Neotropolis

Neo 2026 was the year bounty hunting stopped being the only thing on the board. Standard hunts still ran across Neotropolis, but FDN MK I nodes, new multiplayer modes, and a pewter coin chase gave people parallel reasons to move through the city together.

We hid seven FDN MK I units around the event. Your PDN showed one of several symbols; to crack a node, two players with matching symbols had to jack into the FDN at once. Each successful hack handed the pair one of five words toward a hidden passphrase. Bring the full phrase to the right character and you could claim one of the first cast pewter Alleycat coins, minted only for that puzzle.

Posse let allies chain PDNs so supporters could boost whoever was dueling at the front. Shootout wired up to thirteen players in a ring for rapid king-of-the-hill elimination. We closed the weekend with a full 13-person shootout, one of the loudest crowd moments we have run.

205 PDN MK II units were in the field, with earlier PDN MK I hardware still circulating. The wireless logbook recorded 4,149 Quickdraw matches from 274 active players (everyone who logged at least one duel). Hunters won 53% of duels; bounties escaped 47%.

Reggie Bloodletter won a third straight championship (662 matches, 133 unique opponents). Hot Lock ran a 68-match win streak. g1dg3t averaged 208 ms across 261 matches. Three duels dead-heated to the millisecond.

Volunteers carried a lot of the weekend. We opened applications months out, ran training meetings, and worked with Extremely Temp Agency to screen our staff film on site. We also printed 300 Alleycat Quickdraw Pocket Guides so players could teach friends in the field without camping the booth.

Intake offered a choice for the first time: lore-heavy film or rules-only cut, so newcomers could decide how much story they wanted before the desert.

Staff training returned for year two so booth volunteers could onboard before they reached the table.

FDN prototypes, firmware modes, and the engineering postmortem are on the dispatch page. Season stats and leaderboards live at Neo 2026 season data.