Necromunda (Planet) - Society: The ensuing millennia have not changed its basic purpose very much; Necromunda is still a world of mines, factories, refineries and processing plants. The planet is a vast powerhouse of industry, making thousands and thousands of different items for use throughout the nearby Imperial planetary systems of the Segmentum Solar.Nothing which can contribute to the planet's output has been left untouched. From the tops of the highest mountains to the depths of the oceans, the wealth of Necromunda has been extracted.Mountains have been reduced to rubble for the ore they contain; oceans have been turned into little more than chemical sludge ponds by the constant industrial pollution.The once-fertile plains of the world have disappeared under huge urban developments of imposing housing and factory arcologies, forming new ranges of man-made urban mountains every bit as tall as the long-since flattened natural topographical features.These huge towering urban arcology complexes are known as hive cities, or simply "hives," and their individual peaks or towers are called city spires or "spires." A close group of urban hives is known as a "hive cluster."Between the hives, deserts of industrial ash cover the surface of the planet with a mobile, corrosive skin. Over this desert lies a cloud layer of airborne pollution, so that the great spires of the city hives rise from a drifting mist of tainted vapour like islands appearing out of an ashen sea.The hives and hive clusters are connected through the Ash Wastes by so-called ash trains, long trains of transport cars outfitted with reinforced balloon wheels that can travel between the wastes on a system of tracks, delivering passengers and goods.These trains are often attacked by the nomadic tribes of mutants called "Ash Raiders" who have somehow adapted to life in the poisonous Ash Wastes.Despite being reduced to such a hellish environmental state, Necromunda is still a valuable world to the Imperium. Although little of Necromunda's original resources remain, the waste-heaps of previous generations have become a new source of riches.Necromunda lives on the accumulated wastes of its past: its people have learned to scavenge, reclaim and recycle everything in order to squeeze a living from their exhausted world.Necromunda's population has increased well beyond the planet's capacity to support it. As a consequence, it is wholly reliant on synthetic and imported food.Each hive city has its own recycling plants which convert previously used organic matter and waste into synthetic food like corpse-starch. Real food is imported from off-planet, but is an expensive luxury which only the most wealthy and prestigious Necromundans from the world's aristocracy can afford.There are probably more people now on Necromunda than ever lived in the entire history of Terra up until the end of the twentieth century in the 2nd Millennium.An attempted Imperial census of Trazior Hive four thousand Terran years ago in the 37th Millennium revealed an estimated population of a billion in the upper habitation levels alone -- no further attempt has been made to count Necromunda's population in Trazior or any other of the several thousand hives on the planet, though the world's population must now be over 100 billion people.The society of Necromunda is reasonably typical of larger Imperial Hive Worlds. No attempt is made to enforce central administration upon the entire population, indeed such a thing would prove impossible on a world where most people remain unrecorded by any authority.Instead, a kind of feudal system has evolved by which individual people owe loyalty to others, who in their turn owe loyalty to other increasingly more powerful members of the feudal hierarchy.Among the more stable elements of the population these loyalties are owed on a family basis, and closely related families all support each other under the hegemony of the most powerful member of their family group.This form of urban feudalism tends to be self-regulating. Weaker clans naturally seek the protection of more powerful neighbours whose powerbase then expands until it reaches the limit whereby its numbers and resources are simply too few to allow it to expand further.Where rival clans meet it is inevitable that their power will be tested in combat; the ability of a clan to exert its power being the only true measure of its influence. The endless feuds between the warrior gangs are never-ending and a fundamental part of the political workings of Necromunda.