Beyond These Stars Wiki

City Building

Plan districts along the contours of Kewa: adjacency bonuses, travel time, power coverage ranges, housing, bridges, elevators and the decoration tricks that keep Peeps content.

20+

Key Buildings

Adjacency / Power / Commute

Core Pressures

Finite

Plate

On This Page:Introduction·Core Building Quick Reference·Building Roles at a Glance·Core Mechanics·Advantages·Challenges·FAQ·Quick Tips·Articles·Explore More

Introduction

Building on Kewa is a negotiation with someone else’s shoulders. The plate is not a convenient flat grid: it has contours, slopes and a finite surface, and the buildings you place on it consume land you can only recover by terraforming. Two rules shape almost every layout decision. The first is adjacency — putting the right buildings next to each other produces bonuses, so a compact district with the correct neighbours outperforms the same buildings scattered across open ground. The second is travel time, because your Peeps walk between the places they live, work and eat, and every extra tile of distance is working time taken out of the day. Power works the same way: a Power Generator draws its coverage range when you select it, so a generator placed for aesthetics rather than coverage leaves buildings dark. Get those three ideas right and the rest of the city is bookkeeping; get them wrong and you will spend the mid game demolishing a settlement you were proud of.

Core Building Quick Reference

Building	Purpose	Stage	Placement Note
Home Spaceship	Produces the basics your first Peeps need while the real economy is being built	Start	Your initial anchor; everything early radiates from it
Hut	Housing, and the simplest way to keep happiness from bleeding away	Start	One bed per Peep matters before any production does
Garden	Early food production close to where Peeps actually live	Start	Short walking distance to housing cuts wasted shift time
Water Pump	Supplies water to the settlement	Start	Place near housing and gardens, not on the industrial edge
Storage Shed	Buffers resources between production stages	Early	One buffer per chain stage reveals bottlenecks earlier than one big store
Power Generator	Supplies power in a visible coverage range	Early	Select it and read the range line before you commit the placement
Burner	Burns wood as fuel for early heat and processing	Early	Keep it downwind of housing to limit pollution on residential tiles
Bridge	Crosses forest and water so a district is not split in two	Mid	Use it to shorten commutes rather than to reach new ground
Elevator	Moves Peeps between elevation levels	Mid	The answer to building on the whale’s steep contours

Building Roles at a Glance

Home Spaceship

Starting anchor

What It DoesIt slowly produces what your earliest Peeps need, which means the colony can exist before a real supply chain does. You are not racing a clock in the opening minutes because of it.

How To Use ItTreat its output as a bridge rather than a target. Keep building housing, food and water while it carries the load, then let it fade into irrelevance once your own production takes over.

Common MistakeAssuming it scales. It does not, and a settlement that leans on it into the second hour will stall the moment its output stops covering a growing population.

Role In PlanningBecause it is your first fixed point, its position effectively decides where your first district goes. Give it room to become a hub rather than a corner.

Hut

Housing baseline

Why It Ranks HighestA Peep without a bed is an unhappy Peep, and unhappy Peeps stop working and eventually strike. Housing is therefore production infrastructure that happens to look residential.

PlacementCluster huts near gardens and water so daily needs are a short walk apart. A beautiful settlement with a long commute loses shift time on every single cycle.

Growth RhythmAdd housing just ahead of population rather than behind it, so new Peeps always land in a bed. Retro-fitting housing after a strike has already cost you the production you were chasing.

InteractionsHousing sits inside the pollution question too: industry near residential tiles drags happiness down, so the distance between the two is a layout decision with a stat attached.

Power Generator

Coverage logistics

The MechanismBuildings need power, and the generator shows a range line the moment you select it. That line, not the icon, is the placement guide you should be reading.

Why It Confuses PeopleCoverage is spatial rather than global, so a generator placed correctly by eye can still leave a building outside its radius. Players asking how to figure out power requirements in the first days were usually looking for a number that does not exist.

Pattern That WorksGroup power-hungry production tightly and let one generator serve a compact block, then repeat that block rather than stretching a single generator across a wide footprint.

Mid-Game ShiftAs districts multiply, power stops being a per-building question and becomes a district topology question — which is where bridges and elevators start paying for themselves.

Storage Shed

Buffer and diagnosis

What It DoesIt buffers resources between production stages, smoothing the small timing mismatches that otherwise idle buildings waiting on deliveries.

Diagnostic ValueA buffer per stage turns a stalled factory into a readable problem: whichever shed empties first is adjacent to the real shortage, so you stop guessing which of six inputs ran out.

Placement RulePut the shed where the transport happens, not at the end of the line. A single warehouse near your space port tells you nothing about an internal bottleneck.

ScalingOnce chains span outposts, buffers also absorb the multi-minute gaps that interstellar shipping introduces, which is the difference between a supply line and a stalled one.

Bridge & Elevator

Terrain tools

BridgeCrosses forest and water so a district is not physically split. Its real value is shortening commutes and merging production blocks that would otherwise need duplicate infrastructure.

ElevatorMoves Peeps between elevation levels, which matters more here than in a flat-grid builder because the whale’s contours are genuinely uneven.

When To SpendThese are mid-game tools. Building them early eats resources you need for housing, but delaying them too long forces you into flat, sprawling layouts that waste the plate.

Layout ConsequenceTogether they let you think in three dimensions, stacking functions on adjacent levels instead of spreading them across the ground — which is often the only way to get adjacency and commute time both under control.

Garden & Water Pump

Daily needs

What They DoThe Garden produces early food and the Water Pump supplies the settlement, together covering the two needs that come up before any production chain exists at all.

Placement RuleBoth belong beside housing, not on the industrial edge. A garden half a district away from the Peeps who eat from it is a commute disguised as a building.

Failure ShapeFood and water shortages do not look like shortages. They look like unhappy Peeps and a fall in output, which is why players often chase a production problem that is really a placement one.

InteractionsBoth sit inside the pollution question, because industry sited near housing degrades exactly the tiles these buildings need to be close to. Keep the two zones apart from the start.

Burner

Early fuel

What It DoesThe Burner turns wood into fuel for early heat and processing, which makes it the bridge between your first forestry and a working production chain.

Placement CareBurning things is dirty. Siting the Burner downwind of housing limits how much of the pollution it produces lands on residential tiles, where it would cost happiness rather than throughput.

Supply LinkIt runs on wood, so a Burner without a maintained forest behind it is a building that will stall the moment your extraction rhythm slips.

TransitionAs your economy advances you will want cleaner and higher-output power, which is where the Power Generator and its coverage range take over. The Burner is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Space Port & Ship Builder

Off-world bridge

What They DoThe Space Ship Builder unlocks ship construction and the Space Port acts as the interstellar shipping hub, together enabling outposts and multi-planet supply.

When To BuildMid game, when Kewa’s plate can no longer supply what your factories want. Building earlier spends resources on logistics capacity you have no cargo for yet.

Layout NoteSite the port where your internal production traffic already converges, so cargo changes hands near the buffers and chains that need it rather than across the settlement.

RiskOnce an outpost route is load-bearing, voyage time becomes a production constraint. Keep a storage buffer on each side so shipping latency does not idle factories on either world.

Decoration & Beauty

Happiness shaping

What It DoesPeeps gain happiness when they relax, eat, drink and spend time near decorative buildings, so beauty is not cosmetic here — it is a small, continuous happiness trickle.

Why It MattersBecause happiness is an input to output, decorations effectively raise productivity. That makes them cheaper than the extra housing or the extra strike recovery they prevent.

PlacementPut them where Peeps already spend idle time, along the routes they walk and around the housing they return to, rather than in a decorative corner nobody visits.

InteractionsDecoration competes for the same tiles as production, so the useful question is not whether to build it but which district benefits most from a small happiness cushion.

Core Mechanics

The building layer runs on three spatial systems that interact constantly. Adjacency bonuses reward putting complementary buildings next to each other, which pushes toward compactness. Travel time punishes distance, which pushes toward the same compactness for a different reason. Power coverage is radial, which pushes toward clustering consumers into blocks a single generator can serve. Stack all three and the optimal shape of a settlement becomes obvious: tight multi-purpose districts, each one self-sufficient in power and food, connected to the next by short, walkable routes. What complicates it is terrain. Kewa’s back is not flat, so some of those districts sit at different elevations and need bridges or elevators to stay connected, and the plate is finite, so expansion eventually means reclaiming land through terraforming rather than simply building outward. Housing then becomes the pacing mechanism, because a growing population needs beds before it needs jobs, and unhappy Peeps without beds will stop working on the very buildings you are trying to finish.

Advantages

What the building system does unusually well is expose its own rules. The Power Generator draws its coverage range on selection, adjacency effects are visible in the layout rather than buried in a menu, and the terrain contours actually matter because bridges and elevators exist as answers to them. That means planning decisions are readable in advance rather than discovered by failure. The second advantage is that layout keeps paying off. Because adjacency, commute time and power coverage all reward the same compactness, a well-planned district compounds: fewer generators, shorter walks, fewer duplicate services, and more plate left for the next block. The third is that decorations are functional. Happiness from beauty feeds into output, so a settlement that looks organised is also measurably more productive, which is a rare bit of alignment between the aesthetic and the mechanical case for a design choice.

Challenges

The friction is front-loaded. Power coverage is the single most common point of confusion in the launch window, and the game does not hand you a requirements figure to plan against — you read the range line and learn by placing. Resource management menus carry a lot of small numbers, and reviewers in the first days explicitly asked for more streamlining there. There is also no direct way to assign a particular Peep to a particular job, so workforce problems often have to be solved with buildings and travel distances rather than by micromanagement. Finally the plate is finite and terraforming is the only way to extend it, which means a layout mistake made in the first hour is not merely inefficient — it can lock you into reclaiming ground you should have left alone, at the cost of the biome that keeps Kewa healthy.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the power system actually work?+

Power is spatial rather than global. Buildings need to be inside a generator’s coverage area, and the generator displays that range as a line the moment you select it, so the reliable method is to place a generator, look at the range, and adjust before you commit. Because coverage is finite, clustering power-hungry buildings into a compact block and giving each block its own generator works far better than stretching one generator across a wide settlement. This was the most common early question from launch-window players, and the answer is that there is no requirements figure to look up — coverage is something you read off the placement preview.

What is the best city layout in Beyond These Stars?+

There is no single canonical layout, but three pressures all point the same direction. Adjacency bonuses reward putting complementary buildings next to each other, travel time rewards short commutes between housing, food and work, and power coverage rewards clustering consumers into blocks one generator can serve. A settlement that keeps each district compact, walkable and self-sufficient in power and food will outperform a spread-out one on every metric. Terrain then decides the local shape: on steep sections you will want elevators and bridges to keep districts connected rather than duplicating services on each level. Sandbox Mode lets you flatten or roughen the terrain before you start, which is the fastest way to test a layout idea.

Can I terraform the land or am I stuck with the terrain?+

You can reshape it, and the game expects you to. Digging canals, laying top soil and planting forests are all ways of converting rough ground into land that carries crops, forests or housing, and expanding your buildable area generally means doing some of that work. The catch is that the ecosystem is fragile: over-exploit the plate and your habitat shrinks rather than grows. The developers frame the whole system as a fragile equilibrium, and they explicitly describe keeping the ecosystem intact and mining elsewhere as a legitimate alternative strategy. So terraforming is a tool with a cost, not a free upgrade to your map.

Why are my Peeps unhappy even though they have jobs?+

Happiness is driven by far more than employment. Peeps gain happiness when they relax, eat, drink and spend time near decorative buildings, and they lose it while working, while crossing polluted or toxic ground, and while living without a bed of their own. So the usual causes of a gloomy colony are homeless Peeps, industry sited next to housing, long commutes that leave no time for rest, and a shortage of the small pleasures that decorations supply. Because happiness feeds productivity directly, the fix is usually a layout fix — move the pollution, shorten the walk, add the decoration — rather than an economic one.

Quick Tips

💡

Give every Peep a bed before you chase any output at all. Homeless Peeps drag happiness down and push the colony toward a strike, and a strike halts the production lines you just spent resources building. Housing is not the reward for a working economy, it is the precondition for one, and retro-fitting beds after the walkout has already cost you the output you were chasing.

💡

Group power-hungry buildings into a compact block and give that block its own generator, rather than siting one generator to serve a scattered settlement. Coverage is radial, so a tight cluster converts a single generator into many powered buildings, while a sprawling layout silently leaves consumers outside the range line.

💡

One storage buffer per production stage beats a single large warehouse at the end of the line. When a chain stalls, the buffer that empties first tells you exactly which input ran short, which turns an afternoon of guessing into a single glance at the layout rather than a tour of six buildings.

💡

Use bridges and elevators to shorten commutes rather than to unlock new ground. The plate is finite either way, and a settlement that keeps housing, food and work within a short walk gets more effective labour out of every Peep than one that expands outward and quietly pays for the extra distance in travel time.

💡

Site polluting industry away from the districts you plan to expand into later. Contamination and toxic tiles cost happiness immediately and occupy buildable ground permanently, so a placement decision made in the first hour can quietly remove a district you were counting on twenty hours later, and cleaning polluted ground costs more than siting it correctly in the first place.

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Explore More

⛓️

Production Chains

Tiered goods, power and storage laid out end to end — research unlocks, composting loops, bottleneck diagnosis and multi-planet supply chains that never stall.

👥

Peeps

Happiness, energy, shifts and the strike system explained: stop walkouts early, trigger Fairground celebrations, treat sickness at the Apothecary and manage mourning.

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Guides

Beginner walkthroughs, opening-hour checklists, research order and Steam Deck setup for Beyond These Stars — everything a new Peep colony needs to survive its first shifts.

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