Ambrosia

Ambrosia's the industrial heart of the state. It sits beside Lake Leonida, and the Allied Crystal sugar refinery towers over it.

It also looks like the home of the Thrillbilly Mud Club, the venue first shown back in trailer one, so Ambrosia probably carries a big share of the game's more unhinged side content. Rockstar's never actually said where the club is, though. Trailer one shows it without a place name, and our own regions guide only puts it here with an apparently.

Why sugar

The land south of Lake Okeechobee is one of the biggest sugar growing regions in the United States, and sugar really is the industry that runs those towns. It's also an industry with a long, well documented history of labour disputes, fights over the water draining into the Everglades, and a huge amount of political pull for its size. Belle Glade and Clewiston, on the lake's southern shore, are the towns Ambrosia looks most like.

Picking sugar over some generic factory town gives Rockstar specific things to poke fun at: a farming business with a company town attached, sitting right upstream of the wetland region the game's also built.

The lake behind the wall

Lake Leonida is the game's Okeechobee. The real lake is huge and very shallow, and it's ringed by a tall earth dyke built after hurricanes in the twenties killed thousands of people in the towns around it. From most of the land nearby you can't see the water at all, because the dyke's in the way. If Rockstar's copied that, you'll have a lake the size of a county that you have to climb up a bank to look at.

Signposted from Vice City

Ambrosia's also on a road sign. In Trailer 2 there's an overhead gantry on a causeway at the edge of Vice City reading US 35 North, VCI Airport, Ambrosia, exit only left (our read of the signs). It's the only place name evidence so far for how the region joins up with the rest of the map, and it tells you it's a long way inland and somewhere you're expected to drive.

Where the game gets loud

Every Grand Theft Auto map needs somewhere for the stuff that'd look ridiculous in the city. Trailer one's mud club sequence is exactly that, and putting it here makes Ambrosia the region where the game gets loud and stupid on purpose.

We don't mean that as a knock. Grand Theft Auto V used Sandy Shores and the county around it the same way, and it got some of the most memorable stuff in the game out of it.

What isn't known

Nobody's confirmed whether you can go inside the refinery, how big Ambrosia is, or what the Thrillbilly Mud Club actually is as an activity, or even for certain that it's in Ambrosia. Rockstar hasn't shown any extended footage of the region yet, and we don't know how long the drive up US 35 takes.