Before We Leave — progression guide: research order, build ratios and the route to the Whale Charmer

Before We Leave hides its difficulty in one place: the research tree is a dependency graph with five separate currencies, and you can only earn each currency by physically settling the right kind of land. Green comes from your starting island, Red from the other two islands on the starting planet, Blue and Purple only from other planets, and Yellow only from a Crystal island you have to find with a submarine. Spend your Green unwisely and you will be sitting on a pile of research you cannot convert into anything.

This is the ordered progression: what to build, what to research, the real material costs, the ratios between production buildings, and the specific things that stall a first run. Every number below comes from the community wiki's game-data infoboxes and page text, cross-checked against the Steam patch notes.

Version written for: the 1.0 line, newest numbered patch v1.0346 (4 May 2023), last content update The Wasteland Update (March 2022), plus the binary-only Unity security patch released October 2025 (see unity.com/security/sept-2025-01 — the announcement carries no version number).

What actually counts as progress

There is no turn limit and no score. The campaign's spine is a chain of repairs and launches:

Everything else — the tech tree, the factories, the shipping network — exists to make those four lines true. The Whale Charmer ending is the one the wiki calls the conclusion of the game: it produces a conclusion screen and then gives complete protection from whales if you keep playing.

Research: four colours, four places to find them

Research is not generated from nothing. Ancient Technology deposits sit on islands as finite piles, and an Explorer's Hut (4 Wood + 3 Tools, 7 s) sends Peeps out to collect and convert them. Which colour you get is a property of where the island is:

Two rules follow from that table and they are the two most expensive mistakes in the game:

1. Research deposits are finite until you have the late-game repeatable research. If you run dry, the

answer is to explore more islands and planets, not to wait.

1. A Library must exist on each island before you can build anything unlocked through research —

including on an island that already has the technology globally. This is stated flatly in the wiki FAQ and it is the single most common reason a colonised island refuses to build anything useful.

The complete tree costs 1,030 Green, 1,630 Red, 1,230 Blue, 610 Purple and 350 Yellow research. You will not find that much Green on one island; shipping research back to a central Library is normal play.

The full tech tree, with costs and prerequisites

Every technology, in tree order. "Prereq" is what the wiki's prerequisites column says — two technologies (Repair, Bridge) list none beyond their own tier.

Two entries on the wiki's own pages are marked with a question mark rather than a figure and are not in this table: Decontamination (prereq Pollution Cleaner) and Advanced Shipping (prereq Spaceflight + Cement), plus the Cement technology itself. Their costs are not published on the wiki; we did not invent them.

The opening: the first island, in order

You start with a Shelter and 3 Peeps, surrounded by road tiles. The Shelter holds 50 Peeps in total and they will trickle out only as housing exists. The first few minutes:

1. 3× Hut, 1× Well, 2× Potato Field, 1× Woodcutter. That is the exact opening the wiki suggests.

Hut = 2 Planks, 5 s. Well = 2 Stone, 10 s, produces 1 Water every 3 s (20/min). Potato Field = 2 Wood, 5 s, produces 1 Potato every 12 s (5/min). Woodcutter = 2 Tools, 10 s, 2 workers, one Plank per 4 s.

1. Place the Woodcutter against as many Forests as possible — each adjacent Forest adds storage

(+2 for one, +4 for three), which is what keeps it from stalling.

1. Read the roads rule now: every building must be connected to a road, but a single tile of road

is enough and roads do not have to link to each other. Peeps walk at full speed on road and ~25% speed everywhere else, so road layout is a production multiplier, not decoration.

1. Use the Transmogrifier for your first Tools. It is the buildings that spawns next to the Shelter:

15 Wood in, 5 Tools out, roughly a 40-second cooldown, cannot be demolished, and needs at least one road. This is your only Tools source until Metalwork.

1. Build a Library (4 Wood + 3 Tools + 3 Stone, 7 s) and then an Explorer's Hut (4 Wood + 3

Tools). Keep enough Huts up for the Peeps or nothing works efficiently.

1. First two technologies: Elevator and Mining. Both are Green, 5 and 10 respectively, and they are

what gets you onto the grey Highland tiles.

1. Quarry (4 Wood + 2 Tools) beside a Mountain. Build a road next to a Highland tile, put an

Elevator (4 Wood + 3 Tool, 7 s) on the cliff face, road along the top, then the Quarry against the Mountain. A Quarry produces 1 Stone per 5 s (12/min) and spreads pollution — pay attention to where.

1. Warehouse (8 Wood + 4 Tools, 20 s) as soon as Warehouse tech is done. Recommended split, straight

from the wiki: one warehouse for Potatoes/Vegetables/Water/Tea, a second for Wood/Stone/Tools.

1. Research Repair, then Metalwork. Iron Mine next to a Rusting Hulk on a Highland (4 Wood +

4 Stone + 2 Tools), an Iron Smelter and a Toolsmith beside it.

1. Repair the Ruined Generator — 2 Wood and 2 Tools, available with Repair tech alone, before you

have the Power technology. This is what powers the smelter and toolsmith on island 1.

1. Gardening (20 Green), then Vegetable Field and Tea Field (4 Wood + 1 Tool each). Pollution is the

main source of unhappiness early, and these are the two cheap consumables that offset it.

The ratios that matter

The wiki's building infoboxes carry both an input amount and a per-minute rate, which makes the chains readable. These are the ones worth memorising:

The iron → tools line is 1:1:1 at 12 items per minute.

One Iron Mine feeds exactly one Iron Smelter; one Smelter feeds exactly one Toolsmith. The Toolsmith also drinks 12 Wood a minute — comfortably inside a single Woodcutter's 15 Planks/min nominal rate, which is why the wiki's suggested tool line is Iron Mine + Iron Smelter + Toolsmith + Wood Generator, plus a Cleaner to soak up the pollution they pour out.

Other chains, with the wiki's own numbers:

Power is the chain everyone fudges. The Wood Generator (8 Wood + 4 Tool, unlocked by the Power technology) burns Wood and emits Power plus some pollution; the Oil Generator (8 Wood + 4 Tool) burns Oil instead. The wiki gives two different output figures for the Wood Generator and we could not reconcile them — see caveats. What is reliable is the demand side: an Iron Smelter wants 1 Power/min, a Toolsmith 1/min, a Glass Smelter 2/min, a Steel Smelter 2/min, a Kitchen 1/min, and an Aegis wants 30 Power/min while protecting a planet.

Getting off the first island — the Ruined Ship checklist

The Ruined Ship sits on the coast near your first village. To repair it you need:

Five Peeps board the finished vessel and it becomes a Colony Ship, which you sail to find the second island. Colony Ships built later at a Shipwright cost 10 Wood + 10 Tools and must be filled with 20 Wood, 20 Tools and 10 Stone before launch — that payload is what actually gives you a start on the new island.

Island two, Red research and shipping

Colonising an island destroys the ship and drops a Port on the tile you land on. From there:

1. Food, Water, Housing, then a Library, then a School. Red Research deposits exist here; an Explorer's

Hut converts them. There is no Shelter on the new island, so the School is the only way to grow.

1. Research Shipping (20 Red). That unlocks the Shipwright (8 Wood + 8 Stone + 4 Tool) and lets you

build Ports.

1. Trade Ship: 10 Wood + 10 Tools, 2 Peeps, 30 resource capacity. The wiki's own recommended early

network is: island 1 exports Tools and keeps about 20 stocked on island 2, and island 2 exports all Red and Green research back to island 1 so the big Library can spend it.

1. Port capacity is 120 by default (Port II, costing 10 Stone + 10 Tools + 10 Glass, doubles it to

240). Any ship within two tiles of the port's land tile can load.

1. Set up Smart Shipping rather than manual lanes. Since the Wasteland Update you simply declare how

much of each resource you want on each island and the network moves the difference — it works between planets too. It is the default for new games; the old lane system is available in Difficulty Settings but you cannot convert a Smart Shipping game back.

1. One gotcha worth knowing before you build the network: an island will not export a resource unless

it is marked as tradeable on that island, even if it is sitting in a warehouse. The shipping screen will tell you "No islands are exporting this resource!"

Off the planet — Fuel, Steel, Glass and 50 adults

The Ruined Spaceship is on one of the two non-starter islands. Repairing it needs Fuel, Steel and Glass, plus at least 50 adult Peeps on that island. The adult qualifier is real: the FAQ answers "I have all the resources but it's still greyed out" with exactly that, because launching consumes population.

That means the order is effectively forced:

1. Power → Glasswork (20 G + 20 R) → Fuel (40 Red) → Steel (20 G + 20 R).
2. Build the Sand Mine (5 Wood + 10 Stone + 10 Tools) and Glass Smelter (4 Wood + 12 Stone + 8 Tools,

4 workers), the Oil Well (5 Wood + 10 Iron + 10 Tools) and Fuel Refinery (12 Wood + 16 Stone + 16 Tools + 16 Glass), the Steel Smelter (5 Wood + 15 Stone + 15 Tools).

1. Insulate yourself: the Steel Smelter is Very Heavy pollution, Very Hard Work and heavy Gloom. It

is the building that most often pushes an island's happiness over the edge.

1. Reach 50 adults. Schools hold 6 children each; children become adults after one work cycle. Build a

second School on the spaceship island rather than waiting.

Once repaired, the Spaceship is your planet-hopper. A Launch Pad (30 Stone + 30 Steel + 5 Glass, 4 workers, Spaceflight tech) builds Colony and Trade Spaceships; a Space Port (8 Wood + 15 Stone + 4 Tools) loads them and you may only build one per planet. Space Port capacity is 480, or 960 upgraded. A Colony Spaceship itself costs 50 Wood + 20 Steel + 20 Glass + 10 Tools + 50 Fuel.

Note the Launch Pad's in-game description, which is the real gate people miss: starting construction requires the island to have at least 20 more Peeps than the spaceship needs.

Blue, Purple and Yellow: the last three colours

Landing on any planet other than your first opens Blue, which is where the game's remaining systems live: Spaceflight, Baking, Farming, Irrigation, Lighting, Apartments, Music, Space Elevator, Tinkering, Automation, Clean Power, and the research-economy chain (Salt Removal, Desalination Plant, 90 R + 30 B).

Purple only exists on the innermost and outermost planets, and unlocks Laser (Astrobaleenium Mine), Battery Power, Shielding (the Aegis), Electronics (PCB Maker) and Filtering.

Yellow is the odd one out: it is on a Crystal island on your own starting planet, which you find by exploring a special purple Sunken Ruin with a Submarine. The Crystal biome has no fertilities at all — everything it needs must be imported — but it is the only source of Crystal and Yellow research. Its deposits are depletable (default 2,000), after which a Deep Mine on the biome gives you an infinite supply. Yellow buys you the Transmogrifier (100 Y), the Research Institute (20 B + 100 Y) and the Advanced Transmogrifier (20 P + 150 Y). The Research Institute is the end of the research drought: it pumps out all four colours continuously.

Guardians: what each one wants

Guardians are not combat. Each has exactly one building that answers it, and the answer is always "upgrade that building a lot".

Two other whale facts worth having: whales are the source of Astrobaleenium deposits — the only ones before the Laser tech — and finishing the Whale Charmer ends the game and permanently stops the attacks.

Happiness, pollution and expectations — the numbers

Happiness is not flavour text; it is a work-speed multiplier.

• Peep work and walk speed scales linearly, roughly 50% at minimum happiness to 150% at maximum. (The

same wiki page also says unhappy Peeps drop to "1/3rd the speed" — the two statements conflict; treat 50–150% as the shape and the 33% figure as an outlier.)

• Expectations (formerly Overpopulation) is an unavoidable penalty that scales with island population:

60 Peeps → −1, 120 → −2, 180 → −3, 240 → −4. You cannot remove it; you out-earn it with Tea, Fountains and Luxuries.

• Positive modifiers are capped per category. Food and drink: Fruit/Luxury Items/Tea/Vegetables = +1,

Bread/Milk/better clothes = +2, Meals/Smoothies = +3, Good Meals/Good Smoothies = +4. Fountains, Musicians, Parties and Wilderness stack on top of that. Only one modifier per category applies, and food/drink effects persist for the whole work cycle.

• Pollution is a happiness penalty and a production penalty. Level 1 (−1) comes from most regular

mines; level 2 (−2) from the Wood Generator, Toolsmith and Glass Smelter; level 3 (−3) from Iron Smelters and the Fuel Refinery; level 4 (−4) from Steel Smelters and Deep Mines.

• The production penalty is savage. A field or well sitting on polluted ground runs at **70%, 50%,

30% or 10% speed** for the four pollution levels. Never build food production downwind of industry.

• Pollution does not accumulate above its source. An Iron Mine producing "slight pollution" can never

create Heavy pollution. A Steel Smelter can — and if a Very Heavily Polluted tile is left long enough it becomes Toxic Sludge, destroys whatever was on it and turns the surrounding tiles into Wasteland where Peeps refuse to work.

• Fixing that requires a Decontaminator (12 Wood + 4 Tools, Decontamination tech) built on the sludge

tile, reachable through a Protective Elevator (8 Tools + 4 Steel + 4 Oil + 12 Clothing) or a Protective Airlock. Cleaners have to be built before the sludge appears — a Cleaner I only removes one pollution level and cannot touch slight pollution; only Cleaner II with Chemicals does the job.

• Gloom is not pollution. It cannot accumulate, and several buildings produce it without any pollution

at all: Market Place, Apartment, Aegis and Tailor.

The traps that cost a new player the first ten hours

1. No Library, no buildings. Any island you colonise needs its own Library before research-unlocked

buildings will place there.

1. Not repairing the Ruined Generator. It is available with Repair tech and 2 Wood + 2 Tools, and it is

what feeds your first Iron Smelter and Toolsmith. People research Power first and wonder why the smelter is stalled.

1. Running out of Tools. On standard difficulty, **demolishing a building returns all of its

materials**. When you are tool-starved early, demolish something tool-heavy rather than idling.

1. Running out of research. Deposits are finite. Ship all research to one Library and go explore.
2. The adjacency you skipped. Huts are 2 Peeps base but gain **+1 per adjacent accommodation, capped at

+2** — Huts reach 4, Houses 6, Apartments 8. Fields gain +10% production from one adjacent Field or Well. Generators give adjacent production buildings +10% speed; warehouses give +2 output storage. None of this is visible unless you place buildings in clusters, and clustered is roughly 30–50% more output for the same footprint.

1. Building food on polluted ground. See the 70/50/30/10% penalty above. It is the most common silent

killer of an otherwise fine island.

1. Swamp tiles. They accept Fields and Wells happily but reject almost every "heavy" building:

Warehouse, Airship Hangar, Launch Pad, Space Port, Glass Smelter, Steel Smelter, Fuel Refinery, Chemical Plant, Gadgeteer, PCB Maker, Kitchen, Smoothie Maker, Mill, Baker, Space Elevator, Aegis, Apartment — and every power building except the Solar Generator. Check the biome before you plan the layout.

1. Biome fatigue. Desert and Snow biomes cause Fatigue in Peeps without proper clothing, and Fatigued

Peeps work very slowly. Clothing is not a luxury on those islands; it is infrastructure.

1. Expectations at 60 Peeps. The moment an island crosses 60, every Peep loses a happiness point

permanently. Line up Tea, Fountains or Luxuries before the school finishes.

1. One Space Port per planet. It is a planet-wide singleton, so choose the island deliberately.
2. Whale attacks begin after the Spaceship. The moment you repair it, you inherit a defence problem.
3. Smart Shipping needs an explicit export flag. An island with a full warehouse still exports nothing

if the resource is not marked tradeable there.

What the wiki gets wrong, and what we could not verify

Stated plainly, because a wrong number is worse than a missing one:

• The Wood Generator's power output is contradictory. Its infobox says 1 Wood → 2 Power at 6 actions/min;

the same page's Action line says "Produces 4 Power every 15 seconds / 16 per minute". We quote the demand side (what buildings consume) instead of picking a winner.

• Glass Smelter and Crystal Mine disagree with themselves the same way: infobox 6/min versus Action line

4/min for Glass, infobox 2/min versus Action line 4/min for Crystal.

• Tailor: infobox 10 Clothing/min, Action line 8/min. Research Institute: infobox 22 Green/min,

Action line 20/min.

• Warehouse research cost: the tree summary table says 4 Green, the Green tier detail section says 5.
• Repairing the Ruined Ship and the Shipping technology. The Ship page says repairing the Ruined Ship

"automatically unlocks the Shipping technology"; the Getting Started guide says you research Shipping (20 Red) on the second island. These cannot both be the intended path. Do not budget on the free one.

• There is no official wiki. This game has a stub-heavy community Fandom wiki and nothing from

Balancing Monkey Games or Team17. Some structure pages (Battery Plant, Sky Port, Reclamation Spire, the Solar/Wind generators, Light Tower) are empty or missing, so several late-game building costs are simply not published anywhere we could find. They are omitted rather than guessed.

• The Research page contradicts the tree on how many colours exist: the tree spends five currencies

(Green, Red, Blue, Purple, Yellow); the Research page still describes "four types". Yellow is real — 350 of it is needed for the tree.

• The queue's Steam guides link was wrong. steamcommunity.com/app/1072150/guides points at *Hedon

Bloodrite, not *Before We Leave. The correct hub is app 1073910.

• The wiki's patch page is out of date. It stops at v1.0336 (28 April 2022); Steam's own news feed

carries v1.0340 (3 November 2022) and v1.0346 (4 May 2023). We used Steam's list for the version line.

Sources

• Before We Leave Wiki — Technologies (tech costs, prerequisites, tier totals)
• Before We Leave Wiki — Research
• Before We Leave Wiki — Getting Started
• Before We Leave Wiki — Colonising the Other Islands
• Before We Leave Wiki — List of buildings and the individual building pages (construction costs, input/output rates, effects, upgrades) pulled as raw wikitext via beforeweleave.fandom.com/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions
• Before We Leave Wiki — Happiness, Pollution, Expectations, Bonuses, Penalties
• Before We Leave Wiki — Guardian, Space Whale, Biome, Terrain, Island
• Before We Leave Wiki — Shelter, Peep, School, Ruined Ship, Ship, Port, Space Port, Launch Pad, FAQ
• Before We Leave Wiki — Scenario, Upgrade, Smart Shipping, Trading
• Steam — Before We Leave news feed (app 1073910): Wasteland Update (14 March 2022), v1.0340 (3 November 2022), v1.0346 (4 May 2023), Unity security patch (October 2025)
• Unity security advisory, September 2025

Game version: the 1.0 line — newest numbered patch v1.0346 (4 May 2023), last content update The Wasteland Update (March 2022), plus the October 2025 Unity runtime security patch. The console editions (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Microsoft Store) were forked from the Scenario Update and do not contain the Planet Editor or Wasteland Update content, so several things in this guide — Smart Shipping, Toxic Sludge and Wasteland, the Hub buildings, repeatable research — are PC/EGS/GOG only.