The Far East
Pre-Collapse Identity
Concord was suburban sprawl and a decommissioned naval weapons station. Walnut Creek was affluent shopping centers and families who measured their distance from Oakland in both miles and ideology. Pleasant Hill was pleasant. Martinez had a refinery and a marina. Mt. Diablo rose above it all, a state park where people hiked on weekends and pretended the suburbs below were temporary.
Current Character
The eastern edge of the Sprawl — the place where civilization thins to a membrane and the Wastes begin. Mt. Diablo rises as the eastern sentinel, its summit bristling with surveillance arrays that watch for threats from the irradiated and abandoned territories beyond. The BART corridor through the Caldecott 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 — not lawless in the romantic sense, but ungoverned in the way that means nobody is coming to help.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Valley floor and foothills — Concord's flat suburban grid transitions through Walnut Creek's gentle hills to the steep slopes of Mt. Diablo at 1,173 meters. The terrain is drier than the bay side, hotter in summer, and more exposed. The eastern horizon is the Wastes: brown, empty, and carrying the faint shimmer of heat or radiation or both. Pre-Cascade suburban infrastructure — strip malls, housing developments, parking lots — persists in various states of decay and repurposing. The Caldecott Tunnel mouth is the sector's western gate, fortified and fought over.
Corporate Presence
No corporation dominates, which is both the sector's curse and its appeal. Guardian patrols the border and the tunnel approaches, extracting tolls and providing the security theater that justifies their presence. Independent factions control pockets of territory — the valley floor, the Diablo foothills, the tunnel approaches. The surveillance arrays on Mt. Diablo's summit are a shared resource that every faction wants and nobody fully controls.
Key Locations
Mt. Diablo (eastern sentinel — surveillance arrays, contested summit, 1,173m), Caldecott Tunnel (BART corridor connecting the Far East to the inner ring — strategic chokepoint), the Edge (transitional zone where Sprawl meets Wastes).
Sensory Detail
The air is drier here, hotter, carrying dust from the eastern Wastes on winds that smell of dried grass, sage, and something chemical that nobody can identify. The sound thins — fewer engines, fewer voices, fewer machines — replaced by wind, the creak of decaying suburban infrastructure, and the occasional distant boom from the Wastes whose origin nobody investigates. At night, the surveillance arrays on Diablo's summit blink red, and the eastern horizon is dark in a way that the Sprawl's core never is.
Daily Life
You live at the edge of the map, where the last bus stop meets the first mile of nothing, and you learn to tell the difference between the wind and something moving in it.