Helios Union
The builders' federation · Industry
Build what comes next.
The Red Basin
Help your crew build with fewer Materials.
Forge carrier and mobile construction yard
Starting faction
A better future must be made by people who share responsibility for it.
The first Helios crews were expected to repair a colony with tools that could no longer be replaced. They stripped abandoned equipment, shared plans, and built the machines that built the next machines. No single foundry could finish the job. Their linked workshops became the Union, and every new member added a maker’s mark to the common press.
Cinderworks treats skill as something to teach, not something to hoard. Apprentices stand beside masters at public assembly tables. The Union’s hunger to build can still outrun its judgment: a new foundry means homes and work, but it also needs ground, energy, and material someone else may depend on. The question is not whether to build. It is what deserves to be built.
If you can show me where it failed, we can make it better.
The argument they have not settled
When does useful ambition become extraction without consent?
A custom of theirs
A completed structure receives a plate bearing the marks of every commissioning crew member. A repaired piece keeps its old marks; repair is evidence of care.
Two voices
- Master fabricator
- Sera Calder — An older builder with gray braids and a tool harness worn smooth. She teaches by giving a learner a real piece of work and staying close enough to help.
- Foundry delegate
- Oren Pike — Wants rapid expansion to end shortages. His urgency comes from remembering the winter when the workshops could not keep every shelter warm.
Work they will ask you to do
Your first maker’s mark
A public walkway needs its final training section.
Join a safe cooperative stage, complete assigned work, and inspect the finished joint.
Sera stamps the player’s first maker’s plate; no accuracy ranking is displayed.
A load too far
A new workshop site overlaps a Boreal survey boundary.
Deliver authorized samples and inspect both proposed footprints.
Players uncover a viable alternative that costs more effort but preserves the survey site.
The quiet factory
An abandoned automatic line still produces one component every night.
Survey its outputs with a mixed-faction crew and recover its commissioning record.
Its missing inputs lead into the shared mystery; it is not a new player resource generator.
When the signals came back
Build the return so someone else can maintain it.
Sera Calder mobilizes workshops to repair the links. The Union’s hunger to end scarcity collides with the communities and ecosystems supplying its materials.
Sera circulates repair patterns and sends instructors with the first assemblies. She wants every restored endpoint to retain tools, service notes, and people who can work without asking a distant yard for permission. Union windows fill with handmade displays marking working links, while worn-out crews argue over how many openings the yards can sustain.
What they heard
A recovered service report points to the quiet fabrication line beneath Veyra, still producing a coupling for an unfinished repair. Current inspection reveals a finite reclaimed feedstock. It is evidence of persistence, not a limitless factory waiting to be claimed.
Where it puts them in conflict
Oren Pike proposes accelerating production by reclaiming machinery still serving an unregistered community. His urgency is rooted in remembered cold, but the proposed shortcut moves the shortage onto people absent from the Union’s ledger. Sera must accept a slower opening, find substitute stock, and let affected residents refuse an extraction plan.
Second Sun
An enormous working foundry organized around a straight industrial keel. Its enclosed furnaces, repair gantries, and unfinished vessels make it a moving record of what the Union can build together.
How they sound
- Welcome
- There’s room at the bench. Let’s make something.
- Setback
- That did not fit. We’ll try the next piece.
- Oath
- Every hand leaves a mark.
What they sound like
88–100 BPM; tuned metal percussion, handclaps, warm low synths. Rhythms suggest a crew working together without sounding like constant battle drums.
Wearing it
Allegiance shows in finish, markings and the words a society uses for its own things. It never shows in a stat.
Working heat — charcoal panels, ceramic orange corners, engraved commissioning marks.
A rising orange sun inside an unfinished dark hexagon.
A small stamped maker’s plate with an intentional off-center first strike.
Maker’s Mark · Crewsmith · Common Builder
How they name things
Workshop language, collective work, useful materials; no monopoly on any gameplay ship class.
- Ships
- Second Shift · Good Measure · Common Press
- Places
- Anvil Walk · East Gantry · Cooling Court
The look, and what it refuses
Oxidized steel, orange ceramic, dark work cloth, exposed fasteners. Open frames, modular bays, cranes, shared shade, habitation beside work.
Deliberately not: lava cults, weapons-only industry, waste as a point of pride, an equation of strength with masculinity.