If you were Senior Floor Manager of Earth, and a weird planet innocently appeared on the fringe of our solar system, what would you do? I would probably not zip out there and plant a factory on that planet, in much the same way that I wouldn’t high-five a bear-shaped shadow on the edge of a campsite. But I am not the modder behind beloved Factorio mod Ultracube, who is now part of game developer Dubious Design.

The latter have just announced the very Factorio-esque Substructure, which is being published by Hooded Horse. A new Hooded Horse joint tends to get a certain automatic level of attention round these parts. We’re partial to factory sims, too. Substructure seals the deal by sort of being a horror game as well. I mean, they’re not actually calling it that, but it seems creepy as balls. The trailer below sees whole segments of production line sinking below the surface like Atlantis.

It’s a factory sim in which you slowly colonise the layers of the aforesaid weird planet, constructing new production lines on each level. As players of Anoxia Station and Dwarf Fortress will know, striking the earth tends to make it strike back, but there is a lot of cool stuff down there you can use for upgrades. Please do your best to get hold of that stuff, while avoiding the stuff that has teeth.

You can expect both the routine smokestacks and industrialised agriculture, which makes for a relatively picturesque factory sim. You can program the elevators, though the press release doesn’t go into details, and there’s co-op too. As you’d expect given the dev’s pedigree, the press release makes a big deal of the mod support. “From day one, add new resources, buildings, or just balance the game as desired!” it trills.

You can read more on Steam. A little more on Dubious Design: they’re based in the UK, and consist of two people. “May the future be dubious,” the developers declare in announcement materials. I like the energy, but I would like the future to at least contain an early access release date.