Night City 2045: Everything You Need to Know About Cyberpunk's Most Explosive New Release

If you have ever walked the neon-drenched streets of Cyberpunk 2077 and wondered what Night City looked like before V ever set foot in Watson, your answer has finally arrived. Night City 2045 is the most comprehensive, most ambitious, and most detailed sourcebook ever created for the Cyberpunk universe — and it is setting the entire community on fire.

Whether you are a seasoned Cyberpunk RED tabletop veteran, a devoted Cyberpunk 2077 fan, or someone who just discovered this dystopian world through the hit Netflix anime Edgerunners, Night City 2045 is the one release you cannot afford to ignore in 2026.

This article breaks down everything you need to know: what Night City 2045 is, why it matters, what is inside it, how it connects to Cyberpunk 2077, and why it is already being called the definitive guide to one of the greatest fictional cities ever created.

What Is Night City 2045?

Night City 2045 is a 312-page city sourcebook for the Cyberpunk RED tabletop roleplaying game, published by R. Talsorian Games — the company founded by Mike Pondsmith, the original creator of the entire Cyberpunk franchise. Developed in direct collaboration with CD Projekt Red (the studio behind Cyberpunk 2077), this sourcebook sets out to do something no previous publication has ever accomplished: deliver the absolute definitive guide to Night City at street level, district by district, gang by gang, and corner by corner.

The book is set in 2045, which places it squarely in what the Cyberpunk universe calls the "Time of the Red" — a dark, brutal era that takes place approximately 32 years before the events of Cyberpunk 2077. This is the world of Cyberpunk RED, the current edition of the tabletop RPG, and it is a world still staggering from the catastrophic destruction of the Fourth Corporate War. The skyline is cracked, the corporations are rebuilding their power, and the streets belong to whoever is tough enough to hold them.

Night City 2045 was first announced in August 2024 and has been one of the most anticipated releases in the Cyberpunk community ever since. The digital PDF edition was released on April 17, 2026, while the physical hardcover is scheduled to ship on June 17, 2026, with physical pre-orders beginning to ship around June 22–24, 2026. Pre-orders are open at the R. Talsorian store for $60 (physical) and $30 (PDF), and purchasing the physical copy unlocks a 50% discount on the PDF version.

The Time of the Red: Night City 30 Years Before Cyberpunk 2077

To understand why Night City 2045 matters so deeply to Cyberpunk 2077 fans specifically, you need to understand the timeline of this universe. Cyberpunk 2077 the video game takes place in — obviously — 2077. It presents a version of Night City that has had three decades to rebuild, restabilize, and mutate into the gleaming, brutal megacity players explore. But before that version of Night City existed, there was the Time of the Red.

The Time of the Red is the aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War, a conflict so devastating that it culminated in the infamous Arasaka Tower bombing of 2023. That event — in which Johnny Silverhand (yes, the same Johnny Silverhand you know from the game) led a desperate assault on Arasaka's headquarters — left Night City physically and socially shattered. Nukes, corporate warfare, infrastructure collapse, and mass civilian casualties defined the years that followed.

By 2045, Night City is in a state of brutal reconstruction. Corporations are cautiously rebuilding influence. Gangs have carved the city into feudal territories. The nomad clans roam the Badlands outside the city walls. Netrunners fear the scorched NET left behind by the war. This is a harder, dirtier, more desperate version of Night City than the one Cyberpunk 2077 players know — and that makes it absolutely fascinating.

Night City 2045 the sourcebook immerses you completely in this world. It is not just a history lesson. It is a living, breathing guide to a city in survival mode, written as though you are actually living there, seeing it through the eyes of locals who know every back alley and every corpo lie.

What Is Inside Night City 2045? A Full Content Breakdown

The scope of this sourcebook is genuinely staggering. At 312 pages, it is one of the largest single releases in Cyberpunk tabletop history, and nearly every page is packed with immediately usable, deeply detailed content. Here is a thorough look at what you get.

The Complete City Overview

The book opens with approximately 20 pages of foundational material covering the essential bones of Night City. This includes a full history of the city and an in-universe timeline, an explanation of Night City's legal status (it is a Free City, a city-state operating outside direct US federal governance), information on citizenship and Social Identity Numbers (SINs), and a complete breakdown of transportation — how people get to Night City, how they get around inside it, what vehicle ownership looks like, how traffic and parking work, and what the public transit situation is.

For game masters running Cyberpunk RED campaigns, this section alone is gold. For lore fans, it answers questions about Night City's inner workings that have never been addressed this comprehensively before. This is world-building at an extraordinary level of detail.

24 Districts — Every Single One

The absolute heart of Night City 2045 is its district-by-district breakdown. The book covers all 24 districts of Night City as they exist in 2045, each given a detailed, rich, individual treatment. Every district section tells you who is in charge politically and practically, what the population looks like, which security provider (or gang) controls the streets, the recent historical events that have shaped the neighborhood, and dozens of specific mapped locations within it.

Each district is also narrated in-universe by a local media personality — a journalist from that specific neighborhood who gives you the street-level perspective of someone who actually lives there. This storytelling approach makes the material feel alive rather than clinical. You are not reading a dry encyclopedia. You are reading dispatches from a city that breathes.

For context, the previous major Night City sourcebook (released in 2020 for the tabletop game) covered only the Downtown district in serious depth. Night City 2045 covers all 24 districts. That tells you everything about the scale of ambition here.

The districts span the full spectrum of Night City's social geography, from the corporate-controlled Executive Zone where megacorp towers cast permanent shadows, to the ruins of the Old Combat Zone where law enforcement gave up decades ago, to the docks of Heywood and the former resort ruins of Pacifica. Each district has its own character, its own power structure, and its own secrets.

600+ Specific Locations With Maps

Night City 2045 maps out more than 600 individual locations across the city's 24 districts. These are not vague references. Each location is a real, named, described place: stores, clinics, gang headquarters, corporate fortresses, megabuildings, bars, black markets, tech shops, and more. Every mapped location comes with a Security Code — a rating that tells you what kind of danger you are walking into.

The level of detail here is extraordinary. Locations have sublocations. Establishments have staff descriptions, management information, costs, and even special events calendars in the case of larger venues. This is a resource that game masters can use to run entire campaigns without needing to invent a single location from scratch.

For fans of Cyberpunk 2077, seeing Night City's geography this clearly laid out in 2045 form — 32 years before the video game — provides an entirely new layer of understanding for familiar places. You can trace the evolution of specific neighborhoods from the Time of the Red to the gleaming, brutal megacity of 2077.

Factions, Gangs, and Criminal Organizations

Night City has always been defined by the factions fighting to control it, and Night City 2045 goes deeper into faction politics than any previous Cyberpunk publication. The book contains:

44 Gangs — Each entry includes the gang's logo, its leadership, its activities and thematic identity, its known hangouts, its visual identifiers (how you recognize a member on the street), and detailed information about its operations, history, and role in Night City's power structure. Forty-four gangs is an enormous number, and the level of detail on each one means this section alone rivals the depth of many complete RPG supplements.

6 Major Criminal Organizations — These are the larger, more organized criminal enterprises operating above and beneath the gang level. Each gets full treatment including leadership profiles, activities, fronts, and identifiers.

23 Security Organizations — Night City's corporate and private security providers are not a monolith. Twenty-three different security organizations operate in Night City 2045, each with its own headquarters, mission, and operational profile. For game masters, this is essential for understanding who is protecting what and why.

This faction architecture creates a complete picture of Night City's power dynamics in 2045 — who controls what territory, who is fighting whom, and where the opportunities (and dangers) are for player characters navigating this world.

Playland by the Sea: A Special Deep Dive

One of the most intriguing sections of Night City 2045 is an 11-page deep dive into a specific location: Playland by the Sea, a sprawling amusement park that has taken on a life of its own in the city's underground. This section contains 55 individual mapped locations within the park alone, complete with NPCs, new rules specifically for running scenes in that environment, and a full special events calendar.

An amusement park that has been repurposed or warped by Night City's brutal social realities is exactly the kind of uniquely Cyberpunk location that makes this universe so compelling — a place that was built for joy and has been transformed into something stranger and more dangerous.

99 Character Stat Blocks

For game masters running Cyberpunk RED, Night City 2045 provides 99 fully detailed stat blocks covering the full range of characters you would encounter in the city. From gang foot soldiers and criminal enforcers to corporate security operatives and everyday civilians, these stat blocks let you populate any encounter, any location, any district with mechanically complete NPCs immediately. This is a practical utility feature that saves game masters enormous amounts of preparation time.

Night City 2045 and Cyberpunk 2077: The Connection Explained

Night City 2045 was developed in collaboration with CD Projekt Red, the studio that made Cyberpunk 2077. This is not an incidental detail — it means the lore presented in this sourcebook is canonically consistent with everything Cyberpunk 2077 players know about Night City's history.

For players of the video game, Night City 2045 functions as an extraordinary piece of expanded lore. When you played Cyberpunk 2077, you experienced Night City in 2077. With this sourcebook, you can now understand what that same city looked like at street level in 2045. You can see the neighborhoods before they became what they are in the game. You can understand the gang politics that eventually evolved into the Valentinos, the 6th Street, the Maelstrom, the Tyger Claws.

You can see the corporate power structures that eventually hardened into the corpo-dominated world V navigates.

Every detail in Night City 2045 adds depth to the video game's world. The history sections explain why certain districts are the way they are in 2077. The gang and corporate faction breakdowns trace the lineage of organizations players fight alongside or against in the game. This is the prequel lore that Cyberpunk 2077 fans have been hungry for.

The sourcebook also connects directly to events referenced in Cyberpunk 2077. The Fourth Corporate War and its aftermath, Johnny Silverhand's legacy, the long shadow of Arasaka — these are not just background flavor in Night City 2045. They are the lived reality of a city still digging itself out of catastrophe.

The Creative and Narrative Approach

One of the things that makes Night City 2045 particularly remarkable is how it chooses to present its information. Rather than writing purely in the voice of a distant narrator, the book uses local media personalities from each district as in-universe guides. Each of the 24 districts is introduced and explained by a journalist or media figure who actually lives there and knows the neighborhood from the inside.

This approach does something very clever: it embeds the information in the kind of unreliable, street-level, first-person perspective that is fundamental to the Cyberpunk ethos. In Night City, nobody has the full picture. Everyone is working with incomplete information, filtered through their own biases, their own loyalties, and their own survival instincts. By having local media narrate each district, Night City 2045 turns its sourcebook format into something that feels like reading actual dispatches from the city rather than a developer's database.

The original working title for the book was the "Edgerunners Guide to Night City," which gives you a sense of the street-level, practitioner's perspective the book aims to deliver. It was eventually retitled Night City 2045 to more clearly signal its setting and scope, but the street-level spirit of that original title permeates every page.

Why Night City 2045 Matters for the Cyberpunk Community

The Cyberpunk franchise has been on an extraordinary trajectory since the release of Cyberpunk 2077. The game, despite its troubled launch, became one of the best-selling and most beloved RPGs of its generation after extensive post-launch improvements. The Edgerunners anime on Netflix won critical acclaim and introduced an entirely new generation of fans to the universe. The tabletop RPG Cyberpunk RED has been enjoying a major resurgence in popularity driven by the game's success.

Night City 2045 arrives at a moment when the appetite for Cyberpunk lore, world-building, and expanded content is at an all-time high. For tabletop players, it is the comprehensive city guide that Cyberpunk RED has needed since its launch — a resource that elevates every campaign with an unprecedented depth of setting detail. For video game fans who have never touched the tabletop RPG, it is a legitimate lore artifact that enriches everything they love about Cyberpunk 2077.

The collaborative development process with CD Projekt Red also signals something important: the two major custodians of the Cyberpunk universe are actively working together to create consistent, rich, interconnected lore. That collaboration means this sourcebook is not just fan service — it is genuine canonical expansion of one of science fiction's most compelling fictional universes.

The scale of Night City 2045 also makes a statement. A 312-page city sourcebook covering 24 districts and over 600 locations is not a supplement. It is a monument. It is R. Talsorian saying: this city deserves to be documented completely, at full resolution, without shortcuts. Whether you are using it as a game master's toolkit or reading it purely for lore, the depth of commitment in Night City 2045 is something the community has never quite seen before for this setting.

Who Should Get Night City 2045?

The honest answer is: almost everyone who cares about Cyberpunk in any form. But let's break it down specifically.

Cyberpunk RED Game Masters should consider Night City 2045 essential. This book transforms what is possible in a Cyberpunk RED campaign. Instead of improvising city details or relying on sparse existing resources, you now have 600+ mapped locations, 44 gangs with full profiles, 24 districts with complete political and social breakdowns, and 99 ready-to-use stat blocks. The depth of content here means you could run a multi-year campaign set entirely in one district and never exhaust the material.

Cyberpunk RED Players will find Night City 2045 deeply immersive reading. Understanding the city at this level — knowing who controls which street corner, what the history of your character's neighborhood is, what the power dynamics are between the organizations you encounter — makes you a better, more engaged player and deepens every session.

Cyberpunk 2077 fans who want to understand the full depth of Night City's lore will find Night City 2045 enormously rewarding. It fills in decades of history that the video game references but never fully explains. It shows you the city at a formative moment, still raw from the Fourth Corporate War, and helps you understand why everything in 2077 is the way it is.

New Cyberpunk fans coming from Edgerunners or who are just discovering the franchise will find Night City 2045 an excellent entry point into the broader lore. Yes, it is technically a Cyberpunk RED supplement, but its value as a lore document and world-building resource stands completely independently of any tabletop gaming context.

How to Get Night City 2045

Night City 2045 is available for pre-order now through multiple channels. The physical hardcover edition is priced at $60 and is scheduled for physical release on June 17, 2026, with shipping expected around June 22–24. The digital PDF edition is priced at $30 and is already available on DriveThruRPG. Purchasing the physical edition through the Talsorian Store unlocks a 50% discount on the PDF version, making the combo the best value option for players who want both.

For those attending the Origins Game Fair 2026 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, copies will be available there ahead of the general release date. Additionally, R. Talsorian Games has been releasing a series of developer log articles previewing specific sections of the book weekly in the lead-up to the June 17 release — a great way to get a taste of the content before committing.

There is also a free supplementary release called the Night City 2045 Atlas, a DLC preview item for Cyberpunk RED that showcases locations featured in the main sourcebook. If you want to experience a preview of the sourcebook's geographic scope before purchasing, the Atlas is a good starting point.

Night City 2045 in the Context of Cyberpunk's Legacy

Mike Pondsmith created the Cyberpunk universe in 1988 — 38 years ago. In that time, Night City has evolved from a fictional city sketched out in a tabletop rulebook into one of the most fully realized fictional urban environments in all of popular culture. The video game put it on screens in 4K, sprawling and neon-drenched and brutally beautiful. The anime made its streets feel intimate and heartbreaking. The tabletop has always been its living, expanding home.

Night City 2045 represents perhaps the most complete single document of Night City that has ever existed. It is the culmination of decades of world-building, given the full attention and resources it deserves. The collaboration between R. Talsorian and CD Projekt Red means both the original creators and the most prominent current custodians of the franchise have put their weight behind this project.

For anyone who has ever looked at Night City and wanted to understand it fully — not just play in it, but know it — Night City 2045 is the closest thing that has ever existed to a complete answer.

Final Verdict: Should You Care About Night City 2045?

Absolutely. Whether you are approaching this as a tabletop player, a video game fan, an anime watcher, or a science fiction enthusiast who appreciates extraordinary world-building, Night City 2045 delivers something genuinely rare: a fictional city documented at full resolution, with all the complexity, contradiction, and brutal beauty that Night City has always promised.

The Cyberpunk universe has been building toward something like this for decades. Night City 2045 is not just a sourcebook. It is the definitive record of the most iconic city in dystopian fiction — the City of Dreams, the city that never stops chewing people up, the city where everyone comes to become a legend or a cautionary tale.

Welcome to Night City, choomba. Population: everyone who ever wanted to live in the future and realized it was going to be exactly this complicated.