Beyond These Stars Storage Guide — Sheds & Logistics

Storing resources in Beyond These Stars isn't just about building a warehouse and forgetting about it — it's about controlling the flow of every potato, plank, and iron ingot across a living space whale. If you've ever watched a builder sit idle because the sawmill was hogging all the wood, you already know why this matters.

This Beyond These Stars storage guide breaks down how storage sheds work, what their hard limits are, how to allocate resources per building, and the fetch/delivery settings that quietly decide whether your colony thrives or stalls. Everything here is based on the 1.0 release and hands-on player experience with the tutorial and sandbox modes.

Check out beginner guide for more details.

Why Storage Is the Hidden Backbone of Your Colony

In Beyond These Stars, your Peeps live on the back of Kewa, a sentient space whale. Space is tight, resources are finite, and every building competes for the same supply chains. The game's own store description emphasizes "intricate supply chains" and a "fragile equilibrium" — and storage is where that equilibrium is won or lost.

A few core facts shape everything:

• Your starting home spaceship slowly produces water, potatoes, wood, iron, stone, and tools on its own.
• Buildings only work when materials physically reach them.
• Pollution and toxic tiles can shrink your usable land, so you can't just sprawl storage everywhere.
• Resources flow through roads, and longer roads mean longer travel times for your Peeps.

That means storage isn't a "nice to have" — it's the buffer that keeps production chains from starving each other.

Storage Sheds: The Basics

The storage shed unlocks in the Logistics branch of the technology tree. It's the workhorse of early and mid-game storage, and it has strict limits you need to plan around.

The key takeaway: 80 items total, split across no more than 10 resource types, with 20 items per slot. You cannot dump everything into one shed and call it a day. If you fill all 10 slots with different resources, each slot caps at 8 items — so choose your allocation deliberately.

Community reports note that storage sheds are best placed close to where construction happens. A shed next to your building boom keeps materials flowing; one stranded across the whale just adds travel time.

How to Edit Stored Resources

You can change what a storage shed accepts from its Work tab info card. Click the shed, open the work tab, and toggle which resources it should hold. This is the single most underused tool for new players.

Practical allocation ideas:

• Construction hub shed: wood, stone, iron ingots, tools
• Food shed: potatoes, water, and later processed food/drink
• Industry shed: soot, slag, and ore near your smelters
• Overflow shed: whatever your main sheds can't hold

Mix and match based on what your colony is actually short on. The game even hints that small storage allocations help construction run smoothly or gather resources for future builds.

Fetch and Delivery Thresholds Explained

This is the mechanic most players miss. On production buildings, you can set when Peeps fetch input resources and when they deliver output. The options typically include:

• Fetch only when completely empty
• Fetch when nearly empty
• Fetch when half empty
• Fetch at any amount of empty

And for output:

• Deliver only when full
• Deliver whenever there's any load
• Stop delivering entirely

Why does this matter? A burner generator that only fetches wood when completely empty will sit idle during the fetch trip. Setting it to fetch when half empty keeps it running continuously. Meanwhile, a building that delivers output "whenever there's any load" floods your roads with tiny trips — sometimes you want it to batch up and deliver when full.

Power, Adjacency, and Storage Penalties

Storage isn't isolated — it's affected by where you place buildings. A clear example from the tutorial: placing a second ore smelter next to another one reduces the storage of iron, power, and soot by 30% on that building, while also reducing the worker slots. That's a real storage penalty hiding inside an adjacency effect.

Other adjacency notes worth knowing:

• Two potato patches next to each other lose 20% speed but gain 30% potato output.
• A wood cutter next to five or more trees gains 30% wood; next to another wood cutter, it loses 20% speed.
• A burner generator near four empty tiles produces 25% less pollution but runs 20% slower.

Always read the left-hand adjacency panel before placing a building. Some "bonuses" are actually trade-offs that affect how much your buildings can hold and how fast they fill.

Power Transmission and Storage Layout

Power in Beyond These Stars travels through directly adjacent buildings. That yellow outline around a power generator shows its range. Later, power lines unlock and let you transmit power without stacking buildings side by side — which frees up your storage layout considerably.

Until you get power lines, plan your industrial zone as a connected block: generator touching smelter touching toolsmith. Keep storage sheds on the outer edge of that block so they don't break the power chain but still sit close enough to feed it.

Player tip: Build your dirty industry (smelters, toolsmiths) on bare, non-breathable tiles away from housing, and put storage for soot and slag nearby. This keeps pollution away from Peeps while shortening delivery routes.

Managing Byproducts: Soot, Slag, and Goo

Storage problems in Beyond These Stars often come from byproducts, not raw materials. Smelters produce soot, toolsmiths produce slag, and later fuel plants produce goo. Community threads on Steam note that soot in particular became scarce after release — many buildings need it, but few things you want to build produce it.

How to handle byproduct storage:

• Dedicate a storage shed near your industry to soot and slag.
• Use burner generators to burn excess wood waste for power instead of storing it.
• Route slag into fuel plants later in the tech tree to convert it into fuel.
• Don't over-allocate slots to byproducts you can't use yet — you'll waste the 10-slot limit.

If you're drowning in soot but starving for it elsewhere, check your fetch thresholds. Sometimes the problem isn't production — it's that the soot is sitting in a shed nobody's pulling from.

Sandbox Storage Testing

If you want to experiment freely, sandbox mode offers options that make storage testing painless. You can unlock all buildings from the start and enable instant construction, letting you place storage sheds and production buildings without consuming resources.

Use sandbox to test:

• How many sheds you need to sustain a full industrial chain
• Whether a fetch threshold change fixes a bottleneck
• Optimal shed placement relative to roads and power

The sandbox also lets you adjust pollution rates and toxic tile generation — useful if you want to see how storage layout holds up under heavy industry without the environmental pressure.

Common Storage Mistakes to Avoid

Based on player experience and the tutorial flow, here are the traps that trip up new colony managers:

1. Overloading one shed. Ten resource types max means you must split storage across multiple sheds.
2. Ignoring fetch thresholds. Default settings often cause idle time you can fix in seconds.
3. Building sheds far from construction. Travel time eats into your build speed.
4. Forgetting road connections. Storage sheds need a road link to function.
5. Storing byproducts you can't use. Soot and slag eat slots that could hold iron or tools.
6. Breaking power chains with storage. Don't wedge a shed between a generator and its consumer.

Fix these and your colony's supply chain will feel dramatically smoother — which matters a lot on a whale where space and breathable tiles are limited.

Quick Reference: Storage Setup Checklist

For official updates and patch notes on storage and logistics tweaks, check the Beyond These Stars Steam community hub, where the developers post hotfixes and beginner resources.

Final Thoughts

Storage in Beyond These Stars is deceptively simple on the surface — build a shed, fill it up — but the real skill is in allocation and flow control. Between the 80-item cap, the 10-resource limit, fetch thresholds, and adjacency penalties, there's plenty of depth to master. Get these systems right and your Peeps will keep Kewa humming all the way across the galaxy.