The Surface

Ained's surface presents itself as a pitch dark wasteland of frozen gases spanning the entirety of the planet. Buried under the snow are ruined cities and fossiled rests of once-living beings, plants and animals alike. Once easily distinguishable, oceans and continents are now part of the same, seemingly unending, planet-wide expanse.
No life had populated the surface for centuries before humans started traversing it in their aircrafts to move between habitats.

Geography

There were deserts, wide expanses of sand or rock with hot temperatures during the day and cold during the night. There were forests and jungles, composed of thousands or millions of trees, inhabited by animals of all sizes. There were oceans, immense expanses of salty water, stretching as far as the eyes could see in all directions, in whose depths unknown fish thrived. There were mountains, tall rock formations standing out on the horizon, illuminated by the daylight.
But of course, nothing like that exists anymore. If you could see Ained now from the sky, you would look at a frozen sphere sailing the dark. The atmosphere snowed upon the surface, covering everything, making it all the same. They say mountains would still be visible in the distance, if there were light. But are mountains really there if nobody can even see them?

Ecosystem

Before the Slingshot, Ained's surface presented diverse regions featuring lush ecosystems. During the years after the ejection from orbit, temperatures dropped below the freezing threshold of most gases in the air. The whole atmosphere snowed down on the surface, covering everything in a thick layer of frozen gas. The surface became a planet-wide expanse of nothingness. If there were light, mountains would still be visible, pointing towards the stars, even though they would seem shorter, relatively to the surface.
When the atmosphere started falling on the surface, plants and animals had already been dead for years, but the surviving humans lived the event as the seal of their fate. They called it "The Last Snowfall" and conventionally regarded it as the end of the Slingshot itself.
Nowadays, no living being can survive above the ground. Humans only venture there during carefully planned and well-equipped expeditions or with purposedly engineered aircrafts to travel from one habitat to another.

Natural Resources

The surface is a mandatory step to access many essential resources. Usually, habitats only contain residential districts, warehouses, factories and power plants. All the natural resources humans are not able to or cannot afford to create inside the habitat have to be mined somewhere on the surface. Rock, metals and other constructing materials, salt and water, and nuclear fuel are examples of the resources people need to get from the outside. Most of these cannot be found directly on the surface, but it is often easier and safer to access mines and caves from the surface, especially with the help of robots.
The exploitation of the surface is regulated by a section of the UNA "Act about Resource Scarcity". Current regulations recognise each habitat ownership of territories and resources within 100 km from a conventionally picked point within the habitat itself. Since habitats are further away from each other, there is no overlapping.

Type

Wasteland

Location under

Ained