The heavy industry of State F rests on a single steel backbone — the Steelhill corporation. It is an enormous production ecosystem that unites a coal-mining and ore-dressing combine with the metallurgical giant MetalliKO.

In the north, Steelhill bites into the largest coal basin. What is extracted here is not merely raw material, but literally energy for the entire region: the local coal supplies both metallurgical furnaces and regional thermal power plants. Underground mines, haulage drifts, and beneficiation plants work as a single mechanism. Right at the combine, the company’s own coke-chemical plant smokes — the pride of the company, enabling it to abandon external coke suppliers. It is precisely from here that an uninterrupted flow of fuel for the steelmaking cycle comes. Let the mine hoists freeze — and the whole region will start to run a fever.

Further south sprawls MetalliKO — the flagship combine of State F. It is divided into two autonomous worlds. The first is classical metallurgy: the roar of blast furnaces, converters, and rolling mills. The second is a titanium shop, with its own raw materials and unique process technologies. Both steel and titanium sponge flow out from here across the entire country: from large-scale railway construction projects to the luxury skyscrapers of the City.

All production activity rests on a developed digital infrastructure. Corporate IT systems here are tightly interwoven with industrial ICS networks. Environmental monitoring sensors, safety controls in the mines, and hundreds of PLCs that directly command the rolling mills and furnaces — all of this is the unified digital framework of Steelhill.

For hackers, an immense field of attack opens up here: from the operator consoles at the coal beneficiation plant to the corporate IT servers. And the most dangerous thing is that attackers do not need to break everything in succession. It is enough to strike a single vulnerable point to set off a chain reaction.

For instance, stopping the water supply pump in the quenching tower of the coke-chemical plant — at first glance, a local failure. But without cooling, the incandescent coke not only loses its commercial properties — it begins to burn.

A fire on the coke-sorting platform forces a halt to the unloading of the coke-oven batteries; the product builds up, and the entire coke-chemical section comes to a standstill. Without coke, MetalliKO reduces steel output, and within a few days construction contractors in the City face a shortage of rolled metal and a rise in prices for infrastructure projects.

The stoppage of the main ventilation fan looks no more frightening, but in practice it means an emergency evacuation of the mine and a complete halt of extraction. If the downtime drags on, fuel stops reaching the regional thermal power plants — and power engineers are forced to switch the stations to reserve stocks or restrict the supply of capacity to industrial consumers.