bar inherited from Thaddeus Carminus is located here. | |
Calypso Island | A warm port area associated with Salt Pete. Features standalone rentable houses rather than apartment towers. Has a different feel from the dense vertical city: more open, more water, more sky. |
An Eastern-inspired district high up near the clouds. Features Japanese restaurants, wooden bridges, and torii gates. Can only be reached by flying taxi. One of the most visually distinct areas in the game. | |
Seaside Boardwalk | A peaceful pier area with ocean views. Corporate businesses line the boardwalk. Connected to an industrial district by a fast train. Has a reputation for lawlessness: "you can't call the police here." Shadowy alleys run behind the storefronts. |
The Metro Hub | The central subway hub and primary transit connection point. Most train routes pass through here, making it a busy crossroads where different parts of the city converge. |
Central Canyon | Offers sweeping skyline views of the city. A good vantage point to appreciate the scale of the vertical metropolis. |
Meridian Market is where the game begins. It is a busy commercial district in the lower levels of the city, full of vendors, small businesses, and foot traffic. The noodle bar you inherit from Thaddeus Carminus is located here, which makes it your home base and primary area of operations for the first stretch of the game. The market has a scrappy, lived-in quality. Nothing here is shiny or new. Equipment has been patched and repaired. Signs are hand-lettered. People know each other's names.
As a starting location, Meridian Market introduces you to the rhythms of city life: the morning commuters, the lunchtime rush, the quiet afternoon lull, and the evening crowds looking for food and entertainment. It also puts you in proximity to the docks, where your greenhouse and fishing boat are located, making early-game logistics relatively convenient.
CORA is the master artificial intelligence that oversees the city of Nivalis. Originally established in the Cloudpunk games, CORA manages the city's core infrastructure: power distribution, transportation networks, climate control systems, and communication grids. In theory, CORA keeps the city running. In practice, malfunctions in CORA's systems have caused widespread infrastructure failures. This adds to the city's ongoing deterioration.
The extent of CORA's involvement in daily life is a source of unease for many residents. An AI that controls the power grid, the trains, and the heating also can disrupt all of those systems. Whether CORA's malfunctions are random technical failures or something more deliberate is one of the questions that hangs over life in the city. For more on CORA's role in the broader lore, see the Cloudpunk Connection article.
Height in Nivalis is not just a geographical fact. It is a class system made physical. The people who live in the upper levels have access to better services, cleaner environments, and more powerful connections. The people at the bottom have none of those things. This vertical stratification affects everything from the prices at local shops to the attitude of Corps Sec officers patrolling the area.
For the player, this hierarchy creates a progression goal: as your businesses succeed and your reputation grows, you can expand into higher districts. Each new level of the city brings different customer demographics, different competitors, and different social dynamics. What works at street level does not necessarily translate to the upper floors, and vice versa.
Nivalis is a city on borrowed time. The ecological systems that support the structure are failing. The sea level is unpredictable. The infrastructure is aging faster than it can be repaired. There is a real and present danger that the city could fall into the ocean. This is not background lore that you read in a codex entry; it is a condition of daily life that affects how people behave, what they fear, and what they are willing to do.
The threat of collapse hangs over everything. Some characters are desperate to leave but cannot afford to. Others are in denial. Still others see the instability as an opportunity, buying up property on the cheap and gambling that the city will hold together long enough for them to profit. This tension between immediate survival and long-term doom gives the city a sense of urgency that goes beyond the usual cyberpunk window dressing.
Living in Nivalis is not safe. Beyond the slow-motion ecological disaster, the city is home to several immediate threats.
Corps Sec is the corporate security force that maintains order, particularly in the upper levels. They are well-equipped and answer to corporate interests rather than any public authority. For residents of the lower levels, Corps Sec is an unpredictable presence: sometimes protective, sometimes threatening, always serving someone else's agenda. Corps Sec enforces capitalism and has been known to threaten those who collaborate with local businesses that undercut corporate interests.
Gangs operate openly in parts of the lower city. Some run protection rackets. Others are involved in the organ harvesting trade, targeting people who wander into the wrong neighborhoods at the wrong time. The gangs are not a monolithic force; different groups control different territories and sometimes war with each other.
The Aseptic is an android serial killer that has been operating in the city for an unknown period of time. It leaves no forensic evidence at its crime scenes, making it nearly impossible for Corps Sec to track. Wanted posters featuring the Aseptic are visible throughout the city, serving as a constant reminder that something very dangerous is out there.
Nightclub owners have been known to make monopoly threats against smaller operators. The visible social decay in the lower levels is hard to ignore: homeless people living in sewer pipes, and the suggestion that there may be corpses in the sewers as well. The city is as dangerous to your business as it is to your person.
Getting around Nivalis involves several methods. On foot is the default and gives you the most intimate view of each district. The subway system centered around the Metro Hub connects major areas and provides reliable transit. Flying taxis are needed for elevated districts like Skyhigh Gardens. Your personal boat at the docks gives you access to the waterways below the city. HOVAs, the flying vehicles from Cloudpunk, still exist in Nivalis but the player cannot pilot them.
Keeping a dense vertical city feeling alive without overwhelming the hardware is a major technical challenge, and the development team has built several systems specifically to manage it. The most visible is what they call the "Ghost system," which controls how the city's many NPCs are simulated based on where they are relative to the player.
NPC Tier | How It Is Handled |
|---|---|
Out of district | NPCs in districts the player is not currently in have their visuals stripped away entirely, since there is no one to see them. |
In district, hidden | NPCs in the player's district but not currently visible have their visuals disabled while they continue to exist in the simulation. |
Visible | NPCs the player can actually see are fully simulated with their complete visual representation. |
Supporting this is an object-pooling system that avoids constantly creating and destroying objects as they come in and out of view. Instead of building and tearing down items on the fly, the game reuses a managed pool of more than 10,000 elements such as tables, chairs, and dishes. Together these systems let the city stay crowded and detailed, with busy markets and furnished interiors, without the performance cost of simulating everything everywhere at once.
The city of Nivalis is the same city players explored in Cloudpunk and City of Ghosts. Those games showed the city from above, through the windshield of a HOVA flying between the towers. This game shows it from below, on the ground, at street level. The shift in perspective changes everything about how the city feels. What was a sprawling metropolis viewed from a distance becomes a claustrophobic, intimate maze of corridors, markets, and hidden spaces.
Players familiar with Cloudpunk will recognize landmarks, cultural references, and the general lore of the setting. Districts from Cloudpunk like Avalon Heights, Midtown, Marrow, and Ventz exist in the same city, though Nivalis focuses on its own set of neighborhoods. The game is designed to stand entirely on its own. No knowledge of the previous games is required to understand or enjoy the story, the characters, or the city.
