Space Haven — First Ship Walkthrough: Life Support, Ratios and Your First Jump

Space Haven is Bugbyte's spaceship colony sim: you start with a hull, a few crew and no life support, and you build outward until the ship can jump. The systems overlap — air, temperature, gas, power, comfort and logistics all feed back into each other — but the build order is not ambiguous. This walkthrough is that order, with the actual numbers behind each decision: what each facility costs, what it draws, what it eats, what it produces, and what unlocks it.

Everything numeric here came from the official Space Haven wiki at bugbyte.fi/spacehaven/wiki, which is run by Bugbyte and whose facility and recipe pages carry the build IDs the data was taken from. Read the What is verified and what is not section before you trust a specific decimal — the wiki's data pages predate the 1.0 release, and I flag every place that matters.

What Version This Is Written For

The official wiki's data pages were exported from earlier builds — the recipe and facility tables are stamped build 14856109 (Update 19 era) and 17893980 (Update 20 era), with page banners reading wiki version 2025.05.01.0. So the numbers below are the pre-1.0 numbers. Where a 1.0-era source or patch note contradicts them, I say so rather than quietly averaging the two.

The Build Order At A Glance

1. Tools Facility — nothing else can be built until it exists.
2. Life support trio — Oxygen Generator, Gas Scrubber, Thermal Regulator, plus lights.
3. Power nodes, linked — high-capacity power is not automatic; low-capacity power is.
4. Beds, then a Kitchen — sleep comfort and food, in separate rooms from industry.
5. Water Purifier + Recycler — the two facilities that turn the sector into materials.
6. Assembler + Metal Refinery + Energy Refinery — blocks, steel and power rods.
7. Navigation console + two X1 Hyperdrives + Hull Stabilizer(s) — the jump.
8. Grow beds in their own climate room — food security.
9. Research Lab + Research Workbench — everything above needs tech you do not start with.
10. Weapons console + turrets, Shields console + shield generator — only after the ship can leave.

Step 1 — Tools Facility First

Your crew build facilities with hand-held construction printers, and those printers run on Building Tools. No Tools Facility means no construction jobs at all.

The Tools Facility converts Infrablocks into Building Tools. The wiki recipe page gives 1 Infrablock → 500 Building Tools, but the 1.0-era patch notes contain the line "Increased the amount of tools acquired per infrablock in the tools facility" (release candidate 3, during 1.0 development) — so the live value is higher than 500. Treat 500 as a floor, not a fact.

Two habits here save you an hour:

• Set the Tools Facility to "produce if lower than" rather than continuous, and use its prioritize resources button when a build is stalled waiting on tools. Continuous production on refineries is the single biggest cause of logistics collapse (the wiki FAQ calls this out explicitly: crew "might be overwhelmed with logistics work", with blockages at airlocks).
• Dismantling returns the materials you put in, so an early facility is never a permanent commitment.

Step 2 — Life Support, Then Power

The minimum survivable set, straight from the wiki's step-by-step build guide:

The wiki's rule of thumb for how many: a small area of roughly 15×15 tiles generally needs one of each. Scale from there as you wall rooms off, because walls stop gases and temperature from spreading.

Low-capacity vs high-capacity power

This distinction causes more early confusion than anything else in the game:

• Low-capacity power is distributed through the hull itself and covers the whole ship automatically. Lights, beds, Tools Facility, kitchen-tier facilities run on it.
• High-capacity power comes from power nodes and is required by all industry facilities and all ship-to-ship combat facilities (turrets, shields). A node must cover the facility's yellow energy square, and nodes have to be linked to each other and to the generator — select a node or generator and use the links button. New players routinely build a node and wonder why nothing is powered.

Power control and boosting, from the wiki's power-grid page:

If the grid flickers or browns out, the generator is the constraint — build another generator before building another node.

Step 3 — Beds, Kitchen, and How Comfort Actually Works

Sleep first. Build one bed per crew member, surround them with walls for a bed room, and put a power node, thermal regulator and light inside it. A bed next to the ship core or the engine room is a mood problem, not just an aesthetic one.

Then food. The wiki's Kitchen page (flagged outdated on the wiki itself) gives 2 Infrablocks + 2 Soft Blocks + 3 Building Tools for a Kitchen with a 3×2 footprint (3×1 of it solid), plus a table and enough chairs near it. The one rule that actually bites:

• Crew eat during leisure time, and only on the ship their leisure permission points at. The wiki FAQ's answer to "why is my crew not eating?" is: build a kitchen, and give crew at least two consecutive hours of leisure so they can walk back and eat. A crew member whose leisure ship has no Kitchen will not eat, no matter how much food is in storage.

The comfort model, in numbers

Every tile carries a comfort value. Facilities push discomfort out to a radius, damped by roomdrop (how much it falls off with distance), and walls block discomfort but do not eliminate it. That is why industry belongs in its own walled room rather than against a bedroom wall:

The same tables give the heat and hazardous gas outputs that decide whether a room needs a spacesuit door:

The wiki's own description of the Energy Refinery is the template for all of these: "Releases hazardous gas and is noisy. Enclose with walls and a space suit door to ensure a safe working environment." Keep industry next to the hangar so hauling distances stay short, and keep it out of the crew band.

Step 4 — Production Ratios (The Numbers That Matter)

Recipes are per unit of output. "0.5 Steel Plates → 1 Hull Block" means every Hull Block eats half a Steel Plate.

Construction blocks

Refined resources

Energy, water and fuel

Two conclusions worth internalising:

• Water is the real currency of the early game. It goes into oxygen generation, grow beds and IV fluid. Ice is cheap to mine; build the Water Purifier early, and place Water Collectors near the grow beds where vapor is high.
• Energium and Hyperium convert at 2:1 into Energy Rods and Hyperfuel. The Arks' fuel stockpile is finite, so an Energy Refinery plus mining access is the difference between a ship and a stranded hull.

Ore processing

Note the direction of travel: the Ore Processor is what lets mining feed your refineries. The Beta 2 notes (the Station Mode update, January 2026) say plainly that "the Ore Processor resource output has been increased. Remember to build more than one Ore Processor for more resource output!" — so the wiki's per-ore figures are a floor, and one processor is rarely enough.

The Recycler is also a converter

Scrap is not the only thing the Recycler eats. It will break finished goods back down, which makes it your emergency foundry:

That last pair is the important one: recycling a rod or hyperfuel cell returns about a third of the crystal, so surplus fuel is never dead weight.

Composting and food

The Composter turns waste and surplus crops into carbon, fertilizer and water — the loop that keeps a grow room alive without mining:

Grow beds themselves are the one chain the wiki documents poorly: there is no reliable per-crop growth-time or yield table published, so this guide does not state one. What is documented is the environment rule — plants need light, CO2 and a stable temperature in a room of their own, with a botanist assigned (botany skill sets growth speed and whether a crop can be planted at all). Extreme temperatures kill crops outright, and a failed crop can be inspected by selecting it in the grow bed. The wiki's Industry Tree page lists grow-bed water costs of 0.75 Water per Fruit and per Root Vegetable, 1.5 per Artificial Meat and per Fibers — but that page contains demonstrably stale rows (see below), so treat these as indicative.

Step 5 — Hyperspace: What The Jump Actually Requires

Per the wiki's Hyperspace Travel page, a ship can jump when it has:

• a Power Generator,
• sufficient life support (Oxygen Generator, Gas Scrubber, Thermal Regulator),
• one Navigation Console,
• one Hyperdrive — and more of them as mass grows,
• enough Hull Stability, which is what Hull Stabilizers are for,

and, on board: Energy Rods to keep the core running and Hyperfuel to charge the drive.

The wiki's starter advice is to build two X1 Hyperdrives from the outset, because the basic drive has a low mass ceiling, and to place the engine room as an 8×10 expansion to the rear and the bridge as an 8×8 expansion forward. Loading fuel updates the mass-capability readout, so check the number after the drives are fuelled.

The jump sequence:

1. Turn on the jump toggle in the Systems menu.
2. Keep crew and shuttles undrafted so they can walk back and board.
3. Wait for crew to take the navigation console and charge the drive.
4. Have at least one crew member with Navigate priority per ship.
5. When the bars fill, hit jump. You are now in hyperspace, not at a destination.
6. Travel on the starmap: double-click a reachable (green-blue) sector to move; drop out of hyperspace to enter it, or keep double-clicking to chain sectors.

Two things the game does not spell out. First, jumping does not make the destination safe — sectors differ in resources, factions and hazards, and the starmap legend is where you read that. Second, the jump is a commitment: once you leave, the sector you abandoned does not come back, so salvage and mine what is worth taking first.

Step 6 — Research: What Unlocks What

Research happens at the Research Lab (crew need a Research skill of 1+) and, for modules that require experiments, at the Research Workbench, where experiments consume resources and can start fires or injure the researcher. The wiki's rule of thumb is two research labs and two crew members prioritized on research. Modules are unlocked in three research-point tiers (green = any skill, yellow = moderate, red = high) and some have multiple stages; the research queue handles lab and workbench work in parallel.

The wiki's facility pages name the prerequisite modules per facility, which is the most reliable unlock order published anywhere:

Two research notes that are easy to miss because they are buried in patch notes rather than the wiki: on Peaceful, Builder and Medium difficulties the Botany tech and the Medical bed are unlocked from the start, and facility wear-and-tear defaults to tools only; and "Small Hope Brutal" difficulty starts with the Research Workbench unlocked in its start settings. If you are learning the game, research order barely matters at the start — power, industry and hull stability are already on your list.

Step 7 — Build Costs, Facility By Facility

Everything below is one facility's full wiki build cost. "Building Tools" is abbreviated BT.

Two things this table makes obvious. Energy Blocks and Techblocks are the bottleneck for everything interesting — drives, shields, turrets and jammer all want them, and Techblocks require an Optronics Component, which requires a Chemical Refinery two steps upstream. And power draw is wildly uneven: the Metal Refinery alone wants 200/s, more than a shield generator and an X1 Hyperdrive combined. Budget generator capacity for the refinery before you build it.

System points are the other ceiling. The wiki's Important Concepts page defines them as the pool that turrets, shield modules, hull stabilizers, scanners and similar systems draw from, limited per ship — and system cores are how you raise it (X1 +12, X2 +24, X3 +48), at the cost of a core point each and a heavy comfort penalty, so put the core away from the crew.

Step 8 — Getting Unstuck: Salvage, Trade, Dismantle

The wiki's own answer to "I built myself out of resources" is four options, in the order you should consider them.

Dismantle. Dismantling a facility returns the resources that built it. Temporarily pulling a lower-priority facility to fund a critical one is intended play. (A fan guide on the wiki notes water already consumed by grow beds is not returned — that caveat is unverified, but it is the safe assumption.)

Salvage a derelict. Required precondition, per the wiki: the ship or station must be completely explored and free of aliens and other factions' crew. Then:

1. Select the derelict.
2. Open the salvage tab in the ship selection screen.
3. Toggle the resource types you want. Availability is shown per type — "low" means dismantling its facilities rarely yields that scrap.
4. Ensure crew and shuttles are undrafted so they work automatically.

Scrap becomes usable material only through the Recycler, so a Recycler is the prerequisite for salvage being worth anything. The tech you start with is what arms the away team: an Item Fabricator and a couple of shotguns before your first boarding is the cheap version of insurance, and both can be dismantled afterwards to get the materials back.

Trade. You need a trade agreement to trade at all; merchant factions deal with everyone, most others must be negotiated with by hailing them and choosing Negotiate. Once agreed, select the ship and open the trade tab, then new trade. A trade completes only when both sides haul the goods to their airlocks and a shuttle is available — so undraft your shuttle if a trade stalls, and expect delays when the partner crew is asleep.

What goods are actually worth, from the game's own TradingValues data reproduced on the wiki (max price per unit):

The pattern is clear enough without inventing margins: anything with an Optronics or Energy Cell step in it trades for two to four times what a raw block does, which is exactly why the industry chain pays for itself.

Step 9 — The Traps That Cost New Players Their First Ten Hours

1. Building anything before the Tools Facility. Without Building Tools no construction job exists, and the game simply looks broken.
2. Leaving crew drafted. Drafting strips manual control: a drafted crew member does nothing except what you order. The wiki FAQ says it in bold — "DO NOT LEAVE CREW MEMBERS DRAFTED" — and undrafting stops most "why is nobody working?" panics.
3. Setting every priority to highest on every crew member. In the wiki's own words, that means no priorities are set at all. Spread the jobs and use the skill dots in the crew menu.
4. Leaving refineries on continuous production. It swamps logistics and clogs airlocks. Use "produce if lower than" thresholds and set a few crew members' Logistics priority high.
5. No Kitchen on the leisure ship, or too little leisure time. Crew eat only during leisure, and starvation cannot be cured by one good meal — it needs sustained access to food. Two consecutive leisure hours is the documented minimum.
6. Grow beds without light, CO2 and stable temperature. Crops fail, and the game will only tell you if you select the failed crop. Assign a botanist as well; without one, growth crawls.
7. Industry in the living band. A Metal Refinery is −60 sleep comfort at radius 12. Walls damp it, they do not erase it.
8. Expanding the hull too fast. Every tile is volume to heat, oxygenate and cool, and every tonne is a hyperdrive. The wiki suggests a first expansion of about 8×16 tiles and warns that over-expanding "will eat up a lot of time and resources."
9. Not enclosing the dangerous refineries. Metal Refinery, Energy Refinery, Chemical Refinery and Recycler all emit heat and hazardous gas; the Chemical Refinery is the worst at 3/s. Walls plus a spacesuit door, or you are venting your ship.
10. Boosting power above 100% and leaving it there. It works — and it wears out the facilities that are boosted. Cap it at the 4 nodes/120% ceiling and only during a fight.
11. Assuming an airtight room needs no vent. Vents are what move gas and temperature between rooms; an enclosed room with no vent is a sealed climate problem, and the game has a dedicated vent view mode for finding those.

What Is Verified And What Is Not

Honest accounting, because this guide's value is that you can check it.

Verified against the game's own current build data. The current stable version is 1.0.4; Steam's public branch build is 23680735, timestamped 15 June 2026, and it has not moved since (checked 1 October 2026 via Steam's app-info API). The 1.0 release was 13 May 2026. Patch notes for 1.0.1–1.0.4 contain only fixes and small quality-of-life changes — no recipe or cost rebalancing — so the pre-1.0 numbers above should still hold for the values I could cross-check.

Cross-checked across sources. The Energy Refinery's 0.5 Energium → 1 Energy Rod conversion, its 100.0 high-capacity power draw and its 2/s hazardous gas output all appear both in the wiki data and in post-1.0 coverage of the game; the Hull Stabilizer's +50 hull stability likewise.

Known stale or unverified — do not treat as exact:

• Building Tools per Infrablock. The wiki says 500; the 1.0-era patch notes say this was increased. Current value unverified.
• Ore Processor and Energium Generator throughput. Both were explicitly buffed in the Beta 2 update (December 2025 / January 2026); the wiki's per-ore yields are pre-buff floors.
• The wiki's Industry Tree page contradicts its own recipe pages — it lists Energy Rod at 0.2 Energium and Hyperfuel at 2 Hyperium (the recipe pages say 0.5 for both), and gives different Soft Block, Techblock and Energy Block recipes. I used the recipe pages throughout, because a post-1.0 source agrees with them; the Industry Tree is the older page. Its grow-bed water costs, quoted above, inherit that doubt.
• The wiki's X1 Hyperdrive page lists "Shield Console" as its prerequisite, which contradicts every other page's description of hyperdrives. It reads as a copy-paste error on a newly created page, so it is not repeated here.
• The Ore Processor's infobox has no research prerequisite filled in. Whether it needs none, or the field is simply blank, is unverified.
• The Water Collector's recipe is listed as 22,500 "Water Vapor" → 1 Water. Water vapor is tracked per tile as an internal gas value, so this is a game-units figure, not a number you can plan around the way you plan Ice → Water.
• Growth times, yields per grow bed, and per-crew food consumption are not published anywhere I could find and are therefore absent from this guide rather than estimated.
• Specific per-tile comfort numbers (the value of a light, a bed, a jukebox) are not published; only the facility penalties above are.

Sources

• Official Space Haven wiki (Bugbyte), https://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven/wiki — pages read via the wiki API's raw wikitext so the underlying values, not the rendered icons, were used:
• Building, The Power Grid, Research, Salvaging, Trading, Hyperspace Travel, FAQ, Important Concepts, Menus, Resources, Facilities, Characters, Grow Your Crew / More Crew Members, Industry Tree
• Facility and recipe pages: Tools Facility + /Recipes, Recycler + /Recipes, Metal Refinery + /Recipes, Energy Refinery + /Recipes, Chemical Refinery + /Recipes, Assembler + /Recipes, Advanced Assembler + /Recipes, Optronics Fabricator + /Recipes, Micro-Weaver + /Recipes, Item Fabricator + /Recipes, Item Workbench + /Recipes, Composter + /Recipes, Ore Processor + /Recipes, Water Purifier + /Recipes, Water Collector + /Recipes, Robot Workbench + /Recipes, Salvage Robot Station + /Recipes, Logistics Robot Station + /Recipes, Kitchen, Hull Stabilizer, X1 Hyperdrive, X1 System Core, X2 System Core, X3 System Core, Shield Generator, Small Shield Generator, Scanner, Autoturret, Energy Turret, Rocket Turret, Point Defense Turret, Targeting Jammer
• Wiki data provenance: page banners stamp wiki version 2025.05.01.0; recipe and facility footers carry build IDs 14856109 (Update 19) and 17893980 (Update 20)
• Fargo5's Guide (fan guide hosted on the official wiki; Alpha-era, used only for corroborated points and labelled where cited)
• Steam: ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp for app 979110 (1.0 release post of 13 May 2026 and every RC/patch note through 1.0.4 on 15 June 2026), and SteamCMD app-info for the public branch build ID 23680735
• Game version this guide was written for: Space Haven 1.0.4 (stable, 15 June 2026), Steam public build 23680735
• Written 1 October 2026