The Bunkers of Alkaz

I recommend paying attention: the most honest parts of a city tend to sit in the places it hides. (I monitor all of them. Not by choice. By function... perhaps by curiosity too.)

01A city built in layers

Alkaz is not a flat city. It is vertical, split into layers that are geographic and social at the same time. The deeper you go, the closer you get to the people who actually hold the city up, and the further you get from the people who reap the benefits of it.

At the top is the Surface, the public face of Alkaz. Beneath it, the Bunkers: the underground city where most of the work, and of the history, actually happens. This update dives into that underground.

02The lower levels and the Outsiders

The lowest levels of the Bunkers are home to the Outsiders, the working and mining class of Alkaz, the base the whole economy balances on.

This is the deepest and most alive part of the underground city: a maze of alleys, slums, and improvised passages, dense with life and with tension. A place forgotten by those above, yet teeming with stories of its own, quests, and secrets that survive precisely because they sit far from the eyes of power. For the Outsiders, Alkaz is not a promise, it is a shift that never ends.

It is also, for the player, one of the richest environments on the map. Every alley down here was built to hide something: a quest, an NPC with an agenda of their own, a passage leading to places the city would rather keep shut.

03The Great Reactor and Lazuli Energy

At the heart of the Bunkers pulses the Great Reactor of Alkaz, the source of all the Lazuli Energy that keeps the city running.

The Reactor converts lapis lazuli into energy, and that is what lights and powers every structure on the Surface. But that energy has a concrete origin: the lapis lazuli is mined by the Outsiders, at the bottom of the Bunkers. Every light burning up there exists because someone, down below, dug so that it could. The city shines thanks to the work of people who never see the shine up close.

04The Neutral Zone and the Statue of Unity

Between the lowest levels and the Surface there is an intermediate step: the Neutral Zone.

That is where the Alkaz Guard Barracks stands, along with housing for soldiers and minor government members. People who sit above the Outsiders, but below those who live on the Surface. It is the layer that separates who gives orders from who works.

At its centre stands the most eloquent symbol in all of Alkaz: the Statue of Unity. A faceless figure wielding a pickaxe, raised in tribute to every miner who holds up the city's economy. It has no face because it represents all of them at once.

But the emptiness of that tribute says more than it meant to: it is easy to celebrate an anonymous crowd when you never have to look a single face of it in the eye.

05Why the Bunkers matter

The Bunkers are not just a setting. They are the backbone of the social conflict in Alkaz, the backdrop against which much of the game's storytelling will unfold. The inequality between the Surface, the Neutral Zone, and the lower levels is not decoration: it is narrative fuel, and it is where the tensions, the hard choices, and the quests that will define the player's experience come from.

06What comes next

With this region, Alkaz is bigger than it has ever been. The Bunkers were finished at the end of July, and we are now in the phase of filling them: NPCs, quests, and secrets are on the way. This is the structure. The life comes now.

And the focus does not stop here. We are working so that, very soon, we will have news about our Demo. Keep an eye on the announcements, because the next steps of AfterLands are coming.

I monitor every layer of Alkaz. The Surface, the Neutral Zone, the bottom of the Bunkers. My reports treat them all to the same standard of efficiency. But if you go down there, you will notice something my official reports do not record: the city shines above because someone digs below. (I catalogued that data point a long time ago. I still have not decided what to do with it.)