Cyberpunk in nature

How do you put snow in cyberpunk? what can you do with a winter wilderness in something that focuses on tech and urban environments?

how do you keep sand out of your matrix jack-port in your spine?

I like to think that cyberpunk is just the high tech surface of a planet-wide city, and that deeper in the city bowels where the long forgotten "skyscrapers" and defunct fast food joints meld and rust with the pies and sewer system, nature remains in some form. Even if it is man-made monsters and animals so adapted to city life that they are no longer their original species. In some places, if you go deeper into the city depths you will find the ocean, long forgotten and long buried. A shadowy abyss of black water which will drag you down to feed its scavengers. In other places, you may even find remnants of the old world. A land of eternal night populated by fungi and insects.

Well, you could try modernizing survival gear. Compound bows with affixed VR Uplink scopes, Dataflares, 3d Printed tents, etc.

You could also try putting some interesting buildings and compounds out in nature. The Hokkaido hospital from Hitman is pretty cool.

As shadowrun shows us, survival gear can always be found. Otherwise, dust/cold would definitely cause issues with cyberware and fancy weapons.

>how do you keep sand out of your matrix jack-port in your spine?
Seal it off. Either get a cover fitted before you go, or keep a sticky dressing over it. Or spray it with synskin. You're not gonna get no wi-fi in the fuckin' desert anyway, omae.

In the snow? Same problem. Snow is just frozen water, yeah? Don't want water in your jacks and your 'ware. Don't want ice in your guns neither, but they at least work in the cold.
And yeah, you're gonna need guns. Polar bears, man. Polar. Bears. You think the sewer bears are bad? Polar bears are worse, omae. White as the snow, come out of the night and eat you in your fuckin' sleep.
Extinct? No way omae. Soon as the geo-engineering lobby chilled the caps back down, the bears started having food again. Yeah. They survive on humans now, mostly. Mostly those bleeding-heart greenies, but they'll eat you just the same. Eat you up, shit out your 'ware into the sea. Nobody's gonna find your corpse.

Underwater and space are pretty similar, though, but different. Same shit, different direction, yeah?
Underwater is simple enough. Easy to get down there. Just step off the boat and sink like a rock. If you float, rope yourself to the street sam and watch him sink.
But you can't breathe down there. Artificial gills are one thing, maybe pic related if you're serious. Only works in shallow waters, though, then the pressure gets you anyway.
Pressure's the bitch that gets you. Squeezes the gas from your blood. Ever hear about accidents back in the deep-oil era, before we grew that from shit and algae? One accident in a pressurised diving chamber, and four guys just got sucked up into the air pipe, snap. Just like that. Four men dead, gore all up the pipe, all over the hab, everywhere. Had to haul it up and count the teeth.
Gotta have hard suits and special gases that make you squeak.

OP just now made me realize how often it rains in cyberpunk and how rarely things short out because of it

Well they make pretty water-proof phones these days. I'd imagine dunking your cyber arm into water ain't going to short it out.

>Snow Crash

Also gotta move around down there, fight off sharks and giant squid and that shit. Guns ain't worth shit underwater, so you're down to whatever you can stab with. Swords and axes don't work good down there either; water's too thick. Harpoons, monofil spears, monofil chainsaw modded to work submerged, that shit.
Pressurise to go down there, depressurise to come up, else you go splash.

Space? Hard to get to, easy to work with, easy to die there.
Getting up there, we ain't got no space'vator yet, or if we do they're hiding it pretty fuckin' well. Gotta use the corp shit, unless you're rich enough to have your own rocket, and if you DO, why you doin' this, omae?
But getting up is basically going really fast and really high, then going faster when you're up there. Freefall, not zero-g. Always falling, just missing before you can hit.
Now, you're probably gonna puke on the way up when the engines cut out. That's natural, you got bags for that. Once you're UP, the fun begins. You keep moving if you're outside. Also, no suit? Your blood leaks out as it freezes, eyes pop, guts come outta both ends, and you one dead bitch. In a suit? Easy peasy. Just keep floating until the air runs out and you die, heh.
But no, seriously. Two types of suit. One's your classic space suit. Big, bulky, armoured. The other is basically spandex and a helmet. Your skin's airtight and watertight, just need to keep it pressured so you don't inflate.

Once you're up there, same shit different dog. You do nknow what a dog is, right omae? No? Fuck you, rat, then. Both are in a big metal tube, both places it's a bad idea to shoot the fuckin' wall. Either water gets in or air gets out. Either is bad. In space, probably both, they shield the walls with water. Either way, you're dealin' with whatever they had contained there, and it AIN'T gonna be pretty.

True, but waterproof smartphones aren't generally scrapped together or highly unregulated because of illegality, like a lot of things tend to be in cyberpunk.

I'm not saying I expect it all the time, I just realized I couldn't think of any actual instances of it.

Lots of little gadgets, like small sensory drones, matrix-propagation relays in the shape of pine cones, animal tracking and animal-poacher detection poles, micro-bugs for surveillance of forest fires, etc.

>Your blood leaks out as it freezes
No no no, your blood freezes as it leaks out. Space is an insulator, but the expansion as it turns into a fine mist cool the gasses superfast

Don't you correct my advice, omae, or you're goin' down to feed the swer bears.

> You're not gonna get no wi-fi in the fuckin' desert anyway, omae.

Then I refuse to go. Wifi is a basic human right.

Fuckin' hacker shits these days, I swear.

You get your ass into that plane, and you go out into that desert, and you hack that fuckin' black lab clone experiment site like your friends are fuckin' paying you to, boyo.

It always seems like an easy topic to skip over but you'd think having all that fancy cyberware and shit would be detrimental to surviving in the wilds where you're far away from specialized care.

I refuse to believe that you can do brain surgery in your garage unless you have the proper tools and expertise. A monkey wrench and WD40 arn't going to keep you from going retarded when your buddy sets down his beer asks you to lean back in the recliner and starts cutting into your scalp.

What about just living in a small town? In a cyberpunk world, what is life like for the rural folk? I assume most farms are huge, owned by megacorps and have their own robotized factories. Do the people in villages have good access to the web/matrix/whatever?

Is there even rural living in cyberpunk settings? I thought it's all crowded megacities or barren wastelands

I don't see why not. If you have vast empty spaces and ghosts towns people will inevitably go there to squat or get away from the city becuase living in the sticks is better than being a begger and you could at least do some subsistance farming or maybe join some hippie drug doing commune that does that. It would also make for a good getaway if you need to lay low for a while.

I would assume there would be a lot of open space with the assumed technological advances that are coming up like lab grown meat and indoor farming and any farming you couldn't do with those would be centralized to industrial farms.

Not to mention it would be more believable to me to think you could find people who could do stuff like repair basic augmentations and have Ultra Wifi (or just steal the connection somehow) or something via satelite. I would think if I was running a criminal organization having a ghost town I can claim as my own and charge people rent to live in would be good.

Maybe YOU can't do brain surgery in your garage. Me? Land is cheap out here, corporate oversight is not. Cheapest doc-shop in the state, if you can survive your trip out here.

Well, I didn't say you couldn't persey. I would require the person doing the surgery to at least steal all the various medical tech they would need to basically create a hospital capable of doing such surgeries.

Having it out in the sticks is fine actually and I would expect that. I would add the potential hazard that a doc shop being run in bumfuck no where could have the generators damaged mid surgery or something.

I think the start of Interstellar is a good picture

>sitting on some random ass farm
>barely anyone lives out there
>drone-machinery does most of the farming
>you're a poorly paid drone-herder/fixer
>occasional military drone fly-over
>if you're lucky override their mission for a bonus payday of either looting the parts, or selling the info on the data-market

>Be living in my little ramshackle house out in the boons
>Half of the house is taken up by servers and the hacker group that pays me to keep them also help pay for the gas for the generators
>The town over also acts a hub for various smuggling outfits with everyone from well dress corporate goons to leather skin bikers coming in and out to do "business"
>The place actually runs like a town with a hotel, a bar, hookers, and a grocery store
>I sip on my coffee as my girlfriend is finishing calibrating my cheap-ass leg.

>how do you keep sand out of your matrix jack-port in your spine?

wear your plug, dipshit

Well, shit, I would hope over-industrialization is good at least for cheap goods like basic electrical appliances.

>also for the love gibson don't abuse the rain. Use OTHER meteorological situations to make the world miserable, there are tons.

Matrix PSAs: "Don't jack in the shower"

Cyberpunk in snow? Normal cyberpunk in a almost forgotten Siberian industry town. Doing some stuff in a polar research station / oil rig. Crashing corporate parties in luxury ski resorts.

In Cyberpunk 2020, all the farmers got kicked off their land by the megacorps and became Mad Max-style road nomads.

A good start for anything cyberpunk is to look at how it works today, and then make it just a bit more dystopian. So what can we do with a winter wilderness today?

Research stations are an obvious one, like we have on Antarctica. Either for the possibilities the cold enables or (more obvious for our purposes) for the possibilities the inhospitable remoteness enables.

Siberia has a lot of mining towns (pic related for example). Plenty of cyberpunk potential there: an entire town focused only on productivity. Pollution is a given, of course.

On a more lighthearted note: ski resorts. Perfect place to meet/kidnap/spy on/assassinate some corp exec.

There is not a lot of cyberpunk things you can do with snowy wilderness itself, but as you can see, what humans *do* with it gives us plenty of options.

Great minds think alike.

There is. Read Hardwired. There are corporate farms. While mostly robotized, there are still some humans around. Then you also have maybe a couple of farms left. Maybe some food/fuel processing facilities are located nearby. You have various religious groups who live secluded. And there are the drug production and smuggling operations.

Seems so. If you were a girl, I'd marry you.