Beyond These Stars Difficulty Settings Explained (2026)

Building a city on the back of a space whale sounds cozy — until your industrial district starts poisoning Kewa. That's why understanding Beyond These Stars difficulty settings matters before you click "New Game." The game gives you far more control than a simple easy/normal/hard slider, and the choices you make in the setup menu shape how punishing pollution, toxic tiles, and expansion really are.

This guide breaks down every option found in the New Game and Sandbox menus, explains what each toggle actually changes, and recommends configurations for first-timers, veterans, and players who just want to build a pretty colony without micromanaging soot.

Check out comprehensive guide for more details.

Where to Find Difficulty Settings in Beyond These Stars

When you start a new game, you're presented with three broad modes: the story-driven campaign (with an optional tutorial), sandbox, and custom scenarios. The difficulty options live inside the New Game flow and the sandbox setup screen, and you can also change the starting planet seed and your game name there.

One important note from the community: a launch hotfix addressed a bug where the Tutorial checkbox would turn itself back on if you disabled it and then visited the Difficulty Settings screen. If you're on the current patch, that behavior is fixed — but it's worth double-checking the tutorial toggle before you finalize your setup.

The table below summarizes what each setup area controls.

The Core Difficulty Options and What They Change

The most consequential settings sit in the difficulty panel. Based on a hands-on first-look preview and player reports, here's what each one does.

Pollution Rate

Everything you build on Kewa affects the environment. Burner generators, ore smelters, toolsmiths, and other industry produce soot, slag, and pollution that spreads across nearby hexes. The pollution rate setting lets you dial that spread up or down — and in sandbox you can turn it "right down" if you want a cleaner experience.

This matters because heavily polluted tiles reduce production speed significantly, and letting pollution pile up can spawn toxic areas that shrink your usable habitat.

Toxic Tile Generation Speed

Toxic tiles are the long-term consequence of ignoring pollution. In the difficulty options you can adjust how quickly they generate — including setting the speed to never, which effectively removes the toxic-terrain threat entirely. For a relaxed, cozy playthrough, this is the single most impactful toggle on the screen.

Demolition Resources

When you demolish a building, this setting determines your refund:

Starting Resources and Repair Costs

You can grant yourself extra starting resources, and you can adjust how many resources repairs consume. These are subtle knobs, but on a harder run they force you to plan supply chains carefully rather than brute-forcing your way through shortages.

Unlock All Buildings and Instant Construction

These two sandbox toggles sit at the bottom of the difficulty options and completely transform the experience:

• Unlock All Buildings — the entire tech tree is available from turn one, so you never have to meet production thresholds to unlock the next tier.
• Instant Construction — buildings appear the moment you place them. In testing, players confirmed that instant construction lets you place even expensive structures like a jeweler without consuming resources, meaning you can freely experiment with layouts.

If you want to see the late-game tech tree — spaceship builders, space ports, hydroponics gardens, fairgrounds, and the mysterious "radius" building that permits access to the galaxy's central sector — these toggles are the fastest way to get there.

Recommended Difficulty Setups by Playstyle

Here's how to configure Beyond These Stars difficulty settings depending on what you want out of the game. These recommendations are based on the mechanics observed in preview builds and community discussion, not an official difficulty guide.

For First-Timers

Leave everything on default and keep the tutorial enabled. The campaign walks you through roads, water pumps, potato patches, huts, and the tech tree step by step. You'll learn adjacency effects — like potato patches gaining 20% speed next to a water pump but losing speed when placed beside each other — without the pressure of a harsh ecosystem.

For Cozy Players

Turn toxic tile generation to never and drop the pollution rate. Community reviewers describe the game as genuinely cozy when played this way, and one early reviewer noted that pollution is "so easily removed and repurposed" that it barely registers as a threat on standard settings.

For Players Wanting a Real Challenge

Here's the honest caveat: multiple players report that the game trends easy. One negative Steam review argued that "changing to a higher difficulty isn't going to change this, because it's just objectively too easy to expand." Another community thread specifically asked whether the game offers genuine challenge comparable to Timberborn's drought management.

If you want friction, stack the odds against yourself: raise pollution rates, speed up toxic tiles, set demolition refunds to none, and skip the starting resource bonus. It won't reinvent the challenge, but it will make your first industrial district a genuine planning problem.

How Difficulty Interacts With Core Mechanics

Difficulty settings don't exist in a vacuum — they amplify systems you'll interact with constantly.

Adjacency Effects and Pollution Placement

Every building shows a list of adjacency effects before you place it. A burner generator surrounded by four empty tiles produces 25% less pollution per cycle but runs 20% slower. A toolsmith generates significant pollution because it outputs slag. Smart players deliberately zone industry onto barren tiles away from housing, exactly as you'd separate industrial and residential districts in Surviving Mars.

Higher pollution settings make this zoning mandatory rather than optional.

The Cleaner and Compost Loop

The cleaner building scrubs soot and slag from nearby tiles, and it's typically your first pollution answer. Later, compost heaps recycle wood waste and organic byproducts into compost that restores barren tiles to fertility, and tree nurseries help spread atmosphere while reducing pollution.

One community report warns that landscapers sometimes fail to perform composting jobs, and the composter is slow — so on higher pollution settings, don't rely on compost alone. Build cleaners early.

Terraforming and the Landscaper

The landscaper lets you dig canals and raise hills, reshaping Kewa's terrain. One critical review called the landscaping feature "overpowered" — so if you want terrain to remain a constraint, consider self-imposed limits on how much you flatten.

Sandbox Mode: The Full Customization Menu

Sandbox is where Beyond These Stars difficulty settings become a true toolkit. Beyond the difficulty panel, you can also choose how many planets you'll encounter, and it appears there may be multiple space whales to discover. Custom scenarios offer additional setup options for players who want hand-crafted starting conditions.

The trade-off is narrative: sandbox removes the story events and quest prompts that appear in campaign mode. If you want the plot about the Peeps, Kewa, and the aliens you meet along the way, play the story mode — just know that its difficulty settings are more limited than sandbox's.

For a full feature overview, see the official Beyond These Stars Steam page, which also hosts the developer's Beginner's Guide covering building, Peeps, Kewa, terraforming, technology, and perks.

Quick Tips for Tuning Your Run

• Check the tutorial toggle last. Visit difficulty settings first, then confirm the tutorial checkbox before starting.
• Set toxic tiles to never if you hate losing buildable land. It's the cleanest way to keep your habitat from shrinking.
• Keep demolition refunds on "all" while learning. Layout mistakes are inevitable with adjacency bonuses this intricate.
• Use instant construction to scout the tech tree. Place late-game buildings in a throwaway sandbox save to see what they do before committing in a real run.
• Reroll your seed if terrain is cramped. Preview players noted some seeds leave awkward gaps near key resources like iron and stone.

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