If you’re a long-time Death Stranding fan, you’ve probably scrolled through dozens of trailer breakdowns and leak threads looking for any crumb of info about the upcoming sequel. One question that pops up over and over across Reddit, Twitter, and gaming forums is where does Death Stranding 2 take place. The first game’s sprawling, fractured version of the former United States was such a core part of the experience, tying directly to every delivery, story beat, and multiplayer interaction, so it makes sense players want to know what regions they’ll be traversing this time around. I’ve rewatched every official trailer, developer interview, and Japanese game show deep dive three times to pull together all confirmed locations, rumored areas, and context for why each setting matters for the game’s story and mechanics.
Where Does Death Stranding 2 Take Place: Confirmed Core Regions
Let’s cut straight to the confirmed details first, straight from Kojima Productions’ official announcements. The game is still set in the former continental United States, but you won’t be retreading the same cross-country route from the first Death Stranding. Instead, the core story takes place across the U.S. West Coast and large swathes of southern Alaska, regions that were only referenced or briefly shown in the final act of the first game. Kojima noted in a 2023 developer roundtable that the team wanted to explore areas that felt more isolated and hostile than the relatively tame central U.S. plains from the first entry.
You won’t be starting in the east this time, either. The opening hours of the game pick up with Fragile leading a new delivery team out of a rebuilt hub on the Pacific Northwest coast, several years after the end of the first game’s main story. The chiral network has expanded to cover most of the west coast, but a string of new voidouts and a mutated strain of chiral rain have wiped out large portions of the infrastructure players built in the first game. That means you won’t be able to import your old road networks or safe houses, which is a bummer for anyone who spent 100+ hours perfecting their UCA build, but it also keeps the exploration feeling fresh.
There are also subtle hints that we might get brief detours outside of the U.S. later in the game, but Kojima has stayed tight-lipped about those so far. For the vast majority of your playtime, though, you’ll be sticking to the western edge of North America.
Returning Locations From the First Death Stranding
You won’t be exploring entirely uncharted territory, though. A handful of fan-favorite locations from the first game are making a return, though they’ve changed drastically in the years between the two titles. The most prominent confirmed returning spot is Edge Knot City, the final hub you reach at the end of the first game’s cross-country journey. In the sequel, half the city is submerged after a massive voidout hit the coast shortly after Sam connected it to the chiral network. Most of the original population moved inland, but the remaining residents have turned the flooded sections into a makeshift port for coastal delivery runs.
The Central Region Weather Station is also back, though its role has shifted completely. What was once a small outpost run by a single researcher is now a major UCA research hub studying the new, more aggressive BT strains that have appeared across the west coast. I noticed in the latest trailer that the view from the weather station’s observation deck now looks out over open ocean, which means sea levels have risen at least 30 feet since the end of the first game. That small detail says a lot about how much the world has deteriorated in the time between titles.
Other small locations from the first game will appear as easter eggs, too. You might stumble across the remains of an old safe house you built in the first game, half-buried in snow or flooded by chiral rain, but you won’t spend extended periods of time in any areas you already know well. The dev team made it clear that returning locations are meant to be nods to long-time fans, not core parts of the new game’s map.
New Locations You’ll Explore for the First Time
The vast majority of the map is made up of entirely new regions that never appeared in the first Death Stranding. Most of these are based on real-world locations across the west coast and Alaska, but twisted by years of chiral activity and voidouts. The three biggest confirmed new locations are:
There are plenty of smaller unannounced locations scattered across the map too, from abandoned coastal ski resorts to old military bunkers hidden in the Cascade Mountains. Kojima has teased that some of these smaller locations hold hidden story beats that fill in gaps from the first game, so it’s worth taking time off from main story deliveries to explore off the beaten path.
How the Setting Ties to Death Stranding 2’s Core Mechanics
The location isn’t just a backdrop for deliveries, it directly shapes almost every mechanic in the game. The snowy Alaskan terrain, for example, means you’ll have to manage your core body temperature in addition to your stamina, cargo health, and blood supply. If you get caught in a blizzard without proper cold-weather gear, you’ll start to lose feeling in your fingers and toes, which makes it much harder to balance with heavy cargo and increases your risk of falling and damaging your packages.
The flooded LA ruins also add a whole new layer of planning to every delivery run. You can’t just take your standard reverse trike out into the flooded streets, because it will short out and sink within seconds. You’ll have to swap between land vehicles, amphibious trucks, and even a new underwater delivery suit depending on the route you take, and you’ll have to plan around aquatic BTs that can attack you from below the surface. The new volcanic islands have unique chiral properties that change how multiplayer works, too. Any structure you build on the islands will show up across a much wider pool of player servers, so you’ll see way more contributions from other players, from bridges to safe houses to zip line networks, when you’re exploring that region.
A quick tip for when you start playing: don’t skip upgrading your cold-weather gear and amphibious truck as early as possible. I’ve seen a lot of players assume they can get by with the same gear from the first game, but you’ll get stuck within the first couple of hours if you don’t invest in new equipment built for the new terrain. It’s also a good idea to keep extra repair spray and blood bags on hand when you’re exploring the volcanic islands, because the BTs there hit twice as hard as the ones you fought in the first game.
At the end of the day, asking where does Death Stranding 2 take place is more than just a trivial question for fans. The setting is a core character in the game, just like Sam, Fragile, or any of the other returning cast members. Every region you explore ties directly to the game’s themes of connection, loss, and rebuilding after disaster, and each new location introduces new challenges that force you to adapt how you play. There are still plenty of hidden locations Kojima hasn’t revealed yet, and we’ll probably get more details as we get closer to launch, but the confirmed regions already make it clear this will be a far more varied and dangerous world than the one we explored in the first game.
