Substructure, from Factorio UltraCube Team, Passes 100K Steam Wishlists
Substructure is drawing attention before release, and the developers' stated position that making scale bigger should not be the solution to every problem is visible in the demo's farming and multi-layer mechanics.
Reporting from 1 source: Game Spark.
Dubious Design, the UK studio founded in 2024 by the makers of the Factorio mod UltraCube, showed its new automation game Substructure at gamescom. The game is set on a floating planet approaching the solar system, where players build factories and dig through layered underground cavities. Steam wishlists have passed 100,000. A hands-off demo covered farming, catalysts, lift platforms, and a live multiplayer session.
The demo opened with the player landing on the planet with almost nothing. Titanium and silicate ore come first, and the Moon Crystal resource can only be mined at night, a deliberate early stumbling point. Farming is a production chain: seeds go into Farm Plots, crops feed combustion generators, and the Farm Silo automates planting and harvesting, though converting crops back to seeds succeeds only about 85 percent of the time.
The new Belt Converter changes items directly on a conveyor belt rather than passing them through a machine. Underground, the Lift Platform moves between layers, and farm plots can ride it to stack catalyst effects from different biomes. A live multiplayer session closed the demo, with a developer in the UK joining in.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.