Beyond These Stars Buildings: Full Guide to Every Type

Building a city on the back of a space whale sounds like a joke until you realize that placement, pollution, and production chains all matter just as much as they do in any serious colony sim. In Beyond These Stars, buildings are the entire game: every hut, mine, smelter, and hedge garden you place shapes how your Peeps live, how fast your economy grows, and whether Kewa the whale stays healthy. This guide breaks down the Beyond These Stars buildings you'll use most, how adjacency bonuses work, and how to lay out a settlement that doesn't collapse under its own soot.

Whether you're a few hours into the tutorial or planning a sandbox megacity, the tips below will help you stop guessing and start building with intent.

Check out beginner guide for more details.

How Building and Placement Works in Beyond These Stars

Beyond These Stars is a hex-based survival city builder from New Zealand studio Balancing Monkey Games, published by Hooded Horse and released in 1.0 on October 16, 2026. It's the follow-up to Before We Leave, and it keeps that game's cozy colony-builder DNA while adding a mobile, living map — the space whale Kewa.

Here's what you need to know before placing anything:

• Everything snaps to hexes. Buildings occupy one or more tiles, and most production buildings must connect to a road.
• Roads are free. You can draw as many as you like, but longer roads mean longer walking times for your Peeps, so sprawl has a real cost.
• Power travels through adjacency. A building receiving power can pass it to directly adjacent buildings, which is why industrial districts tend to cluster. Power lines unlock later and free you from strict adjacency.
• Most buildings have adjacency effects. These can be positive, negative, or mixed — more on that below.
• The home spaceship acts as your starting hub, slowly producing water, potatoes, wood, iron, stone, and tools while you establish your first districts.

You can check the official store page for Beyond These Stars on Steam to confirm current patch notes, since hotfixes have already adjusted things like power generator range displays.

The Tech Tree Gates Almost Everything

There are no research points in this game. Instead, you unlock buildings by doing things. Produce five wood in a woodcutter and the mine unlocks; smelt ten iron and the toolsmith becomes available. Each unlock also grants perk points, which you spend on a separate web of Peep upgrades.

The tech tree is split into columns: accommodation, agriculture, peak resources, construction, power, terraforming, pathing, logistics, hazardous, advanced, and decoration. A common community complaint is that unlocking is a manual click every time even though it costs nothing — so get in the habit of checking the tree after every milestone popup.

Core Beyond These Stars Buildings by Category

The table below summarizes the buildings you'll interact with most in the early and mid game, based on gameplay footage and player reports.

Housing: Huts Are Your Population Engine

Huts are the backbone of early growth. Each hut houses a small number of Peeps, and grouping three huts together grants an extra Peep slot per building — at the cost of 20% less energy for residents. Placing huts next to potato patches adds 20% happiness, which is a cheap early boost.

Community members have asked for a one-click hut-to-house upgrade button; as of launch, you'll need to demolish and rebuild or use the move tool, so plan housing blocks with expansion in mind rather than cramming them into corners.

Food and Water: The Potato Economy

Early food is almost entirely potatoes. The potato patch is a great example of how adjacency cuts both ways:

The classic efficient pattern is two potato patches side by side with a water pump adjacent to both, connected by a short road loop. It costs a little extra road length but pays off every harvest.

Power and Industry: Where Pollution Is Born

The burner generator is your first power source, burning wood and wood waste. It has a notable quirk: with four nearby empty tiles it produces 25% less pollution but runs 20% slower. Surround it with buildings and it speeds up — and pollutes more. Since you're literally living on a sentient creature, that trade-off matters.

The ore smelter converts iron ore into iron and generates soot. The toolsmith consumes wood, iron, and power to make tools, producing slag and significant local pollution. Player experience suggests building your entire industrial chain on barren tiles away from housing — the tutorial even nudges you toward this by placing industry on non-breathable terrain at the edge of your oxygen bubble.

A frequently reported pain point is soot scarcity. Many mid-game buildings want soot, but only a few produce it, so players find themselves running burners and smelters just to stockpile it. Plan for this bottleneck before you commit to soot-hungry construction.

Sanitation and Terraforming

Pollution isn't just cosmetic — heavily polluted tiles can spawn toxic areas that disable buildings, including homes. Your tools:

• Cleaner — maintains polluted tiles using soot and water; toxic tiles require chemicals.
• Toxic Tile Scraper — a manual, labor-intensive way to clear toxic ground before chemicals are available.
• Landscaper — unlocks terraforming mode for reshaping terrain, clearing debris, and building paths up cliffs.
• Compost Heap and Tree Nursery — long-term fixes that restore fertility and spread atmosphere through forests.

One creative trick from gameplay footage: when your debris storage fills up during terraforming, you can dump excess debris into a tall pillar or use it to build a staircase road up a mountainside. It's ugly, but it works — and it opens up high ground for forests and future expansion.

Adjacency Bonuses: The Real Skill Ceiling

If there's one system that separates a functional colony from an efficient one, it's adjacency. Every building's info panel lists its adjacency effects on the left side, and they're rarely purely good.

The takeaway: don't chase every green number. Sometimes the "bonus" configuration costs you energy, storage, or clean air. Decide what each district is optimizing for — throughput, happiness, or sustainability — and place accordingly.

Logistics Settings Most Players Miss

Click the worker icon on any production building and you'll find fetch and delivery thresholds. You can tell a building to only request input when it's completely empty, half empty, or nearly empty, and to deliver output only when full or whenever it has any load. Tuning these reduces Peep walking time and smooths out supply chains — especially for slow producers like the sawmill.

Storage Sheds deserve similar attention. Each shed holds a maximum of 10 resource types and roughly 80 stored items, so dedicate sheds to specific roles: one for construction materials near your build sites, one for industrial byproducts near your factories.

Early Game Build Order That Actually Works

Based on tutorial flow and player-tested layouts, here's a reliable opening sequence:

1. Place five huts along a short road near your landing site.
2. Build two potato patches with a water pump adjacent to both.
3. Add a woodcutter beside a cluster of five or more trees.
4. Unlock and build stone and iron mines on their deposits, away from housing.
5. Place a burner generator adjacent to your ore smelter so power flows without lines.
6. Build the toolsmith next to the smelter to inherit shared power.
7. Add a storage shed near the town center and set it to hold wood, stone, iron, and sand.
8. Build a cleaner beside your industry before pollution complaints start.

Then expand housing to bring the remaining crew off the home spaceship — you start with 30 Peeps, and idle workers are wasted production.

Sandbox Options for Building Testers

If you want to experiment with layouts without grinding the tech tree, sandbox mode includes two toggles that change everything: Unlock All Buildings and Instant Construction. The latter lets you place structures immediately without consuming resources, which is ideal for prototyping adjacency-heavy districts or just building a gorgeous colony on Kewa's back.

Sandbox difficulty settings also let you slow or disable toxic tile generation, reduce pollution rates, and choose how many resources you get back when demolishing — useful if you're iterating on a layout and don't want to punish yourself for moving a smelter three tiles to the left.

Frequently Asked Questions