Industrial World

Heavy industry with mixed production dominates this planet.

— Industrial World description, Stellaris

A world, or another large area, dedicated wholly or primarily to industry, fabrication and construction. The landscape, from here to the horizon, is a mass of machinery and factories. The sky is choked with smoke, the streets are filled with grime, and every building is filled with churning pistons, rumbling conveyor belts and frantic assembly lines. Even at night, the facilities are lit up and shifts of workers change over to keep the production going. No one really wants to live here, but it's the only place within light years that they can. Expect to see robots, heavy machinery, transport vehicles, and coverall-clad workers everywhere.

These places will usually be horribly polluted and exploited as a consequence of the extensive industrial activity. Air and water pollution are likely to be rampant, smog will cloud the sky, and the surface will be torn by immense mines when the planet's mineral reserves haven't been entirely exhausted. Little trace of natural life can be expected to exist, save perhaps for urban pests and scavengers.

In a setting where most worlds are dedicated to one activity and one activity alone, expect to see a lot of these worlds as the planetary equivalent to cities' industrial districts. This is also likely to be where a Proud Industrious Race lives.

Settlements on these places will generally be either mass-produced prefab housing or grime-covered Industrial Ghettos. These ghettos, with their Abandoned Warehouses and winding alleys, are an excellent place for a Wretched Hive to grow and fester.

When this is a standard video game setting, that's Eternal Engine. When it's a Planet Ville, it might cover entire sections of the planet. This is different from a City Planet, but they commonly overlap as it's rare to see factories without cities. Subtrope of One-Product Planet. For a specific planet that is often given this treatment, see Industrialized Mercury.

Compare Agri World.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Pokémon: The Series, Ash and co. visit a town (that does not exist in the games) called "Gringy City". Few people live there, and the buildings there are mostly factories and the like. All the pollution has caused a group of Grimer (and a Muk, which Ash eventually captures) to move in and clog the seawater intake valve at the power plant, jeopardizing the lives of Pokémon in the ICU at the Pokémon Center.

Comic Books

• New Gods: Apokolips, a Crapsack World ruled by the despot Darkseid, is usually portrayed as a horribly polluted hellscape of blasted earth and foundry cities forever cranking out war machines for Darkseid's army.
• Rocket Raccoon: Rocket hails from Halfworld, so named due to half the planet being industrialized and populated by robots.

Films — Live-Action

• Star Wars: Geonosis is a downplayed example. It's outwardly a fairly standard desert planet dotted with the city-spires of the Geonosians and even a small sea, but its economy revolves entirely around industrial construction, especially of droids — beneath those cities are immense, cavernous factories where vast numbers of droids are continuously being built.
• Stingray Sam: Spoofed with Durango, a planet of rocket builders which after an economic slump turns into a planet of criminals and then a planet of prison factories (in which they build rockets).

Literature

• Choice of Games: Empyrean has an example of this trope in the form of "Deep Tech", a mechanical wilderness beneath the city.
• Ciaphas Cain: Quadravidia is a Forge World depending on the proximity of Imperial fleets dropping by to rearm themselves for its protection. Ciaphas uses this as a bargaining chip to force them to allow a Tau diplomat on the planet: since they clearly don't need the Guard's help in fighting off the approaching Tyranids, they'll find somewhere else to make themselves useful and leave the cogboys to deal but the 'nids themselves.
• Dune: Giedi Prime is a volcanic world mostly dominated by industrial complexes where most of its population works, although it does maintain tracts of preserved forest — albeit, granted, ones kept chiefly to be farmed for logging, with the rest being hunting preserves for the nobility (particularly the planetary overlords the Harkonnens]).
• His Dark Materials: In The Amber Spyglass, while experimenting with the subtle knife, Will finds, among others, a world seemingly entirely devoted to industry.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Eriadu is a major Outer Rim trade center mostly covered in urban sprawls, factories and industrial zones largely dedicated to building computer technology, textiles, and robots, and waste disposal areas. Its architecture is uniformly blocky and utilitarian, and its environment highly polluted — something largely caused by the single MegaCorp that runs the planet, which is chiefly responsible for the pollution and for not using the complex air- and water-cleaning technologies that keep most worlds habitable.
  • Mechis III is entirely covered with droid factory complexe. During the reign of the Empire it was even owned by a single company, Arakyd Industries. Less than 100 biological employees live on the planet, the rest of the population is millions of droid workers. And yes, Mechis III has plenty of volcanic activity, so it has elements of Lethal Lava Land as well.
  • Sullust is extremely rich in natural resources, and the local Sullustans are known as great engineers. This led the world to becoming one of the main starships manufacturers in the galaxy with pretty much no concerns for natural preservation, as the planet was never very hospitable anyway and not even the natives wanted to go outside if it could be avoided, instead living on space stations or large underground settlements.

Live-Action TV

• Firefly: The show never got time to say so, but supplemental material stated that the planet Wash was from was heavily industrialized and so polluted that it was impossible to see the sky.
• The Orville: Bortus' homeworld, Moclus, is presented as a planet almost entirely covered in arms factories.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: Played with with Hesperus II. Most of the world is uninhabited jungle that's too hot and humid for humans. The one settlement on the planet is Defiance Industries, a massive, city-sized factory complex that churns out dozens of different battlemechs, combat vehicles, battle armor and weapon systems.
• Exalted: Autochthonia, the world-body of the mechanical Primordial Autochthon, consists entirely of country- to continent-sized complexes of machinery, tubing, and immense metallic constructs. Even its Elemental Poles, in contrast to Creation's Poles of Earth, Water, Fire, Wood and Air, reflect the makeup of machinery — Autochthonia's component elements are Metal, Crystal, Smoke, Oil, Lightning and Steam. Cities and habitable countries are squeezed into those areas that aren't made up of the immense mechanisms of Autochthon's body, and are themselves entirely devoted to industry and production, being in many ways as much like immense and rigidly ordered factory complexes as they are like civilian communities. The realities of living within a gigantic machine slash factory are a particular source of problems for the Autochthonians — there's no natural light in there, for one, and food is generally scarce and difficult to mass-produce.
• Scum and Villainy: The planet Indri in the Iota system produces 25% of all manufactured goods in the Procyon sector, to the point where any spot on its surface is either a factory or an industrial wasteland. Its atmosphere is a toxic soup that wrecks the lungs of anyone who breathes it unprotected, and both of its moons have long been consumed for raw materials by its industry.
• SLA Industries: Industrial Worlds, such as Mort, have their land surface (and most of their seas) completely covered with industrial production facilities and cities.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Forge worlds are planets that have been entirely stripped of useful minerals, water and plant life, the entire surface devoted to colossal factories dedicated to meeting the ever-increasing material needs of the Imperium, from ammo to bionic implants to Titans. Conditions there are usually hellish (sometimes the oceans and even the atmosphere are gone) and the worker population enormous, with most people being heavily modified just to survive working there. Despite the immense output of weapons, vehicles and wargear, some Forge Worlds are relatively defenseless and rely on Navy, Guard and Space Marine protection so as to leave room for more factories. The most famous is Mars, home of the Adeptus Mechanicus cult. It's also the location of the Noctis Labyrinth, the prison of the C'tan entity known as the Void Dragon, which is all but stated to be the Omnissiah worshipped by the Mechanicus.
  • Industrial worlds are a distinct category of planets, with their chief difference from forge worlds being that they are not owned by the Adeptus Mechanicus. They're otherwise still dedicated to planet-wide manufacturing, production and mining and are generally highly overbuilt, overexploited and polluted, although not to the extreme degree that forge worlds are. Many are also hive worlds. Within the Solar System, Venus is classified as an industrial world of this type.
  • Some ork worlds ruled by mekaniaks — orks with an instinctive drive to create machinery — can become cruder versions of this known as mek worlds. One of the most famous, Mordax, used to be an imperial Forge World until it was captured by orks, who harnessed the factories for their own use (and renamed it Moredakka).

Toys

• BIONICLE: Ta-Metru serves as the manufacturing district on Metru Nui, where most tools are forged and smelted. However, assembly is done in Po-Metru, which has much clearer skies compared to Ta-Metru's smoky atmosphere.

Video Games

• Battlezone (1998): In the Forgotten Enemies mod, the planet Facility is covered almost entirely in machinery, with huge cranes, fuel tanks, and heat sinks dotting the surface. The atmosphere is tainted green, and the only exposed land is brown, lifeless rock.
• The Force Unleashed: Raxus Prime has spent thousands of years as a glorified factory for a succession of governments and MegaCorps, which created immense manufacturing plants on its surface to produce goods varying from high-tech weaponry to starships to chemical products. This took an immense toll on Raxus Prime's ecosystem, filling its air and water with pollutants and covering its land with slag and industrial waste. Eventually, aside from immense factory complexes and sealed habitat areas, the planet's surface became a polluted hell of debris fields, played-out strip mines, and lakes of toxic chemicals good for nothing but dumping further waste in.
• Freelancer: Leeds was heavily settled and industrialized due to its rich mineral wealth, leading to its current state as an overbuilt factory-world with a collapsed natural environment, a surface covered in mining, smelting, and manufacturing facilities and a sky constantly obscured by smog.
• Jazz Jackrabbit had a few, with Tubelectric as one of the most famous one thanks to it being featured in the shareware version. It's a munition factory planet abandoned after a freak accident in one of the nuclear reactors. Other examples include Technoir (an oil refinery planet) and Industrius (a beverage factory planet).
• Kirby: Planet Robobot sees Popstar become one after the Haltmann Works Company arrives. Dead set on colonizing the planet for its resources, they turn the once happy and bright planet into a mechanized mess. Normal landscapes become metal and there are factories all over the planet. It's Kirby's job to set everything back to normal.
• Meteos: Grannest is one such planet, with factories and refineries completely covering its surface, though the games have never specified what is made there. Its original, organic inhabitants all left the planet long ago, leaving only the factory robots behind who continue to work tirelessly manufacturing things.
• Obsidian:
  • In the second dream world, one of the four machine element worlds is set in a rocky, smog-covered landscape filled with smoke-spewing factories. One of these factories produces robots that mine ore, throw it into the factory, then fall to their death in an infinite cycle to create more robots. For good measure, when you arrive, the robot factory shuts down, and your goal is to start it again.
  • The hub factory of the same dream also appears to be set in a similar world, as the player can see clusters of glowing factories under a creepy purple sky through the building's windows.
• OFF: The entire world is a downplayed example. It's all made out of metal surrounded by oceans of plastic with smoke acting as air, yet only two out of the five Zones are dedicated to actual production:
  • Zone 1 consists of workplaces where the game's Bizarro Elements are made, and offices that ensure that they are shipped out to the other Zones properly.
  • Zone 3 is a single, massive factory complex devoted to producing the secret "fifth element," Sugar.
• Prey (2006) takes place in a planet-sized Eternal Engine. The aliens live in a giant artificial sphere in which every room, corridor and passage is strewn with wires, pipes and machinery of all sorts (not always inoffensive). Of course, since the sphere also has a biological component, parts of it also take place in a Womb Level version of this.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Orxon, the Blarg's homeworld, has become so polluted due to Drek's overindustralization, it is practically uninhabitable to any non-mutated organic species.
  • Quartu is home to the robot factory where Clank was "born".
  • Drek's new planet was planned to become this so he can repeat the same planet plundering process once it became too toxic to inhabit safely.
• Ristar: The Planet Automaton features an entire planet made out of machines and populated by robots.
• Starbound: On Volcanic planets, there's the minor biome Foundry, where the NPCs are factory workers or robots and most of the drops are industrial goods.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords had the Dummied Out planet M4-78, a factory world populated entirely by droids.
• Stellaris:
  • Machine worlds are planets where only robots or cyborgs can live. They cannot have farming but mining enjoys bonuses.
  • Planets can also be designated with specific focuses by the player. Forge, Industrial, and Refinery Worlds fit this trope best, giving bonuses to Alloy, Consumer Good, and Strategic Resource production respectively. Flavor text mentions how the surfaces of these worlds are entirely filled with factories and noxious fumes.
• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is set on the forge world of Graia, which starts out under attack by orks (which is why the Space Marines are sent in) then invaded by Chaos. Because Titan-producing worlds are so rare, the intro itself explains why Exterminatus isn't an option unless the world is clearly beyond saving. Strangely, there are no tech-priests to be seen anywhere, only unaugmented humans.
  Guardsman repairing a Basilisk: Hand me that field manual. We're stuck on a bloody Forge World, and not a Tech-Priest in sight!
• Wing Commander: Privateer: New Detroit was one of the first industrial hubs in the Gemini Sector, resulting in a massive industrial boom that saw the initial settlement spread to cover the entire planet in only thirty years. The combination of a planet-wide city and heavy industrialization essentially destroyed the ecosphere and resulted in a near-perpetual cover of acid rain clouds.

Web Original

• Orion's Arm: Some systems in the Seams — a series of neutral areas, unclaimed worlds and border spaces running between and through the main interstellar empires — are classified as Industrial, meaning that they're very rich in resources and claimed by an empire or AI god for manufacturing purposes. Contrary to this trope's usual portrayal, they're usually all but uninhabited — the machinery used there is either extensively automated, strictly nanotechnological, or both, and the worlds' populations are kept at the strict minimum needed to run these things.

Western Animation

• Invader Zim: When the Irkens conquer a planet, they simply destroy everything and, on the Tallests' whim, rebuild it from the ground up based on a very narrow theme. One such planet, Callnowia, is covered in factories that Irkens can order things from.
• The Transformers: The planet Cybertron was built as one giant factory by the Quintessons, who used it to create the robot types who would one day become known as Autobots and Decepticons.

Real Life

• Vernon, California, embedded inside the County of Los Angeles, has only (as of 2020) 112 inhabitants, mainly municipal employees, but sports numerous factories and its own power plant for cheaper electricity, for a total of 46,000 direct and 54,000 indirect jobs. The city is dedicated almost entirely to food production, metalworking, and the manufacture of plastic goods, and consists almost entirely of warehouses and factories. They even have "Exclusively Industrial" on their seal!
• The appropriately named City of Industry, California, not far from Vernon, is also structured this way, with only about 200 residents and the rest of it made mostly of manufacturing, though with some retail and restaurant businesses within designed to serve the people who work these industrial jobs. Unlike Vernon, there isn't any specific thing made in Industry; the factories range from computer parts to toys to clothing to food. Enforced Trope, as City of Industry has no business tax whatsoever.

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