The Evacuation Zone is one of the denser collectible pockets in Control Resonant’s Manhattan, and it punishes a single pass. A chasm cuts the district in half, the main story pulls you through only part of it, and several pickups sit behind barriers you cannot break until later. A clean sweep is mostly a matter of splitting the zone in two and returning once with the right ability.
Quick answer: Sweep the north and south sides of the central chasm separately, clear the zone’s main story boss, and return with a fire ability to open the blocked routes.
Evacuation Zone layout: north side, south side, and the chasm
Treat the Evacuation Zone as two maps stitched together. A giant chasm runs through the middle of the district, and quests and collectibles are scattered along both of its edges as well as deeper into each half. Anything you find while following a quest marker is incidental — the marked route does not cover the zone.
Work one side at a time. Pick a dimensional door on the north side, clear every street, alley and rooftop you can reach from it, then do the same from a door on the south side. Splitting the sweep this way stops you from crossing the chasm repeatedly and losing track of which blocks you have already stripped.
Street level is not the whole picture either. Barricades and stacked wreckage act as climbing routes to upper platforms, and some pickups only exist up there. If a wooden barricade or a crushed truck looks climbable, it usually is.
Clear the main story boss before you sweep
The boss in the Evacuation Zone is part of the main story, so you will fight it whether or not you care about collectibles. That works in your favour — do the story beat first, then come back for the cleanup rather than trying to pick up everything while enemies are still spawning around the objective.
Expect pressure from multiple angles while you explore. Melee units close in from the street, drones circle above the main road, and the open blocks let both types reach you at once. Repeating one attack chain does not carry you through these fights.
Abilities that unlock blocked collectibles in the Evacuation Zone
Some of the zone’s pickups are not hidden, just sealed. Certain blockades can only be cleared with a fire ability, and until you have one, those routes stay shut no matter how thoroughly you search around them. If you hit a blocked doorway or a wall of debris that refuses every other attack, mark it and move on.
Traversal matters just as much. The Reach ability from the Fault in this area makes the upside-down rooftops and inverted walls far easier to handle, and double jump plus levitation covers the gaps between them. Picking up Reach before the collectible sweep saves a lot of failed jumps.
When something is visible but unreachable, check the surface above you. Several Evacuation Zone pickups sit on inverted geometry, and the route to them runs along the ceiling rather than the ground.
Collectible types to track in the Evacuation Zone
Not everything that glows counts the same way. The zone mixes lore entries, build materials and permanent upgrades, and they are logged in different places.
| Pickup | What it is | Why you want it |
|---|---|---|
| Dylan’s Sketchbook | Sketch pages | Collectible entry |
| Evacuation Efforts | Zone record set | Lore entry |
| Untapped Artifact | World find | Crafted into Artifacts in The Gap |
| Living Shard | Aberrant item | Build material |
| Health / Power Upgrade Point | Special item | Permanent stat increase |
| Outfit item | Cosmetic | Appearance only |
Ground pickups announce themselves with coloured glows, so scan sidewalks and alley mouths as you pass rather than stopping at every marker. The sketchbook pages are the ones most often missed, because they sit off the main traffic routes instead of on them.
Evacuation Zone dog toy location (Every Dog Has Her Day)
One of the zone’s side story pickups belongs to the recurring dog quest, and it is the fiddliest grab in the district because both the dog and her toy sit on inverted surfaces.
Check your Evacuation Zone completion
Open the quest log to confirm the zone’s side stories have closed out and the boss objective is marked complete. Returned quest items such as the dog’s toy update their side story entry the moment you hand them over, so if an entry is still open, the object is still out there.
There is no rush to be perfect on the first visit. Nothing on the confirmed completion list is flagged as permanently missable, and every zone stays accessible after the story ends, which makes a post-game pass the cleanest way to finish the Evacuation Zone once you have every ability the blockades demand.
New Game Plus carries most progression forward, but traversal abilities reset. If you are planning to mop up inverted-rooftop pickups on a second run, expect to re-earn the movement tools first.
