In many respects, as someone who has played a lot of automation games, Substructure is very familiar. It begins with you landing on the surface of an alien world and using nothing but pluck, the tools on your UI, and the schematics in your tech tree to construct a sprawling factory that claws up resources from the planet and transforms them into materials and components to build ever bigger machines.

The world is more than its surface. Build drilling equipment and elevators and you can carve through the topsoil and travel down to the caverns below, and even into caverns below those. In the depths you will find new resources to transform into more advanced equipment.

One big change between the surface and the first sublayer you explore is the light, or lack of it. While you need lights on the surface to see by night, outside of the elevator shaft, there is total darkness. You need to find ways to build lamps and power them if you're going to explore. In that dark, there are rewards: you will find fauna that can't grow on the surface, and minerals that only appear at great depths. Deeper still are toxic spores that will kill you, but also have a catalysing effect on certain plants. In one example, I'm shown a shrub that can't spawn on the poison level but still benefits hugely from the toxic fumes, quadrupling its growth rate. Exploiting that reaction means working out a way to seed the crop on one level and transport it into the fumes below.

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