The Main Debris zone on New Albuquerque is the biggest and oldest of the planet’s scrapheaps, where the terrain is dominated by the wreckage of the many ships that end up as derelicts in the area. Scrap started being intentionally dumped in the area late in the 1,000 Years War by the Empire of 1,000,000 Suns after the Battle of the Three Moons. The area is regarded with a degree of reverence by both the Empire as well as the Cult of Troniac due to the large numbers of dead from both sides of the 1,000 Years War who were lost with their vessels that ended up in the zone.
The zone was shaped again during the Grey Exodous, when the Greys working salvage and recycling operations for the E1MS left to join the Convergence leaving behind substantial ruins.
The Main Debris Zone is sparsely populated, with the majority of the inhabitants being nomads or scavengers organized into roving bands and a few scattered towns. The biggest city (and unofficial capitol of New Albuquerque) is Colony City on the eastern edge of the zone. It was founded when the colony ship Garcia’s Hope from the Planetary League crashed there. The local Vorgon population as well as the many survivors who either crash or are marooned here make their living by recycling the mountains of debris that give the zone its name. Most roads in the region are simple dirt or gravel paths, with a few paved with the thick armor of the downed ships that pile up there.
The region of space near New Albuquerque is prone to shipwrecks due to both a high level of ambient debris as well as strong cosmic winds from various nearby black holes and neutron stars. This natural tendency for junk to accumulate on and near the planet greatly enhances the local scavenging economy, but at the cost of making it both difficult and dangerous to leave the surface. The presence of so many dead stars in the region (the area is known as a stellar graveyard) also limits communication with the outside world, and causes irregularities in the local flow of time.
