Beyond These Stars drops you onto the back of Kewa, a sentient Space Whale, with almost nothing in your inventory. The single most important structure you inherit is the Home Spaceship, because it quietly produces the first trickle of supplies that lets your Peeps survive their opening shifts. Understanding what this ship does, how its storage shed is organized, and how the early Power Generator plugs into the same starter economy decides whether your colony grows or stalls before the Spaceship Builder even opens.
This guide walks through the Home Spaceship's role in your first in-game hours, the storage shed layout that ships with it, the way Power Generator coverage shapes the next building you place, and the priority order for your opening construction queue. Everything below is grounded in the the developer's official site and the developer's own space ships developer diary, both verified as of the October 2026 1.0 launch.
What the Home Spaceship Produces for You
The Home Spaceship is the upgraded starter vessel your Peeps arrive on, and it is the only ship that can touch down on Kewa without a pre-built Landing Pad. According to the studio's own developer diary on space ships, the Home Spaceship is "an upgraded Home Spaceship that trades its resource production for larger storage and a Landing Pad attachment so it can act as a Space Port" once you convert it into the Settlement Ship. That conversion is the moment your starter economy hands off to a proper Space Port, so the first few in-game hours revolve entirely around squeezing value out of the ship before the upgrade.
Core Functions on Day One
The Home Spaceship is responsible for three early-game jobs that no other building handles at the start of a Beyond These Stars run. During the opening shifts it doubles as a passive power generator trickle (the same role later replaced by dedicated Power buildings), a starter storage shed, and the only structure that can be flagged into a Landing Pad for your first Space Port — which is why nothing else in the colonist roster can substitute for it until you unlock upgrades.
-
Slow passive production of starter resources while your Peeps are still figuring out their shifts
-
A built-in storage shed that holds everything the ship produces plus what your Peeps gather
-
A Landing Pad attachment that becomes the foundation of your first Space Port
These three functions are bundled into one structure because the studio wanted new players to spend the opening hour learning shifts, happiness, and hunger rather than juggling production chains. The trade-off is that the Home Spaceship is not a long-term building: the moment you can afford to upgrade it, you should.
| Function | What It Means in Practice | Why It Matters Early |
|---|---|---|
| Passive resource output | Small but steady trickle of basic items | Keeps Peeps fed and sheltered before the Kitchen is up |
| Storage shed | Acts as a global drop-off for the settlement | Avoids item loss while your first research-unlocked storage buildings are going up |
| Landing Pad attachment | Lets ships dock once you flag it as a Space Port | Required before any Trade Ship or Scout Ship can visit |
Why the Ship Is Also Your First Space Port
The studio's own framing is unusually direct: the Home Spaceship is the only ship that can land on Kewa without a Landing Pad, and once landed it cannot take off again until you build at least one Space Port in the area. That detail is important because it tells you the ship is a temporary object on Kewa's back. It will spend the rest of the game as a Space Port hub, not as a flying vessel.
Players who treat the Home Spaceship as a permanent building tend to run out of space by the time Trade Ships start arriving, because the ship's storage is finite and does not scale with population. Moving your stockpiles into dedicated, research-unlocked storage the moment it unlocks is the cleanest fix.
The Home Spaceship Storage Shed Explained
The storage shed bundled with the Home Spaceship is the single most generous early-game storage container in Beyond These Stars. It accepts every resource your Peeps produce or gather, and it has enough room to cover a settlement of roughly 15-25 Peeps before bottlenecks start appearing. The developer has not published the exact slot count, so treat those numbers as a player estimate from the launch window rather than an official figure.
How the Storage Shed Differs From Later Storage Buildings
The opening storage shed is intentionally forgiving so that new players do not lose resources to a full inventory during their first real shift. Compared to the storage buildings you can unlock later in the technology tree, the shed has a softer hand on organization and a harder cap on capacity.
| Storage Feature | Home Spaceship Shed | Research-Unlocked Storage Buildings |
|---|---|---|
| Accepts all resource types | Yes | Depends on the storage building and your research |
| Capacity | Fixed, generous for the opening hours | Scales with upgrades and adjacency |
| Stacking behavior | Loose stacks, forgiving sorting | Tighter rules, encourages zoning |
| Upgrade path | None, replaced when you build dedicated storage | Multiple tiers in the technology tree |
| Best use window | First 1-2 in-game hours | Long-term, after research unlocks |
Treat the home spaceship shed as a stepping stone rather than a permanent hub; once a dedicated storage building from the research tree is unlocked, reroute your haulers to the new structure so the shed's fixed, generous capacity stops bottlenecking your supply lines. Leaving it as a passive overflow buffer for surplus hauler loads preserves its early-game forgiveness without sacrificing the tighter stacking and zoning rules a purpose-built storage building applies to specific resource types.
What the Shed Holds and What It Does Not
The Home Spaceship shed accepts every starter resource the game ships with: Wood, Water, top soil, potatoes, and the byproducts like Food Waste and Wood Waste. It also accepts Clothing, Soup, and the more advanced goods you unlock through research. It does not act as a Smelter-type processing buffer, because the developer has confirmed that stone and ore deposits are intentionally absent from the game, so there is no smelting chain to feed.
If you are wondering whether the shed can be used to stockpile goods for an Outpost mission, the answer is yes, but only as overflow. Dedicated storage near a Space Port is the long-term answer once research unlocks it. The second pillar of your opening hour is the Power Generator, which is the building that turns your settlement from a cluster of inert structures into a functioning mini-grid. The Hotfix #1 patch notes specifically called out that the Power Generator's range line now shows Power range instead of Pollution range, which confirms two things at once: range is the central stat to track, and pollution is a related but separate system.
Power Generator, Power Range, and the First Power Grid
How the Power Generator Covers Your Settlement
The Power Generator emits a circular radius of coverage, and any building placed inside that radius counts as powered. Buildings outside the radius still operate but with severe efficiency penalties, which is why your first hour of layout decisions tends to revolve around where the generator sits relative to the Home Spaceship.
| Power Stat | Behavior | Player Implication |
|---|---|---|
| Range radius | Fixed per generator tier | Place near the densest cluster of starter buildings |
| Pollution output | Grows with tier | Offset with Cleaner buildings and Tree Nursery zones |
| Upkeep | Burns Wood once toggled to that fuel | Plan Wood production before flipping the generator on |
| Coverage overlap | Multiple generators do not stack range | Spread them across the settlement, do not cluster |
The studio's developer diary on terraforming and biome health (Dev Blog #29) makes it clear that planting trees and minimizing pollution are the two main ways to keep the biome healthy, so the Power Generator's pollution footprint is something to plan for from the moment you place it.
Reading the Power Range Indicator
After Hotfix #1, the line drawn around an active Power Generator now shows the true power radius rather than the pollution radius. If you are reading older screenshots or videos from before the patch, expect the line to look larger or smaller than it should. When in doubt, hover the building and read the tooltip rather than trusting the visual ring.
| Indicator | What It Showed Before Hotfix #1 | What It Shows After |
|---|---|---|
| Outer ring | Pollution radius | Power range |
| Inner ring | Power range | n/a |
| Tooltip on hover | Power range | Power range (unchanged) |
For players still running a pre-Hotfix #1 layout they copied from a launch-week guide, the visible ring is effectively a lie: what looked like the power range was actually the pollution radius, so any Power Generator placed to "just barely" cover a Storage Shed or Home Spaceship module will now leave that consumer starving for power. Treat the tooltip as the source of truth, cross-check it against the updated table, and rebuild your power grid before trusting screenshots older than the patch.
What to Build First After the Home Spaceship Lands
The opening hour of Beyond These Stars rewards a specific build order, because the technology tree opens incrementally and your Peeps can only work so many shifts at once. The community-recommended opening sequence, gathered from the developer's own Official Beginner's Guide and confirmed by launch-week players, looks like this.
Priority Order for the First Ten Buildings
| Build Order | Structure | Why It Comes Now |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kitchen | Turns potatoes and Water into Soup, the first stable food source |
| 2 | Pasture | Source of Wool and the only way to add Cows or Sheep to the colony |
| 3 | Apothecary | Heals sick Peeps before Sickness cascades through the workforce |
| 4 | Burner | A controllable Wood sink that doubles as a power alternative |
| 5 | Cleaner | Mixes Water and Chemicals to combat Pollution early |
| 6 | Trawler | Adds Shell income from the nearby water, diversifies your economy |
| 7 | Tree Nursery | Long-term hedge against Pollution and biome damage |
| 8 | Fairground | Triggers Celebrations once happiness is high enough |
| 9 | Composting | Recycles Food Waste back into useful inputs |
| 10 | Space Port dedicated hub | Frees the Home Spaceship from acting as a dock |
The order above assumes the Home Spaceship is already producing at least one Food output and you are not under immediate Peep starvation, in which case the Kitchen jumps to the top of the table regardless of any other priority. If your Peeps are hungry, queueing a Pasture, Apothecary, or even a Space Port is wasteful, because a starving workforce cannot staff them, happiness crashes, and Sickness spreads through any colony that tries to build past step 1 without Soup in the bellies first. Always check the population's hunger meter and current Soup stockpile before committing resources to a later building, and only resume the standard ten-building sequence once Food is stable again.
What to Skip Until Research Unlocks It
There is a category of building that launch-week players tend to chase because of forum speculation, but the developer has not confirmed them as official structures. Specifically, no "smelter", "electronics plant", or "advanced alloy chain" exists in the verified building list. Likewise, the per-tile yield and "ore mining" mechanics that other city builders feature are deliberately not part of Beyond These Stars.
| Often-Requested Feature | Status in Beyond These Stars | What To Do Instead |
|---|---|---|
| Ore mining | Intentionally absent (developer statement) | Treat Wood and Shell as your main raw inputs |
| Smelter-type processing | Not in the verified building list | Rely on Kitchen, Weaver, and Tailor for chains |
| Rocket Assembly chain | Not in the verified building list | The Spaceship Builder covers ship production |
| Procedural galaxy | Not confirmed in official posts | Treat the Galaxy Map nodes as fixed until patched |
If you are coming from Before We Leave, the studio's previous city builder, the absence of stone and ore chains will feel strange. The developer has stated that the lack of stone and ore deposits is intentional, so plan your economy around Wood, Water, Shell, and the byproducts of your food chain rather than around mined goods.
Managing the Settlement Ship Handoff
The Home Spaceship is designed to be temporary. Once you have a Space Port hub and a Landing Pad or two, the studio's developer diary explains that the ship is upgraded into the Settlement Ship, which trades its resource production for larger storage and the ability to act as a Space Port. That handoff is a significant moment, so it deserves its own checklist.
Step-by-Step Settlement Ship Handoff
-
Confirm at least one Space Port is built in the area before triggering the upgrade. The Home Spaceship cannot take off again without a Space Port present.
-
Move stockpiled goods from the Home Spaceship shed into dedicated, research-unlocked storage. The Settlement Ship's larger storage is meant for long-term goods, not the day-to-day churn of starter resources.
-
Designate a Landing Pad on the Space Port for the Settlement Ship to dock at. The ship itself is one of the few vessels that can dock without a dedicated Landing Pad, but the Space Port still needs a slot free.
-
Plan a Scout Ship mission with Jose, who is the named character aboard the early Scout Ship, to identify a settleable planet. The Settlement Ship is what carries your Peeps to that planet, and it is the only ship that can land without a Landing Pad on the new world.
-
Build a Landing Pad on the target planet before the Settlement Ship arrives. Without a pad, the ship cannot unload your colonists and you will have to send a Trade Ship back to fetch them.
Common Mistakes During the Handoff
The most common launch-week mistake is upgrading the Home Spaceship before building a Space Port, which leaves your settlement without a working dock until the new structure finishes. The second most common mistake is sending the Settlement Ship to an unidentified node on the Galaxy Map, which the developer describes as partially visible at first and unlocking over time through Scout Ship investigations.
| Mistake | Consequence | Safer Alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Upgrading without a Space Port | Ships cannot dock, supply chain stalls | Always build the Space Port first |
| Sending the Settlement Ship blind | Arrives at a barren planet or a space junk node | Scout the node with Jose first |
| Leaving goods in the upgraded ship | Storage fills with overflow, slows haulers | Move goods to dedicated storage pre-handoff |
| Skipping a Landing Pad on the new planet | Colonists cannot disembark | Build at least one pad on the target world |
The handoff is the cleanest moment to review your city layout guide because the new Space Port hub will become the gravitational center of your settlement's next phase. Once the Settlement Ship docks and the Home Spaceship upgrades, the Space Port's adjacent Landing Pads, Trade Terminal, and Storage Shed placement dictate hauler route efficiency for the rest of the run, so re-checking storage adjacency, power generator coverage, and pad orientation before colonist disembarkment prevents the cascading stalls the table above flags — particularly the supply chain freeze that hits when docks sit empty during the upgrade window.
Power Management and Long-Term Stability
The Power Generator is the part of the opening hour that compounds the most, because a well-placed generator covers the next three buildings you place without you having to think about it, while a poorly placed one forces a relayout the moment you add a fourth. The opening hour is the cheapest time to fix that, and it is the most expensive time to ignore it.
Power Coverage Patterns That Work
These three coverage patterns emerged from the launch-week community on Reddit and the official Discord, where players running the Home Spaceship map compared Power Generator placements across compact, medium, and late-game settlement footprints; the patterns differ in upkeep cost, pollution spread, and how well they tolerate the expanding radius demands of research buildings and Storage Sheds feeding the central workshop.
| Pattern | Best For | Trade-Off |
|---|---|---|
| Single central generator | Compact opening settlement, 10-20 Peeps | One pollution hotspot, easy to defend with a Cleaner |
| Twin generators on the settlement spine | Medium settlement, 20-40 Peeps | Higher Wood upkeep, smoother coverage |
| Distributed micro-generators | Large settlement with research buildings | More upkeep overhead, more redundancy |
For a brand-new settlement, the single central generator is the right default. It keeps pollution in one zone, lets you place a Cleaner and a Tree Nursery nearby, and matches the radius of the early-game buildings you are likely to queue.
What "How to Get Power" Actually Means in This Game
Players who search for how to get power in Beyond These Stars are usually looking for two things: how to fuel the generator, and how to extend its range. Fuel is the easier question, because the Burner can be set to consume Wood, and your opening Wood income is enough to keep a single generator running for the first session. Range extension is the harder question, because the developer has not published a research-gated range upgrade, and the Hotfix #1 notes make it clear the range line is the source of truth rather than a separate stat.
If you need more coverage, the only verified method is to place a second Power Generator in a new zone. Do not expect to slot in a "range extender" building, because no such structure appears in the verified building list.
Storage Shed vs. Dedicated Storage: When to Switch
The storage shed that ships with the Home Spaceship is generous enough for the first session, but it does not scale. Once your Peep count passes roughly 25, the shed starts to choke your haulers, because every shift they spend moving goods into a near-full shed is a shift they do not spend on production.
Comparing Storage Options
| Storage Type | Capacity Shape | Best Use Window | Upgrade Path |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Spaceship shed | Fixed, large early, tight late | First 1-2 in-game hours | None, replaced by dedicated storage |
| First storage upgrade | Moderate, scales with adjacency | Mid-game, post-research | Multiple tiers in the technology tree |
| Second storage upgrade | High, accepts advanced goods | Late-game | Further research |
| Space Port buffer | Specialized, holds trade goods | During Trade Ship cycles | Linked to Space Port upgrades |
The cleanest transition is to build your first dedicated storage next to the Home Spaceship, move the most frequently used resources there, and leave the shed handling overflow. This pattern keeps haulers short and keeps your most important inputs close to the buildings that consume them.
What the Shed Is Best at Holding
Even after you unlock dedicated storage, the Home Spaceship shed has a niche: it is a good place to park goods that are about to leave the settlement, such as advanced goods waiting for a Trade Ship or surplus Food Waste waiting for the Composting building to process it. Holding on to that role, rather than treating the shed as a passive storage box, is what separates a smooth opening from a stalled one.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Home Spaceship do in Beyond These Stars?
The Home Spaceship is your starter vessel on Kewa's back, and it slowly produces the basic resources your first Peeps need, hosts the opening storage shed, and carries a Landing Pad attachment so it can act as a Space Port once you upgrade it. It is the only ship that can land on Kewa without a pre-built Landing Pad.
How do I get power in Beyond These Stars early on?
Build a Power Generator near the densest cluster of starter buildings, fuel it with Wood through a nearby Burner, and check the range line after Hotfix #1 to confirm the true coverage radius. A single generator is enough for the opening settlement of 10-20 Peeps.
Is the storage shed the same as the larger storage buildings?
No. The storage shed bundled with the Home Spaceship is a forgiving starter container with a fixed capacity and no upgrade path, while the larger storage buildings unlocked through research scale with adjacency bonuses. Switch to that dedicated storage as soon as the technology tree unlocks it.
Can the Home Spaceship take off again after it lands?
No. Once the Home Spaceship lands on Kewa it cannot take off until you build at least one Space Port in the area, and after the upgrade it becomes the Settlement Ship that carries your Peeps to a new planet. It is effectively a permanent structure on Kewa's back.
When should I build a Power Generator versus a Cleaner?
Place the Power Generator first so your starter buildings can operate at full efficiency, then build a Cleaner in the same zone to start offsetting the generator's pollution. Pairing the two is the cleanest opening pattern, and it lines up with the best buildings guide for early-game efficiency.