Cyberpunk 2077 Gangs: All Eight Ranked, and Why Size Doesn't Matter

Eight gangs hold Night City between them, and the first thing to understand about the ranking below is that it is not a headcount. The Valentinos have around 6,000 members and sit fourth. Maelstrom has roughly 1,300 and sits first. Power in this city is a question of what a gang is willing to do and who is standing behind it, and the two gangs at the top of this list are there because one has a corporation funding it and the other has stopped caring what happens to its own members.

The eight, least to most powerful

Read the last two columns against each other and the ranking stops being a straight line. The Animals are seventh on a power list and carry a high threat level, while the Voodoo Boys are two places above them and are described as a low threat in the street. Those are two different measurements wearing one number. The ranking is about what a gang controls; the threat column is about what happens if you walk into one of them. If you are deciding where to farm, the second column is the one that matters, and our XP farming guide routes around Pacifica and The Glen for exactly that reason.

The bottom half

The Mox are the smallest and the newest, formed eleven years before the game and built around protecting sex workers, which makes them the closest thing Night City has to a gang with a principle. They work out of Lizzie's Bar in Kabuki and they fight only when pushed. Their founder Lizzie was killed by the Tyger Claws after she took an axe to three of them for torturing and killing one of her employees, which is the whole city summarised in one sentence. Around 250 punks, anarchists and sex workers, mostly carrying melee weapons. Judy Alvarez is a member, which is worth knowing before you start her questline on our romance guide.

The Animals are the opposite: over 2,500 people who have decided that the answer to chrome is muscle. They run on supplements and a drug they call Juice, they use almost no cyberware, and a great many of them work the doors of clubs owned by other gangs. Their leader is whoever is strongest and fastest, currently Sasquatch, whose hammer sits at the bottom of our best weapons ranking for the perfectly good reason that carrying it stops you sprinting.

The Scavengers barely qualify as a gang. They do not run organised crime so much as hunt people, abducting anyone visibly chromed and harvesting the implants, which has made them rich as cyberware prices climb. Russian graffiti is how you spot their territory. The Voodoo Boys are the strangest entry on the list: a Pacifica gang of mostly Haitian and Dominican refugees, cult-like in their practices, and the best netrunners in the city. They make their money breaking into corporate accounts, their leader Bridgette is a netrunner herself with Placide as her second, and their real project is getting through the Blackwall, the barrier that keeps rogue AI out. In a firefight they are unremarkable. On the Net they are as dangerous as anything in Night City.

The top half

The Valentinos carry the largest stated membership on this page, around 6,000, and the motives that make the least sense from outside. They are Latino, they hold justice, honour and brotherhood in genuine esteem, and their central preoccupation is seducing women, preferably prestigious ones, with a habit of assaulting the boyfriends of anybody they take an interest in. They own a lot of legitimate businesses in Heywood and supplement the income with gun smuggling, theft, trafficking and contract work.

6th Street started as the opposite of a gang. It was formed by veterans of the Fourth Corporate War who had given up on the NCPD and decided to clean the streets themselves, and they arrived with military weapons and the training to use them. What they have become is a protection racket with a sideline in stolen cars, which they modify and sell, working out of Santo Domingo and Heywood. The drift from noble intentions to armed robbery is the most Night City arc on this page.

The Tyger Claws are second because of who pays them. Around 5,500 members across Westbrook and Watson, backed by Arasaka, and unusually light on cyberware for a gang this size, preferring martial arts, reflexes and katanas. They own more legitimate business than anyone else in the city, bars and casinos and brothels, and they run human trafficking, drugs and money laundering underneath it. Their katanas are the reason the Bladerunner build on our best builds guide has so much to loot.

Why Maelstrom is first

Maelstrom is not the biggest, the richest or the best connected. It came together when several smaller outfits, the Metal Warriors among them, merged because a gang called the Inquisitors was picking them off one by one. Around 1,300 members, based in an abandoned warehouse near the Docks, dealing in illegal medicine and drugs and running the Totentanz, one of the most popular clubs in the city. What puts them at the top is the chrome. Maelstrom's members install everything they can get, to the point where roughly a third of them have gone cyberpsycho and another third are on the edge of it, and a gang where one member in three has lost the thread is not a gang you negotiate with. The cyberware capacity limit on our best cyberware guide exists in the fiction precisely to stop V ending up like them.

You meet them early, too. Royce leads the Maelstrom crew at the Totentanz meet during The Pickup, and killing him is what puts the Chaos pistol in your hands, one of the five early iconics on our iconic weapon locations guide. Sparing him closes that door and opens another one later. Our main Cyberpunk 2077 guide maps the rest of the city.

FAQ

How many gangs are in Cyberpunk 2077?

Eight: the Mox, Animals, Scavengers, Voodoo Boys, Valentinos, 6th Street, Tyger Claws and Maelstrom.

What is the most powerful gang in Cyberpunk 2077?

Maelstrom, despite being one of the smaller ones at around 1,300 members. A third of them are cyberpsychos and another third are close to it.

Which is the largest gang in Night City?

The Valentinos, at roughly 6,000 members in Heywood, with the Tyger Claws close behind at around 5,500.

Which gang is the most dangerous to fight?

Maelstrom in a straight fight, and the Animals close behind them. The Voodoo Boys are the least dangerous in person and the last people you want waiting for you on the Net.