Getting started
Beyond These Stars: How to Play and Build Your First Settlement
The quick answer
Start small: connect buildings to roads, keep workplaces within housing range, and supply both food and drinking water. Follow Goals while you build one reliable production chain at a time.
Build around your Peeps
In Beyond These Stars, your settlement lives on Kewa, a travelling space whale. A building is useful only when your Peeps can reach it and keep it running.
- Connect your first buildings to roads.
- Keep workplaces inside the blue work range shown around housing. A distant industrial district can leave jobs out of reach.
- Make food and drinking water available to homes. Peeps work in shifts, then eat, drink and rest; supplying only one of food or drink gives poorer recovery.
- Begin with Default labour. Hard Labor adds pressure before your supply chains are ready.
Follow Goals, then check the technology tree
Goals give you your next objective. Technology unlocks depend on their own prerequisites, which may include constructing a building and producing a resource. Simply owning materials is not always enough.
Perk Points earned through technology are spent on the separate Perks screen. Treat a technology requirement and a perk purchase as different decisions.
Get your first production chain running
Check the construction menu for a power icon. Early on, place powered buildings directly adjacent to a working generator; use Power Lines once they become available.
If production stops, inspect these in order:
| Check | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Access | A road connection and a workplace within housing range |
| Staffing | All required worker positions filled |
| Inputs | Materials in the building, rather than only in the global total |
| Power | A real connection and enough power for the selected task |
| Outputs | Space for both the main product and every by-product |
Expand when the basics are stable
Place Storage Sheds near production or consumption points. Pause buildings whose goods you do not currently need, and give a bottleneck higher priority instead of expanding every industry at once.
As the town grows, smaller settlements can extend workplace coverage. Water channels, compost and saplings help you develop more of Kewa’s surface.