Nova Lands — progression guide: the research order, the island chain and the endgame

Nova Lands is a 37-entry research tree, ten buildable islands, and one production chain that ends with planetary-scale quantum computers. This guide is the order to do it in, the costs of each step, the ratios behind it, and the things that quietly cost a new player their first ten hours.

What version this was written for

Nova Lands 1.1.18 — the hotfix released 20 December 2023, which is still the current build. The big content update was "Quantum Gravity" (4 December 2023); every patch after it (1.1.9 → 1.1.18) is bug fixes. BEHEMUTT's only later posts are about other games, and their November 2025 note says support on Nova Lands continues without announcing a new version. Game is by BEHEMUTT, published by HypeTrain Digital, released 22 June 2023, price $19.99.

Every number below comes from the community wiki's raw page text — the rendered pages show icons, not values, so the figures here were read from the wikitext of the pages named in Sources, each with its last-edited date. Where the wiki contradicts itself, both numbers are shown rather than one being picked.

The progression spine in ten steps

1. Furnace (Stone ×10, no research needed) → smelt Charcoal (Twig ×3) and Modular Brick

(Stone ×1 + Charcoal ×1 → 6).

1. Oxygenator (Modular Brick ×6 + Iron Ingot ×1) → this is what starts your oxygen draining.
2. Research Processor (Modular Brick ×12) → now you can research at all. First buy is usually

Mass Production I (20 Modular Brick).

1. Radar via Explorer Needs I (1 Iron Ingot) → unlocks Grass Island (1 Iron Ingot), then

Rock Island (2 Iron Ingot + 2 Copper Ingot).

1. Jetpack (1 Iron Ingot) and Bot Antenna + Collector Bot via Automation I (2 Iron Ingot) →

the game stops being manual.

1. Coal Generator via Power I (7 Iron + 7 Copper) → Mass Production II (15 Iron + 15 Copper)

unlocks Electric Furnace, Steel and Glass. Research a Workbench for bots and Medkits.

1. Desert Island (1 Steel) → Sand, Glass and Cactus Flowers; rescue Daniel from the sandworm at

its centre, which unlocks the Museum. The Encampment Island (1 Copper Ingot) is the hub where Camila, Armando and Sasha settle after you meet them on Landing, Grass and Rock islands, and where their three shops — the ones that sell every piece of equipment you own — unlock by handing each of them 20 Modular Brick and 2 Iron Ingot.

1. Sea Island (15 Steel) → Stretshrooms → Advanced Production II (20 Steel) unlocks the

Industrial Refinery and Plastic. Forest Island (3 Plastic) gets you Kruwak's Remote Shop Catalog → Exporter Rocket → Kredits → the Space Station.

1. Snow Island (1 Plasteel) and Metallic Island (3 Jelly) → Titanium → Complex Production II

→ Reinforced Super Metal → the research ladder to Hypercomputer.

1. Nova Gateway → Hard Drives → Levittium → Matriarch's Island → the Quantum chain →

Black Hole Pyramid on Behemuttium Vein Island. That pyramid is the win condition.

Phase 1 — charcoal, bricks and your first research

The furnace line is charcoal-limited from the first minute, and that never really stops.

Charcoal is the tax on everything: one charcoal per iron ingot, one per copper ingot, one per modular brick cycle. Three twigs per charcoal means two iron ingots cost six twigs. Expect to run several furnaces on charcoal duty in parallel, and expect to be short of Twig before you're short of ore.

The wiki's own unlock fields are inconsistent here and it is worth knowing before you plan: the Iron Ingot and Copper Ingot pages list Mass Production I as their unlock research, but the Oxygenator (Modular Brick ×6 + Iron Ingot ×1) and Explorer Needs I (1 Iron Ingot) both require an ingot and both sit before that research is reachable — the Research Processor the research needs is itself unlocked by building the Oxygenator. The only non-circular reading is that the Furnace's ingot recipes are available from the start, which is also how the Furnace page presents them (its own recipe table, "unlocked_by = Start of game"). Treat the ingot unlock labels as stale.

The Oxygenator is a one-way door. It consumes Water Balls to refill your meter, and — quoting the page — "it does not start draining until you build the oxygenator". Before that you can roam freely. After it, every trip off the oxygenator's radius costs you. The first thing to buy afterwards is not a bigger base, it is the Oxygen Link (Explorer Needs IV, Modular Brick ×3 + Plastic ×3), which extends the oxygenator's air to another island.

Phase 2 — the Radar and the island chain

The Radar (Explorer Needs I: Modular Brick ×6 + Iron Ingot ×3) opens the map, and the map is where material costs turn into land.

Six islands are restricted and arrive by other routes: Encampment Island (Copper Ingot ×1), Mysterious Tower Island (Plastic ×8 — the Drameleon), Oasis Island (Superglue ×2 — the Tunasa), the Space Station (build a Personal Spaceship), Matriarch's Island (Superglue ×2, teleporter only) and Behemuttium Vein Island (Hard Drive 5).

Three islands are "wild" — covered in tall grass you cannot build on until a Biome Scanner (Explorer Needs III: Modular Brick ×4 + Steel ×1) clears it. The scanner is destroyed on completion and each island has its own price:

Those four Cornilia Flowers and ten Sweetcanes have to come from Forest Island itself, which is where you are standing. Plan for it.

The full research tree, in order

37 entries, in the order the wiki lists them. Cost is what you hand over at the Research Processor. This ordering is the wiki's, not a guaranteed reflection of the game's own screen order — check the in-game tree for prerequisites before committing to a long build-up.

Two of these are quietly circular-looking and both are real: Superhard Minerals costs Titanium Ore ×2 while unlocking the Stronger Extractor that is the only way to mine Titanium Deposits — you get the ore by killing Arabeetles on Metallic Island (they drop 2–3 each) or by letting a beetle break a deposit. And Complex Production II costs a Titanium Ingot, which needs the same research line.

Production chains and ratios

Per-machine rates matter more than per-batch times once you're scaling. All times are the wiki's.

Furnace line (no electricity)

Levittium at 2 s each is the cheapest output in the game and the reason the endgame is a Levittium problem, not a Levittium shortage.

Electric Furnace line (unlocked by Mass Production II)

The steel ratio that drives the whole early factory: 1 Steel = 2 Iron Ingot + 2 Copper Ingot = 1:1 between the two ingots. One Electric Furnace eats 1.67 iron and 1.67 copper per minute while one Furnace makes 1.25 ingots per minute — so a single steel furnace wants about 1.33 furnaces per metal, and each of those ingots costs a charcoal, i.e. ~3.3 charcoal/min, i.e. more than one dedicated charcoal furnace. Build the charcoal array before the steel array, not after.

Industrial Refinery line (unlocked by Advanced Production II — needs power, and lubricant)

Plasteel is a ranching recipe as much as a factory one. One Animal Scale per Plasteel means a Scortixa barn (3 creatures, fed 1 Nutritious Egg each, producing 3 Animal Scale per 36 s) feeding the refinery — the eggs come from Hives on Grass Island. Set this up when you unlock Plasteel, not when you run out.

Assembler line (unlocked by Complex Production I; needs power and lubricant)

Two Gold Nuggets of overhead per electronic item. Gold comes from Carancrabs (they eat Stone and excrete Gold Nuggets, on Rock and Desert Islands) — not from a mine. One Electronic Parts wants one nugget, one Quantum Connector wants another.

The advanced versions roughly double throughput rather than changing recipes: the Advanced Assembler makes 2 × Electronic Parts per 7 m 12 s, 2 × Computer Module per 9 m 36 s, 2 × Advanced Electronic Parts per 19 m 12 s and 2 × Hypercomputer Module per 38 m 24 s. The Advanced Industrial Refinery likewise makes Plastic ×2, Plasteel ×2 and Reinforced Super Metal ×2 per batch, and cuts Lubricant/Superglue/ Biofuel/Super Cooler Fluid batches to 24 s per item.

Particle Accelerator (Hard Drive 4)

Power: what each generator actually gives you

Draw per building (from the requires_energy fields): Electric Furnace 1, Advanced Electric Furnace 2, Industrial Refinery 4, Assembler 4, Advanced Industrial Refinery 8, Advanced Assembler 8, Mega Electric Furnace 8, Particle Accelerator 16, Driller 16, Nova Gateway 200. Plain Furnaces and Mega Furnaces list no energy requirement.

Nova Gateway's 200 draw is the biggest single number in the game and it arrives before Levittium. The Levittium generator (360) is unlocked by Hard Drive 2, which is behind the Gateway. So the Gateway has to be powered by two Behemuttium Power Plants (240) — two batteries every 7½ minutes, forever — or by a stack of biofuel/coal. Build the power first.

Kredits: what the Space Station costs, and how you earn it

Kredits come from one place only: the Exporter Rocket (Plasteel ×2 + Electronic Parts ×1, burns Biofuel Bottle ×4 per launch). The first rocket is free from the Remote Shop Catalog; more cost Kredits.

The Manager sells Space Station facilities strictly in order, top to bottom:

(The Space Station page lists House Upgrades at 1,200 and Decorations at 1,000 — the values are swapped between the two pages; the total is the same either way.)

What sits inside them, added up from the shop pages: Interplanetary Shop 24,625 Kredits (including the Merchant I–IV memberships at 150/450/900/1,000, Exporter Rocket 2,250, Packager 2,250, Mega Furnace 2,250, Mega Electric Furnace 2,250, Buildings Demolisher 500, Advanced Assembler 3,500, Advanced Industrial Refinery 3,500, Driller + Titanium Drill Bit 3,500); Inventor's Shop 15,000 (five inventions at 3,000 each); Spacewalk Upgrades 9,270 plus chunks. Roughly 59,000 Kredits for everything, and 10,300 of it is just opening the doors. That total is my addition of the wiki's listed prices, not a figure the wiki states.

The Exporter Rocket pays by contract, and the high-value contracts are all late-game:

Quantities of 100+ must be packed in a Packager (15 s per 100-item box). Don't sell unprompted: set the Packager's max output stack to 1 or the contracts will waste your production once the repeat count runs out.

The Space Station, the Hard Drives and the story chain

The story runs on Hard Drives, and Hard Drives run on quests that only open after the Nova Gateway.

• Nova Gateway (research Hypercomputer; Reinforced Super Metal ×20 + Super Control Unit ×6 +

Hypercomputer Module ×4, footprint 7×5, 200 energy) asks for four deliveries: #1 Twig ×1, #2 Behemuttium ×1 + Behemuttium Cell ×1 + Behemuttium Battery ×1, #3 Super Control Unit ×10 + Behemuttium Battery ×10, #4 Hypercomputer Module ×10 + Behemuttium Battery ×10. That is 21 Behemuttium Batteries after the Gateway itself, at 19 m 12 s each.

• Ahuatzi shows up on Encampment Island once the Gateway missions are done and hands over

Hard Drive 1, which researches (free, at the Inventor's Shop) Levittium, the Teleporter and Mysterious Ruins Island.

• The Teleporter (Computer Module ×1 + Levittium ×1, one per island) is the only way to reach

Matriarch's Island, where Thaynara sits and the rest of the Hard Drives come from.

Thaynara's line, as her page lists it:

The Hard Drive 5 page states the request as Black Hole ×1, not Neutron Core ×1 — the two pages disagree and I could not verify which is current.

Thaynara's requests are manufactured out of the same chain she unlocks, so this is where the game turns from "build a factory" into "build a factory that feeds itself".

The endgame: the arithmetic of the Black Hole Pyramid

The Black Hole Pyramid (unlocked by Thaynara; Quantum Computer ×1 + Plasteel ×10 + Reinforced Super Metal ×10) is buildable only at a predefined spot on Behemuttium Vein Island and asks for Black Hole ×1, then ×10, then ×20 — 31 Black Holes. The wiki's own note on the page is "this is also how you beat the game".

Working down from the recipe tables, 31 Black Holes is:

Those are first-order counts — each layer's own recipe applied to the layer above, before the recursion those outputs imply. They recurse heavily (Reinforced Super Metal and Titanium Ingot sit inside Advanced Electronic Parts and inside Behemuttium Cells and inside the batteries that feed the Hypercomputer chain), so the true totals are higher. What the table is good for is the shape of it: at the top you are spending single-digit quantum computers, and at the bottom you are spending thousands of Electronic Parts, each of which is 7 m 12 s of Assembler time and one Gold Nugget. Build the Electronic Parts and Gold Nugget supply first, and expect the Particle Accelerator's four recipes to be running continuously for hours.

At the other end, the Spacewalk offers a shortcut on nothing: it is a Kredit sink (Space Suit 50, Tiers 0–3 for 30/60/80+40/120+60 chunks, then Oxygen Range, Thruster, Field of View, Portal Deposits and Oxygenator Capacity upgrades from 15 to 1,500 Kredits each) that yields asteroid chunks — Carbon, Silver, Obsidian, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Diamond — plus Pearls. Those chunks feed the traversal upgrades (Ruby Rush, Sapphire Speed, Emerald Express, Diamond Dash, Diamond Dark), not the factory.

The Museum, the Relics and the optional completion list

The Museum opens on Encampment Island after you free Daniel from the sandworm on Desert Island. It is eight collections of five items each, ×5 units per item, and each completed collection pays a Health Upgrade (+20 max health) plus a skin. All eight is 200 items.

Every "Capsule" is a creature caught with the Creature Capture attachment (Ranching II) plus the Animal Cloning Machine (Interplanetary Shop, 500 Kredits) to duplicate it up to 5. Completing all eight pays the Bot Perfume relic.

Relics (permanent, viewable in the Collection tab):

Bosses (three) — and each route gives a different badge, so you must visit each one twice if you want everything:

• Drameleon (Mysterious Tower Island, 8 Plastic). Fight: dodge the hex-targeted fireballs into

contiguous empty hexes, dash through the flamethrower sweep on invincibility frames, move sideways away from the radial burst. Pacifist: put one valid resource from each island on its altar — Rock: Copper Ore / Gold Nugget / Iron Ore / Stone; Grass: Berry / Nutritious Egg / Twig; Desert: Animal Scale / Cactus Flower / Sand; Sea: Stretshroom / Water Ball; Forest: Cornilia Flower / Sweetcane. Wrong choices bounce off and can be retried.

• Moschillar (Encampment Island, behind Emilia's quests). Pacifist: grow the Blood Flower Seed

Emilia gives you in a Farm Plot and place the Blood Flower on the altar before entering.

• Tunasa (Oasis Island, 2 Superglue). Pacifist: solve the order of five creatures on the altars —

no repeats, so start by setting every altar to a different creature, pull the lever, keep the sparkled ones and re-roll the rest.

First kills pay Behemuttium ×3 each, a skin, and the relic — 9 Behemuttium in total from the three.

Challenges: the wiki lists 43, each paying a skin, ranging from "produce 100 Modular Brick" to "produce 10,000 Steel", "produce 100 Supercomputer Module" and "finish all delivery missions on the Nova Gateway". They are optional and none of them gate progression.

Skills: spend the points in this order

Skill points come from levelling; the skill table has 36 entries at 1–3 points each. The ones that actually change your game:

The four Builder skills are the single largest saving in the game, and they unlock by spending points, not by choosing them — so every cheap 1-point utility skill you take early is also progress toward free buildings.

Traps that cost a new player their first ten hours

• The Oxygenator starts the clock. Oxygen does not drain until you build it. Build it when you want

a base, not because it appeared in the build menu.

• Charcoal, not ore, is the early bottleneck. Ingots and Modular Bricks each consume one charcoal.

Three twigs per charcoal. A modest steel line needs more than one dedicated charcoal furnace.

• Modular Brick is a research currency. Mass Production I alone is 20 bricks; the Research Processor

is another 12.

• Leave Carancrabs alone. They eat Stone and excrete Gold Nuggets for free; Logistics Bots will

collect them if you set a Deposit Area or Transporter Arm to accept nuggets. Killing them stops that.

• Don't farm Nutritious Eggs early. Collector Bots die to the hive's guards, Fighter Bots kill the

bees and slow production, and nothing needs eggs until Plasteel. Queens only spawn when a hive is full of eggs, so an empty hive also stops the colony expanding.

• Titanium is stolen before it is mined. Titanium Deposits need the Stronger Extractor, which needs

Superhard Minerals, which costs Titanium Ore. Get the ore off an Arabeetle (2–3 per kill) or from a deposit a beetle has already cracked.

• Plasteel needs animal scales. One per unit, from a Scortixa barn. If your ranching is not set up

when you unlock Plasteel, the whole advanced tier stalls.

• The advanced buildings are power hogs and the power tier lags. Assemblers pull 4, Advanced

Assemblers 8, Particle Accelerators 16, Driller 16 and the Nova Gateway 200 — and the 360-energy Levittium generator is locked behind Hard Drive 2, which is behind the Gateway. Plan two Behemuttium Power Plants (240) for the Gateway.

• Nova Gateway's 200 draw plus 21 Behemuttium Batteries (19 m 12 s each) plus 20 Reinforced Super

Metal and 6 Super Control Units is the real cost of the quest, not the visible build price.

• Packing is one-way. Once packaged, items cannot be unpacked; dumping a Mega building mid-batch is

the only refund. Set Packager output stacks to 1 when selling.

• Boss routes are not alternatives for completion. Fight and befriend each boss, or you lose a badge.
• The Space Station sells in order. No jumping to the Inventor's Shop at 2,000 Kredits before the

Interplanetary Shop at 300; the Manager gates them top-to-bottom.

• Every Driller burns a Titanium Drill Bit every 3 m 45 s to produce about 1,800 units, and each

drill bit is Titanium Ingot ×4. Drilling is not free the way hand-extraction is.

• Metallic Island's unlock requirements were wrong in-game until 1.1.13 ("Wrong requirements for the

metallic island unlock" is in that patch's fix list). On 1.1.18 you are fine; older guides are not.

Numbers the wiki contradicts itself on

Listed rather than smoothed over, because a wrong ratio is worse than a flagged one:

• Charcoal: 21 s (Charcoal page) vs 26 s (Furnace page).
• Mega Furnace Steel: 12 m 30 s for Steel ×75, i.e. 10 s each (Mega Electric Furnace page) vs

10 m, i.e. 8 s each (Steel page).

• Mega Electric Furnace Glass: 2 m 45 s for Glass ×25, 6.6 s each (building page) vs 2 m 13 s,

5.32 s each (Glass page).

• Iron/Copper Ingot unlock research: listed as Mass Production I on the item pages, which is

circular given the pre-research costs of the Oxygenator and Explorer Needs I.

• Space Station facility prices: House Upgrades and Decorations Shop are 1,000/1,200 on one page and

1,200/1,000 on the other.

• Hard Drive 5's quest: Black Hole ×1 (Hard Drive 5 page) vs Neutron Core ×1 (Thaynara page).

Also unverified and therefore absent: no wiki page states which islands other than Forest, Snow and Behemuttium need a Biome Scanner, or what those scanners cost; and the Animal Barn's table covers only Antork, Carancrab and Scortixa, so there are no published feed/produce rates for the other creature capsules.

Sources

Community wiki (Fandom), read via api.php?action=query&prop=revisions raw wikitext, with each page's last-edited date:

• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Research — research tree, costs, unlocks (last edited 2025-08-22)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Islands — buildable and restricted island costs (2026-07-18)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Skills — skill and invention effects and point costs (2025-08-22)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Challenges — the 43 challenges (2025-10-14)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Museum — the eight collections and rewards (2026-07-12)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Relics — relic effects and sources (2023-12-07)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Equipment — backpack, oxygen, armour, jetpack, boots, extractor,

rifle, rocket upgrades

• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Manager — Space Station facility unlocks and prices (2024-08-02)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Interplanetary_Shop — blueprint prices and Merchant ranks (2024-03-14)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Inventor%27s_Shop — inventions and Hard Drive researches
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Exporter_Rocket — contract table and fuel (2023-12-04)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Spacewalk and /Spacewalk_Upgrades — asteroid tiers and upgrade

prices (2023-12-15)

• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Nova_Gateway — the four deliveries (2023-12-05)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Hole_Pyramid — the winning deliveries (2023-12-05)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Hard_Drive_1 … /Hard_Drive_5 — quest chain and what each drive

researches (2023-12-04 to 2023-12-05)

• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Thaynara — the Matriarch's Island quest line (2023-12-15)
• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Furnace (2025-10-14), /Electric_Furnace (2025-10-14),

/Industrial_Refinery (2025-10-14), /Assembler (2025-10-14), /Mega_Furnace, /Mega_Electric_Furnace, /Advanced_Industrial_Refinery, /Advanced_Assembler, /Particle_Accelerator, /Driller (2023-12-14), /Packager (2024-01-07), /Animal_Barn (2023-07-05), /Farm_Plot, /Oxygenator, /Research_Processor, /Radar, /Biome_Scanner, /Exporter_Rocket

• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Coal_Generator (2023-07-06), /Solar_Panel (2023-06-25),

/Biofuel_Generator (2023-07-06), /Behemuttium_Power_Plant (2025-08-17), /Levittium_Power_Generator (2023-12-06)

• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Drameleon (2024-01-03), /Moschillar (2023-06-28),

/Tunasa (2023-06-26) — boss routes and rewards

• https://nova-lands.fandom.com/wiki/Landing_Island (2023-06-28) and the individual island pages —

per-island resources and scanner prices

• Individual item pages for every recipe quoted: Iron Ingot, Copper Ingot, Steel, Glass, Plastic,

Plasteel, Modular Brick, Electronic Parts, Advanced Electronic Parts, Computer Module, Smart Sensor, Lens, Titanium Ingot, Reinforced Super Metal, Superglue, Super Cooler Fluid, Lubricant Oil, Biofuel Bottle, Behemuttium Cell, Behemuttium Battery, Levittium, Levittium Cell, Qubit Chip, Quantum Connector, Quantum Computer, Neutron Core, Black Hole, Stardust, Dark Matter, Charcoal, Empty Package, Ultra Fertilizer, Ultra Lubricant, Super Fertilizer

Developer and store pages for the version and the update history:

• https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1501610 — Steam news, last game update 1.1.18 (20 December 2023)
• https://steamcommunity.com/app/1501610/allnews/ — Quantum Gravity Update, 4 December 2023
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1501610/Nova_Lands/ — release date, developer, publisher, price
• https://novalandsgame.com/ — the developer's own site (no numeric documentation on it)
• https://steamcommunity.com/app/1501610/guides — the Steam guide hub named in the queue item; used to

confirm the version the community is playing on, not as a source for numbers

Written for Nova Lands 1.1.18 (current build, December 2023).