Beyond These Stars — first colony, build order and four layouts

Beyond These Stars is Balancing Monkey's follow-up to Before We Leave: a non-violent city builder on the back of a space whale, released in 1.0 on 16 October 2026. The twist that shapes every decision is that the map is a living creature. Kewa's health, happiness and temperature are part of your economy, and the space you build on is space you have to earn back through terraforming.

This guide covers the first colony from landing to a terraced mid-game town, with layouts built around the numbers the game actually uses. Everything here is drawn from the official Hooded Horse wiki's own building tables and from the developer's beginner's guide.

The rules that decide every layout

Six constraints do most of the work. Get these right and the rest of the game is logistics.

The energy line is the one people miss. Working in moderately hot or cold tiles costs +75 energy per shift, extreme temperatures +130, and walking over polluted or toxic tiles adds more on top. A settlement that looks fine on production can still be bleeding because its Peeps spend their whole shift walking through soot to get to work.

Two more facts that govern expansion: buildings only run when every work slot is filled, and Peeps strike when more than 40% of them sit below the happiness threshold, for 3–7 shifts or until their demands are met. Overbuilding is not a neutral mistake — an unstaffed building is dead weight, and an unhappy one is a production stoppage.

The buildings you need, and what they cost

Costs from the official wiki's building tables. Tools are the recurring tax on early construction, which is why the Toolsmith matters earlier than it looks.

A note on the House: it is not a tech unlock you buy, it is a population gate. Build at most 30 Huts with a School in range so Peeps breed, reach 60 population, and Houses appear. Thirty Huts at 2 Peeps each is exactly 60 — every Hut you place is a step toward the gate, so place them where they will still be useful after the upgrade.

Build order: the first thirty minutes

1. Water first. One Water Pump on a bank. Peeps fetch water from the pump nearest their home, so its position is a logistics decision, not a utility one.
2. Huts and Potato Patches together. Build them as one object, not two projects. See the hamlet layout below.
3. Woodcutter inside the trees. Wood funds everything else, and a Woodcutter with five Forests around it (only the road side open) gets +30% storage.
4. Mine, the moment the deposit is reachable. It unlocks the Burner Generator and Ore Smelter, and it is the only source of the Iron in nearly every early build.
5. Burner Generator, then Power Lines as soon as the first Copper ingot lands.
6. Storage Shed next to the Burner, not next to your town. Soot fills the generator and stops power dead.
7. Sawmill and Toolsmith once Wood is steady — Tools gate almost every building you want next.
8. School, then push Huts to the 60-population gate.

Do not build in "districts" the way you would in a normal city builder. The developer's own advice is the opposite: keep balanced pockets of housing, food and work close together, because distance between home and workplace is paid in shift time.

Layout 1 — the starter hamlet

Every building here is one hex: Hut, Potato Patch, Water Pump and Woodcutter all sit on a single tile. So the first colony is a terrace, not a block, and the whole design is about which six tiles each hut touches.

The Hut's adjacency is precise: +20% happiness next to 2 Potato Patches, and a −20% happiness penalty next to 2 Houses. It also gets +1 housing spot when touching 3 other Huts, but that costs 20% of the energy your Peeps get from food and drink. Early on take the happiness and skip the packing — Houses are not available yet anyway, so the penalty is not a risk, and the extra housing slot is not worth the energy.

Read it as two terraces of P H P H P H P H P with a road row above and below. Each hut is a single hex with exactly two patch neighbours and road on its other edges, so the +20% lands on every hut without exception.

The woodcutter is the one that needs planning. Its +30% storage fires when it is surrounded by five Forests with only its road open, which is exactly what the top-left of the diagram shows: a single hex buried in the tree line with one road spur reaching it. Put it in a clearing and you lose the bonus; put it in the middle of a forest with no road and it cannot be built.

The pump wants a shore, not a pond. Three underwater tiles give +30% storage, so park it on a promontory where the bank curves — the one in the diagram has water on four sides and road on the fifth. Keep huts off its edge: an adjacent Hut costs the pump 20% production speed.

The road is the spine. Roads are free and instant, every building must touch one, and the terraces above and below share the same road row instead of doubling it. When Houses eventually unlock (at most 30 Huts plus a School in range, then 60 Peeps), the patches stay and the huts get replaced in place.

Layout 2 — the 16-tile work bubble

Every Peep works only inside 16 tiles of their home. That single number means a settlement is not one city, it is a set of overlapping circles, and the interesting design question is how many workplaces you can hang off one housing cluster.

Rules that follow from it:

• Measure from the furthest corner of a house you plan to fill, not the nearest. A house on the edge of a cluster has a smaller useful bubble.
• Put workplaces between housing clusters rather than beyond them. A workplace on the line between two clusters is inside both bubbles.
• When a resource only exists at the edge of the map, build a second full pocket — a hut cluster, a food source, a water pump — rather than extending roads from the first town. The developer's guide is explicit that this becomes necessary.
• Do not build a wide low-density ring. Density wins, because a compact cluster keeps every job inside every bubble.

A practical target: one School and one food source per cluster, and workshops no more than 8–10 tiles from the outermost home. Count hexes, not buildings: fifteen huts is fifteen hexes, but five Houses is fifteen hexes as well — and a single Ore Smelter eats three.

Layout 3 — the industry pocket

This is where most colonies poison themselves, and the shapes matter: the Burner Generator, Ore Smelter and Cleaner are each three hexes in a V. That V is what gives the pocket its rules:

• Burner Generator: 4 empty neighbouring tiles (roads count as empty) buys −25% pollution at −20% speed. A V of three hexes has 11 neighbouring tiles, so this is satisfiable — but not if you pack the pocket.
• Ore Smelter next to a Cleaner: +20% production speed, +25% pollution. Both effects, always — it is not a one-tile-away effect, it needs a shared edge.
• Ore Smelter next to another Ore Smelter: −30% storage, −1 worker. Never pair them, and with a three-hex footprint they pair easily by accident.

Why this shape works: the burner keeps 7 empty neighbours with only the road and one smelter edge against it, so the −25% pollution discount survives. The smelter touches the burner on one edge, sits inside the forest belt that soaks up its pollution, and does not touch another smelter. The Storage Shed is against the smelter — it is swallowing the Soot the smelter and burner both make, and 1 hex is all it needs.

The Cleaner here is deliberately standing off, one ring from the smelter, so it cleans the ground without paying the adjacency penalty. That is the conservative placement: touching the smelter buys +20% speed and adds +25% pollution, which is a bad trade before you have a chemical supply. If you do want the speed, butt one of its three hexes against the smelter's ring and staff it, because the added pollution has to go somewhere.

Place the Cleaner before you need it, not after. Pollution becomes a Toxic Area when a tile sits at High or Very High pollution for 15 minutes, and once it is toxic Peeps refuse to walk across it — which quietly cuts the settlement in half. Cleaners cannot work over water and cannot clean flooded tiles, so do not build industry on a shoreline you may want to flood later.

A three-hex Cleaner covers its own tiles plus the ring around them, which is a wide patch. That is still a pocket tool, not a city-wide filter: if you find yourself wanting three cleaners for one area, the answer is more forest, because cleaners burn Soot and Soot comes from the buildings causing the problem.

Layout 4 — the terraced mid-game town

Houses are three hexes and they arrive late: at most 30 Huts with a School in range, then 60 Peeps. A House holds 7 Peeps, or 10 with a second House adjacent — at the cost of −20% energy from food and drink. That is the central mid-game decision:

• Paired Houses for capacity: 10 Peeps per footprint, weaker recovery, so you need better food.
• Spaced Houses for recovery: 7 Peeps each, but they shrug off a mediocre diet.

Pair them only when you can feed them properly. A paired block with a Kitchen nearby and a decent drink is a 43% capacity gain; a paired block living on raw Potato is a downward spiral into strikes.

Happiness has its own cheap lever: Park Benches, since a House with 2 adjacent benches gets +20% happiness. Put benches in the gaps where you are not pairing Houses — you cannot use that tile for another House anyway if you want the energy bonus.

Keep the terrace pattern from Layout 1 and swap huts for Houses in place: a road row, a building row, a road row. Each House occupies three hexes, so a paired block is six — which means a pair spans roughly two hut widths, and the benches go in the notch the pair leaves beside the road.

Then layer the upgrades in this order:

1. Warehouse (12 Stone, 8 Glass, 8 Steel, 6 Plank) — 120 space per tile versus the Storage Shed's 80.
2. Apartment (18 Stone, 12 Cement, 6 Tool, 16 Glass, 20 Plank, 10 Steel) — the next housing tier after Houses, and the one that carries the House happiness bonuses forward through the perk tree. Check its slot count in the construction menu before you plan a block around it; the wiki lists it but not its capacity.
3. Town Centre (20 Plank, 24 Tool, 50 Stone, 24 Glass, 30 Steel) — the largest accommodation-category build in the game and the natural centrepiece of a finished town. Plan road capacity for it before you place it, because everything around it will want to connect through it.

Keep at least two tiles between parallel roads where you want adjacency bonuses. Playtesters' most repeated early complaint is roads placed one tile apart, which quietly denies the buildings on either side their adjacency effects.

Making space: terraforming without wrecking the biome

Land is the scarcest resource, and terraforming is how you get more. Three tools, in the order they unlock:

• Landscaping (Landscaper): select tiles and move them up or down multiple levels. Moving up consumes Debris; moving down produces it. Batch tiles into one job before you start — a batched job finishes together and lets you set the depth once.
• Composting (Compost Heap): turns Bare tiles into fertile ground. Only Watered + Dirt is Fertile, so compost and water are a pair.
• Forestry (Tree Nursery): Compost → Saplings → planted Forest, which expands atmosphere and eats pollution.

The biome runs on one sentence: health is how much of the back is Fertile or Flooded and how many Forests cover every playable tile with atmosphere. So the loop is dig → channel water → compost → plant, not dig → build.

Two practical notes. First, the Landscaper's Debris store fills up and stops digging; balance cut-and-fill in the same project or it stalls. Second, a single Forest tile reaches 4 tiles in every direction, so planting a line of trees along the edge of your buildable area extends atmosphere faster than dotting singles around.

Water channels are the highest-leverage move in the whole game. Cutting a channel to a dry region revives dead Forest, which restores atmosphere, which makes ground buildable — and Kewa's health bar moves in the same motion, which restores its travel energy faster. That is the engine that lets you reach further systems.

Storage and the by-product traps

Nearly every production building in this game makes a second thing you did not ask for, and if the by-product storage fills, the building stops — even with its main product empty. Soot from Burner Generators and Ore Smelters, Wood Waste from Woodcutters, Sludge from the hazardous chain: these are the classic deadlocks.

How to handle it:

• One Storage Shed at the polluter, configured for the by-product first. A shed holds 4 stacks of 20 and one worker fetches into it, which is exactly what is needed to unblock a stalling building.
• Do not carpet the map with sheds. Demolishing a shed leaves a resource cache that occupies the ground until it is cleared, which usually needs another shed. Playtests complain about exactly this: storage as area denial.
• Sometimes let it stay full. If you do not need the by-product, a full building sitting idle is cheaper than three sheds you cannot demolish.
• Give Soot a sink — the Cleaner consumes Soot and Water. If you are planting forests instead, you will have Soot with nowhere to go, which is the game's most common complaint in reviews.

Wood Waste deserves a mention: it is the only early input for Compost, so a Burner Generator burning Wood Waste for power is competing with your terraforming. Burn Wood where you can, and keep the Waste for compost.

Power

Power has three states, and the order matters:

1. Touching. The first Burner Generator can only power buildings that physically touch it. Keep it to one or two consumers.
2. Power Lines (1 Copper, 1 Wood), unlocked by your first Copper ingot. Lines can run over roads and empty ground.
3. Diversity. Generators are hard to replace, so mix sources once Fuel Generators, Solar Panels and Wind Turbines appear. Do not build a colony that dies to one dead generator.

Two traps: Power Lines are blocked by Forests and Buildings, so run them along roads where new trees cannot cut the grid; and the Burner Generator's continuous-power setting is what keeps Soot flowing for Cleaners — but continuous running is also what pollutes your town. Balance them deliberately, and remember the settings let you set cleaner and generator priority explicitly.

What actually ends runs

• Soot or Sludge deadlock. The building stops, the chain stops, and the fix needs a resource the stopped chain was making.
• A toxic area between home and work. Fifteen minutes of High pollution is all it takes. Peeps then refuse to cross, and your 16-tile bubbles silently shrink.
• Strikes at 40% unhappy. Usually a food-quality problem, not a happiness-decoration problem. Check what they are eating before building benches.
• Unstaffed buildings. All slots or nothing. Adding a building before the population exists is a pure loss.
• Overheating Kewa. If the region is too hot, Kewa's health takes an orange Overheated segment and it will move itself somewhere cooler — which can strand your supply lines.
• Ignoring Kewa's energy. A long jump costs more energy than Kewa has, and it will set its own resting waypoint to feed. That is an unplanned detour in the middle of your build.

Sources

• Beyond These Stars Official Wiki — Buildings, Building (adjacency effects), Peeps, Forests, Pollution, Biome, Terraforming, Roads, Storage, and the individual Hut, House, Water Pump, Woodcutter, Burner Generator, Ore Smelter, Cleaner, Storage Shed and Power Line pages: https://wiki.hoodedhorse.com/Beyond_These_Stars/
• Beyond These Stars Beginner's Guide, by Antony and Matt (Hooded Horse), posted 16 October 2026: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3810374640
• Steam store page and 1.0 release notes, incl. Hotfixes #1–#3: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2295060/
• Balancing Monkey Games press kit (release dates, setting): https://www.balancingmonkeygames.com/presskit/beyond-these-stars-presskit

Written for the 1.0 release build (16 October 2026). Three hotfixes have shipped since launch; none changed the numbers above.

Where the footprints come from: the official wiki documents only the House ("a 3-hex footprint"). Every other size in this guide was read from the in-game placement preview in 1.0 — Hut, Potato Patch, Water Pump, Woodcutter and Storage Shed at 1 hex; Burner Generator, Ore Smelter and Cleaner at 3 hexes in a V. The House is drawn at 3 hexes but its shape is not confirmed, so treat the terraced-town section as the one still to check against the build menu.

One number to watch: the test game's Ore Smelter panel shows construction costs of 6 / 8 / 16 / 16 against the wiki's 6 Tool, 8 Wood, 6 Stone, 9 Iron. The first two agree, so the wiki's table may be pre-release — verify the last two in your own build menu before budgeting a smelter chain.