An interstellar body detected on a collision course with our solar system inspires equal parts fear and curiosity – could this rogue planet threaten our fragile home, or does it offer some great, unknown opportunity? Establish complex automated factories and production facilities on the lush surface of an alien world as you delve below its surface in search of answers as part of a hastily-prepared expeditionary mission. Work alone or with friends in multiplayer as you build within intricate caverns and take advantage of the strange and unfamiliar resources hidden beneath the surface – industrialize the very depths of this world to uncover its secrets, awakening dangerous threats and encountering inexplicable phenomena along the way.
Despite its location far beyond the habitable zone, lush green fields dominate the planet and present unexpected agricultural opportunities to pair with your industrial capabilities. Will you seek the delicate but sometimes inefficient balance between fields and factories, or will the fires of industry burn this world in the interests of your expedition?
Starting with individually planted seeds to power your first combustion generators, developing towards drone-operated megafarms that sustain entire sections of your mission, agriculture isn’t just a stepping stone in the world of Substructure, but a vital process that enables your manufacturing and research capabilities.
Seek out new raw materials that can be processed and combined to manufacture advanced equipment and increase your efficiency as you journey towards the planet core. Whether you’re pulling water out of the air to produce nitrogen and lubricants or assembling logic units needed for the advanced logistic mechanisms that optimize your throughput, increasingly complex production chains drive your journey forward.
A surface-level expedition will only ever grant you surface-level answers. To truly understand the situation at hand, you must dig deeper. Build massive platforms to transport yourself, materials, and entire production chains between the cavernous layers beneath the planet's surface, revealing new biomes and the resources, opportunities, and threats they bring with them. Optimizing your production will require you to analyze and fine-tune not just each individual layer, but the interactions between them as well.
Take on the monumental task of digging through layers of the planet and build programmable platforms that transport raw materials, processed goods, and factory infrastructure. Drilling through subsequent layers will introduce new challenges to overcome in the dark underbelly of this mysterious world – you’ll need to manufacture additional tools to pierce through increasingly complex layers while accounting for limited space and light.
Though many resources on this alien planet show familiar properties, others will require ingenuity to harness – from rocks that are impossible to mine when in direct sunlight to plants that only grow underground and materials that are easier to process closer to the planet’s core, you’ll need to take into consideration humidity, heat, light, and more.
Improvement and complexity doesn’t just flow in one direction – as you uncover more resources below the planet’s surface, doubling back to use them in the layers above might further improve your efficiency or open new opportunities. From catalysts to research units to more advanced sources of fuel and power, there’s plenty to discover beneath the surface.
You need not journey alone – Substructure has been built with multiplayer integrated from its inception! Whether you prefer to play solo or with dozens of friends, you can easily host new or existing saves to go from one mode of play to another.
Built from the ground up with modding in mind, you can use basic script edits to rebalance the game or add new resources, buildings, and recipes, or tap into a simple art pipeline to add new visuals as well. Substructure makes it easy to customize your experience and share it with the world!
