Proud Industrious Race

Diligent yet envious, patient yet stubborn, ingenious yet haughty — the Proud Industrious Race is a one that has devoted itself to working in workshops and factories. No matter what they put their hands to, the result always turns out to be perfection. Usually, it is their monuments and palaces that are the most exemplary in their beauty and splendor, their tools and crafts that are of the highest quality, their knowledge and experience in the field of engineering that are the deepest, and so on.

Given that this specialization is remarkably costly, they are likely to be heavily engaged in exploitative activities, such as mining and logging, which will allow them to do their business to the extent they want (if they know no bounds, their ways might even become a trigger for Gaia's Vengeance). However, since resources in most works tend to be scarce, there is usually a choice between producing little but in a sophisticated way and producing much but without any zest. Although the Proud Industrious Race can simultaneously have the best of both, they will more often than not lean towards one of the two in the following variation of the Quality vs. Quantity dichotomy:

• Artisan Race: Being not only skillful workers but also imaginative designers, this type is able to combine a grandiose scale with a delicate approach, giving birth to masterpieces that are inspiring for generations. When they take up hammers and anvils, they always put a piece of both their heart and soul into the work, viewing their final creations as a way of self-expression, a legacy to be left behind after their ruin someday, or visual examples of their talent, greatness, or chosenness, the very existence of which will already please the ego. If a setting has something widely recognized as a true Wonder (which is often a structure analogous to the Seven Wonders of the World), your best guess it is a culture of this type that was behind its creation.

• Craftsman Race: For anyone of this type, what they do is not art, but rather an effective way to solve issues of the day. Such a culture is much known for their ability to produce impressive amounts of nearly anything in a relatively short time, be it consumer goods, luxury items, weapons, or whatever else that is possible to make on a large scale and is deemed necessary for their society. It is not uncommon for labor to play a prominent role in their social customs and worldview, with the most typical example being manual labor considered a duty for one and all. Another distinctive feature is that they tend to approach the use of their skills from a purely pragmatic, utilitarian standpoint, perceiving everything beyond that as needless and excessive.

By default, the former will focus on buildings and the latter on something smaller, but it can also be the other way around. The main criteria here are the number and complexity of production — the Artisan Race may instead produce, say, extremely powerful, very finely crafted, and often aesthetically stunning artifacts, while the Craftsman Race can be engaged in the development of infrastructure, simple yet functional, over an enormous territory.

Type can also influence an attitude towards controversial questions within a setting, like robotics and its use in manufacturing. The Artisan Race may oppose robots because of the view that anything created with their use is deprived of its charm, or vice versa — consider that their ability to do monotonous work well can be used to focus on all the creatively significant aspects of construction. Likewise, the Craftsman Race can resist any mechanical touch due to its impact on their strict work ethic, in line with the Job-Stealing Robot trope, or, if they are all about efficiency, be instead the best roboticists themselves and see robots as the most useful invention ever made.

The Proud Industrious Race is typically highly self-centered, though not outright isolationist. On the contrary, they will not object to trade, sometimes seeing it as a way to obtain some of the materials they need for their activities. Other races, if allowed, can even hire their finest masters for a decent reward to use the skills they have to their own benefit. Nonetheless, the Proud Industrious Race is often inclined to resort to some Cultural Posturing in relation to outsiders because of undisguised pride about their ability to build more beautifully than others, the comparatively greater diligence of their people, or both. Don't get it wrong — they can show a likable attitude but still are unlikely to do so without being at least somewhat patronizing.

And yes, if there are several such cultures at once, they will usually perceive one another as the worst rivals, meaning that it will be a matter of principle for them to prove their ultimate superiority. Obviously, without resorting to violence — the point is not that someone is a pacifist, but that there is a common understanding that no one can prove their mastery by simply annihilating an opponent. However, if they, for one reason or another, get involved in a war and end up with a complete victory, they celebrate it by erecting a Monument of Humiliation and Defeat in their enemy's most iconic place.

In a space-age setting, these cultures are likely to inhabit Industrial Worlds, possibly in combination with their capital being a City Planet. Within the Standard Fantasy Setting, the dwarves are more or less guaranteed to be this due to their penchant for building voluminous underground halls and possessing matchless, occasionally even legendary-known, production tools. Otherwise, it can be a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of some real-world country or civilization, such as Ancient China/Egypt/Rome, pre-Columbian Inca/Maya, or Industrial Britain/Germany.

If it is a faction in a large roster among many others, it will always be of The Industrial Faction type from all those presented on the A Commander Is You page. Most often, though, they will combine it with something else from the list.

They could be a likely target for And Man Grew Proud, depending on how much emphasis the Proud Industrious Race has on the "Proud" part. If that's not the case, and they were prominent in the past but no longer exist, expect to see a lot of Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair instead.

Sub-Trope of Planet of Hats. Compare with its sister tropes — Proud Warrior Race, Proud Merchant Race, Proud Scholar Race, and Proud Hunter Race. Super-Trope to Busy Beaver, where beavers as a species are depicted as being fond of hard work, especially carpentry, lumber harvesting, and construction.

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Examples:

Fan Works

• The Arithmancer: In explaining goblin culture, Bill tells Hermione that contrary to the public perception of being a Proud Warrior Race, the goblins think of themselves as craftsmen, and their ruler is the greatest craftsman among them — though which craft is negotiable. The current king is apparently a tailor.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Dwarves, who are good at building very tiny wards, city-wide magical infrastructure, and also cities where the surface is only a small portion of it, as said in "Ultimatum":
  Even that comparatively low number was hard to believe when the parts enclosed by the city walls fit into an area of less than a square kilometre.
  Ami reminded herself that most of the city was below ground and that the surface part was the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
• Inter Nos: The Himeans, standing in for the Roman Empire in the story, are renowned builders. In one instance, a kingdom with ties to the now-overtaken Mentulean Empire, tears down a bridge that linked the two lands. The king believed it would take at least a year to restore the bridge and that the Himeans would have better things to do in the meantime. He is very surprised, then, when it takes General Fujino's engineers just over a month to reestablish the bridge. Shizuru does smugly inform the king they were aided by the fact that his people tore down the span, but left the caissons standing, meaning her people had much less work to do.
• Mass Effect: Altered Humanity: The Terran Dominion stands as the top industrial superpower in the galaxy. Humanity's tech is never flashy or cutting edge, but what they do make has a reputation of Boring, but Practical as it so durable that it has a better chance of outlasting its owners than suffering mechanical failure, which they stockpile in great numbers. Not to mention they make so many of these durable good cheaply that they see wide-scale use across the galaxy. The pinnacle of humanity's industriousness is their Stellar Forges, Mile-Long Ship Mobile Factories that they use to basically strip mine entire planets to build massive fleets of ships. Add in their general gruff demeanor and highly militarized society, and you get the player base joking that humans are Space Dwarves.

Literature

• Discworld dwarfs are known as great craftsmen and metalworkers. Although they don't seem to have conventional spellcasting abilities, they're known for forging magic rings and repairing Flying Broomsticks. In Equal Rites, it's noted that even if a dwarf's job is something entirely unrelated to metalwork, he finds it hard to concentrate without the sound of anvils ringing out.
• A Lord from Planet Earth: The vampiric people of planet Pel are described as (among other things) being excellent builders and architects.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: The Shesepankh aren't well known, but the information that is provided gives them the title "The Monument Builders".
• Shadows of the Apt: Industriousness is the hat of the tough, enduring Beetle-kinden. In the past, the Beetles were exploited for this trait and used as slave labor by the Moth-kinden, but this ended after the Beetle-kinden invented the crossbow and began distributing it widely. Now the Beetle city of Helleron is recognized as the industrial capital of the world, where raw materials are combined with ideas conceived in its sister city Collegium and refined for mass production.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: The Xi Char are described as caring more about the engineering of their machines than their intended use, and even their workshops have a lot of similarities with cathedrals.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Dwarves were originally created by the Vala Aulë to be a people who would share his love for making things of beauty, and consequently place a great deal of cultural importance on crafts, especially the working of metal and stone. They are famously some of the greatest craftsmen in Middle-Earth, and famous for the size and splendor of their great underground cities and for the beauty of the gems and jewels that they make.
  • The Ñoldor, one of the great tribes of the Elves, became closely associated with Aulë during their stay in Aman, and became renowned for their skill in physical crafts. Many of the world's greatest artisans came from their number — most infamously Fëanor, whose peerless skill with gemwork was matched only by his pride, and his grandson Celebrimbor, the creator of the Great Rings whose work became tainted by Sauron.
• Vorkosigan Saga: Quaddies are genetically engineered to live in zero-g and thus need to build their own space habitats. Their unit of cultural organization is the "work gang" and Miles notes (and takes advantage of) the fact that "work" was a word with extra resonance in Quaddiespace, much as "honor" has extra resonance on Barrayar.
• The Wheel of Time: The Ogier are the greatest architects and stonemasons in the world, creating Shining Cities where each building is a unique work of art. However, they learned the trade during a diaspora that forced them to live alongside humans; their own communities blend seamlessly into the forests they love most.

Live-Action TV

• Fraggle Rock: The Doozers are constantly building tall, crystalline structures which the Fraggles love to snack on. They actually like it when Fraggles destroy their towers because it means they get to build more; if they didn't, they would run out of room to build and be forced to move away.
• What little we've seen of the Tellarites in Star Trek, they're shown to be natural engineers and argue as a pastime.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Planegea: Dwarves have a compulsion to build buildings, regardless of whether they actually need to make them. The landscape is littered with abandoned dwarven structures.
  • Spelljammer: The Dwarven Citadel is an asteroid spaceship that is powered by the industrial energy of all the dwarves within as they mine their way through it.
  • Subverted in Dragonlance and Spelljammer with the tinker gnomes, who believe themselves to be the trope, but are actually an Unjustifiably Proud Bungling Inventor Race.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Kin of the Leagues of Votann, also known by their original name, the Squats are the Craftsman archetype. Descended from ancient human miners who explored the resource-rich but dangerous Galactic Core, their entire civilisation is based around efficient production and skilled craftsmanship. And since their society has not collapsed like that of baseline humanity, and they lack the Imperium's religious bans on innovation, their technology is a step above their Imperial counterparts, too.
  • To the extent that they can be considered a race (they are definitely their own civilisation within the Imperium, and their penchant for augmentation can make them qualify as a Transhuman Human Subspecies), the Adeptus Mechanicus are also this. Their Machine Worship religion, the Cult Mechanicus, views the maintenance and construction of machinery as sacred, and their factories and furnaces are effectively temples. They are responsible for most of the Imperium's industrial production.
  • Meanwhile, the Adeptus Mechanicus's (more) Evil Counterpart, the Chaos-worshipping Dark Mechanicum, lean more into the Artisan archetype. Not constrained by their Imperial brethren's religious dogma (nor the Leagues of Votann's traditionalism, nor general sanity for that matter), and with the reality-warping power of Chaos at their disposal, they are responsible for some of the most awe-inspiring and horrifying technology of the setting. The Daemon Engines of the Chaos Space Marines are produced in their Hell Forges.
  • Although they are not "races" per se, some of the more technologically-inclined Space Marine Chapters and Chaos Space Marine Legions and warbands can also quality. The Salamanders, the Iron Hands and the Iron Warriors, in particular, value craftsmanship greatly.

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • The Nynrah Ghosts are a group of Matoran crafters from the island of Nynrah known for their weapon-making business. Various objects throughout the series are their handiwork.
  • The Vortixx species are both a Proud Merchant Race and a Proud Industrious Race who turned their island Xia into an industrialized land with few natural resources. They also employ some members of the aforementioned Nynrah Ghosts on their island.

Video Games

• Civilization series:
  • Some civilizations in III have the Industrious trait, meaning that their workers will be faster in completing the tasks, and their cities of the "Metropolis" level will be slightly more productive than usual. In IV, traits are assigned to leaders instead of civilizations, which provides much greater variety, given that some of the latter have a sample of two or even three leaders. If a leader has the Industrious trait, their civ gets a 50% bonus to Wonder production and double production speed for Forges.
  • In V, traits as they were before are abolished and replaced with unique abilities, each of which, as the name implies, is unique to the civilization that has it. Two civs, Rome and Egypt, are classic examples of the Craftsman and Artisan Races, respectively: the former has a +25% Production bonus towards any buildings that already exist in the Capital ("The Glory of Rome"), which is very valuable if playing as a Wide Empire with a lot of small cities (a little but fitting bonus — one of their unique units, Legion, can construct Roads and Forts just like ordinary Workers do), while the latter gets a +20% Production bonus towards Wonder construction ("Monument Builders"), which prompts them to develop as a Tall Empire with only a couple of very developed cities. Additionally, the leader of Egypt, Ramesses II, has some matching AI Traits, namely a 10 in "Wonder Emphasis", a 9 in "Wonder Competitiveness", and a 7 in "Production Emphasis", indicating that Egypt under AI control always tries to build as many Wonders as possible, is extremely jealous of other civs with a significant enough number of them, and usually succeeds in being the most wonder-filled civilization in the game due to having large enough production capacity.
  • In VI, both civilizations and leaders have unique abilities, which leads to the fact that many civs have bonuses on Production for or from one thing or another. There are, though, relatively few of those whose playing style is thematically closely related to the trope, with the most appropriate examples arguably being England under Victoria (Age of Steam), which gets a significant Production bonus towards and from Industrial Zone buildings and some extra Production points from Strategic Resources, Nubia under Amanitore, which is incomparable in construction of Districts and Ranged units, and China under Qin Shi Huang (Mandate of Heaven), as they can boost their scientific and cultural development by building Wonders and their Builders receive an additional build charge plus the ability to spend them to speed up the construction of Ancient and Classical Eras Wonders.
    • All three abovementioned leaders — Victoria (The Age of Steam), Amanitore, and Qin Shi Huang (Mandate of Heaven) — have a historical agenda that drives them to both judge you regarding whether you meet it or not and turn civilization under their rule into one or the other variation of this trope. The agendas of Ramses II and Hammurabi make them fit the bill as well, and, apart from historical agendas, the same applies to any leader who has any of the "Exploitative" (identical to Ramses II's "Ma'at" agenda), "Heavy Industry" (identical to Victoria's "Industrial Revolution" agenda), and "Wonder Obsessed" (identical to Qin Shi Huang's "Wall of 10,000 Li" agenda) hidden agendas.
    • It is also worth mentioning two civilizations that have their own version of the Industrial Zone district: Germany with the Hansa and the Gauls with the Oppidum. These two unique districts are naturally different in some ways but have in common that they are cheaper to build and can potentially give much more Production points than a regular Industrial Zone, thus encouraging their owners to rely heavily on them and their advantages.
    • Mali provides an interesting inversion due to having a -30% Production modifier towards buildings and units, along with their mines being less productive than usual. However, their Proud Merchant Race bonuses for Gold fully compensate for these penalties, which means that hard work is a waste for Malians, considering they can easily buy whatever they want.
• Distant Worlds: The Teekan are a race of three-eyed rodent people who, while being fond of commerce and trade, truly live for tinkering, construction and generally messing around with any technology they can find. They're not especially scientific since their own original advances are somewhat stunted, but they get a lot done with what they already have, having significant bonuses to construction, mining and general industry thanks to it.
• Dragalia Lost has the Rokkans, a race of Horned Humanoids who have excellent body strength. As such they are built for industrial jobs such as blacksmithing and mining. The two main Rokkans present in the game are Larzy and Gauld, with the former being one of the greatest blacksmiths in Grastea, and the latter being a retired miner.
• Dwarf Fortress: The dwarves are literally defined by their affinity for drink and industry, and as the game's main playable race they have access to a huge variety of industries, from smithing and masonry to beekeeping and soap-making. They are also the only major civilization that can craft steel equipment.
• The Elder Scrolls: Even millennia after their mysterious disappearance, the Dwemer retain the reputation of the most skilled crafters Tamriel has ever seen. First and foremost, the Dwemer were a Proud Scholar Race that had reached a level of progress no one else had ever come close to matching. As much as they revered science, they also loved engineering, being brilliant masters of every imaginable facet of this trope. In many regions of Hammerfell, Skyrim, and Morrowind, there are still dozens of Dwemer cities' remnants, even a cursory examination of which tells that they apparently were built using techniques whose secrets died with the disappearance of their inventors. The Dwemer were the ones who designed a unique device for safe reading of the Elder Scrolls, a Weather-Control Machine known as the Karstangz-Bcharn, and an incredibly large number of Animunculi that, as befits Dwemer creations, have stood the test of time and remain as active in the Dwemer ruins as they were on the day of their assembly. Finally, probably most importantly — the Dwemer went so far as to make the Numidium — a hand-made god, around a thousand feet tall, whose influence on the history of the entire continent of Tamriel can hardly be truly overestimated.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • The kobolds of Vylbrand are a race of skilled metallurgists, having taught the Lominsans their smithing techniques before the two factions entered bloody war. Their mines in O'Ghomoro are lined with vast networks of steam pipes to power their technology, heated using bombs that exit the void. Later encounters with the kobolds have them fielding steam-powered Mini-Mecha against their foes.
  • The dwarves of Kholusia are a proud, industrious race of miners, warriors, engineers, and builders. They possess some of the most advanced and hardy machinery on Norvandt outside of the Lost Technology of Ronka and the Allagan marvels of the Crystal Tower. In a world of swords and magic, they possess steam-powered automatons capable of flight. The Dwarf Tribe Quests even have you help Ronitt construct a fleet of tanks to sell with an automated factory to speed up production.
• Horizon: The Oseram are an entire tribe of Blacksmiths who are experts at repurposing Machine scrap and turning them into strong armor or impressive machines. Compared to the rest of the iron-age North American tribes, the Oseram are more like a pre-industrial society that are on the verge of rediscovering the steam engine, which makes them very popular as both mercenaries and weapons contractors (The Carja Sun-King's Praetorian Guard is even made up of crack Oseram warriors). In one quest in Zero Dawn, Aloy even helps an Oseram woman named Petra invent what is essentially a rapid-fire mortar cannon out of repurposed machine parts before the world has even reinvented gunpowder.
• Humankind: Cultures with Builder affinity are this. The game rewards every such culture for new districts constructed, and they are encouraged to increase their Industry output as well as build Cultural Wonders whenever possible.
• The Legend of Zelda: Gorons are a race of rock-like people whose diet consists only of rocks. They usually live in volcanic environments and said environments are quite industrial. Gorons often act as blacksmiths and are usually seen mining (after all, it's how they eat), with there being mine carts and tracks everywhere around where they live.
• Oddworld: There's a dichotomy between the Industrial◊ and the Native species. The natives, like the Mudokons, live In Harmony with Nature being Magical Native American expies, while the Glukkons and Vykkers are interested in science and industry. In the backstory, the Glukkons used to be friends with the Mudokons until the latter started seeing themselves as superior to the former. Part of the Glukkons' motivation other than money is to destroy nature the Mudokons care about and turn Oddworld into an industrial wasteland. A simpler way to put it is that Vykkers "invent" things and Glukkons "sell" things, but ultimately the Industrialists as a whole are about "making" things, either inventing them or mass producing them in factories.
• A Primer on the Capture and Identification of the Little Folk: As the writer says, "Menehune are said to be incredible craftspeople". Capturing, subduing, and then giving them tools to marvel at the resultant creation is encouraged.
• Rise of Nations: Each nation has a specific power, essentially its own set of benefits regarding different gameplay aspects. Almost all of them include bonuses for faster and/or cheaper construction of a particular type of unit or building to complement the nation's preferred playstyle. Among the more illustrative examples are the Egyptians (Power of the Nile), since they are the ones who can build Wonders at a discounted price, earlier on one age, and with a higher limit on their number in one city, the Maya (Power of Architecture), whose buildings are the most sustainable, always faster to be built, and almost universally need somewhat less Tinder, and the Germans (Power of Industry), who can build Granaries, Lumber Mills, and Smelters right from the game's start, unlock production upgrades from them sooner and for a lesser price, and get a bit bigger number of resources from cities and for resource-gathering buildings' construction completion, thereby having both the opportunity and a solid reason to build as much as possible (not to mention their ability to create all air and some naval units faster, which, with all the other advantages, allows them to become a relentless war machine beginning with the Industrial Age). Besides, the Americans and the Iroquois from the Thrones and Patriots expansion also have a touch of this, as they can instantly build their first Wonder and Senat, respectively.
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
  • Described by the game itself as a faction of "excellent craftsmen and skilled workers", the Free Drones naturally have +2 to Industry, thus needing fewer minerals to build new units and facilities. Not only that, the "Industrial Base" technology is available to them from the start, providing a quick and easy way to get a foothold for the development of large-scale infrastructure while also befitting their ultimate ambition of creating a workingman's paradise — a goal that attracts the oppressed and deprived to them, making it more likely that revolting bases will join the Drones rather than anyone else. On the other hand, their fixation on production leads to several logical disadvantages as well: the Free Drones treat technological progress as a not applicable enough investment that is secondary compared to hard work here and now, thereby having -2 to Research, and they cannot choose Green Economics, as this very frugal approach is incompatible with their labor-driven philosophy.
  • The Human Hive counts as well, even though the ability to build a lot is a consequence of their ideology rather than its basis and essence. Their name hints at what this faction is — a unique experiment to create a collectivist totalitarian society defined to the smallest detail. The tendency to over-control and build bases mostly underground makes having a fairly high level of output an inevitable requirement to keep their mode of operation afloat, so hard work for the common good is mandatory for all Hive's residents. For this reason, they get a +1 to Industry (as the game puts it, because of the "brutal serfdom"), being able to produce slightly more than other factions.
• Stellaris: You can give your empire the "Masterful Craftsmen" civic (or, if you're playing as a MegaCorp, the identical in function "Mastercraft Inc."). It replaces Artisan jobs with Artificer, whose consumer goods output is slightly increased, while also adding trade value to the planet on which they are employed.

Webcomics

• Sequential Art: The odd little shadow creatures (Jakovians) are mighty industrious, as under their crackbrained leader, they built a nuclear reactor in Art's basement to power an Elaborate Underground Base complete with Mission Control to launch a worldwide Kill Sat. Once their evil leader is killed by his own Beam-O-War, the Jakovians turn to crafting whatever the Genius Ditz squirrel girls devise. They even craft a working TIE fighter from Star Wars so Pip can fetch groceries.
• Vexxarr: The Engineers are (or, rather, were) a genetically engineered Slave Race of a long-extinct race of builders, who see little to no difference in work and play. After the titular Vexxarr liberates them, they show up to Earth to help build their fleet of starships. The Engineers ask to get paid in junk food and entertainment media, so they can spend their leisure time 1) eating junk food, and 2) building stuff to play their media on. If there's time left, they'll actually experience the contents of their media.

Western Animation

• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The LGM's (Little Green Men) comprise most of the staff of Star Command; understandable, since they built most of it. They can operate any device they encounter, they can repair anything given time, and they can build anything given enough materials. The only reason the LGM's don't rule the galaxy is they lack direction, which means someone has to assign them a task, whereupon the LGM's go at it with blistering efficiency.
• Legends of Chima has the beaver tribe, who absolutely love to work. They even get punished by being forced to take breaks from working. As such, the land that they live in has all sorts of complex structures, getting new improvements constantly.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender: The Olkari are a race of skilled engineers who can manipulate metal and plants with a touch.
• What on Earth!: Played for Comedy. An alien probe mistakes the cars and trucks for a living populace. The aliens deduce that when the earthlings encounter an obstacle, they complain loudly (honking) to summon workers (construction machines) to clear a path. These "workers" are shown devouring a mountain range, paving a roadway, and even building a bridge over a chasm in less than one minute. Traffic flows smoothly in their wake.

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