The Works
Pre-Collapse Identity
The Mission District was the soul of San Francisco's Latino community — murals on every wall, taquerias on every corner, and a cultural identity that fought gentrification for decades before the money won. Potrero Hill was industrial. Dogpatch was where ships were built. All three were places where people worked with their hands.
Current Character
The Works is the Sprawl's SF-side industrial backbone — Ironclad foundries, fabrication yards, and worker housing blocks stacked in utilitarian rows along the flats. The Mission's pre-Cascade cultural identity survives in fragments: murals on factory walls depicting saints and ancestors, Spanish spoken in break rooms and shouted across loading docks, small shrines tucked into welding bays. It is a sector that builds things for people who will never set foot here. Potrero Hill provides strategic elevation overlooking both the Mission flats and the Rim edge, making it valuable to whoever holds it.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Mixed terrain — Potrero Hill's elevation offers sight lines to the bay floor and the eastern Sprawl, while the Mission Valley runs flat and industrial, its old residential grid converted to manufacturing corridors. The waterfront edge at Dogpatch drops to the Rim, where industrial cargo elevators haul materials between the bay floor and the surface. The air carries heat shimmer from foundries and the constant metallic taste of particulate.
Corporate Presence
Ironclad maintains secondary operations here — their primary HQ is across the bay in Sector 6, but The Works houses significant fabrication capacity. Multiple smaller operations contest the margins, and Good Fortune loan offices dot the worker housing blocks, collecting on debts that keep the labor force in place. The sector is contested enough that no single corporation has total control.
Key Locations
The Bash Terminal (underground bar and neutral-ground data exchange for information brokers), Neon Underground Hub (major transit interchange with a black market layer beneath it), The Heat Ward (foundry district at the Sector 4/8 border — perpetually hot, thermal venting visible from blocks away), The Thermal Shadow (residential zone cooled by industrial heat sinks, where Works laborers sleep).
Sensory Detail
The bass thrum of hydraulic presses rattles through your sternum before you consciously hear it. The smell is molten metal, machine oil, and corn tortillas from the street vendors who set up between shift changes. At night, the foundries cast an orange underglow against the fog, and sparks from the welding bays drift upward like inverse rain.
Daily Life
You work a twelve-hour shift, eat something handed to you through a window, and sleep in a housing block that shakes when the presses cycle — and you do it again tomorrow because the Good Fortune payment is due.