Beyond These Stars Beginner Guide: First Colony Tips

So you've landed a crew of Peeps on the back of a sentient space whale and you're not sure where to start. This Beyond These Stars beginner guide walks you through the first hours of your colony — roads, resource chains, pollution, perks, and keeping Kewa healthy — so your settlement survives its first orbital jump instead of collapsing into toxic sludge.

The game, developed by Balancing Monkey Games and published by Hooded Horse, launched on October 16, 2026 at $29.99 (currently 20% off during the launch window, per the official Steam page). It's a cozy hex-grid colony builder, but the twist is real: every factory you place affects the living whale beneath your feet. If you want a smooth first run, treat this Beyond These Stars beginner guide as your pre-flight checklist.

Check out comprehensive guide for more details.

Start With the Tutorial, Then Pick Your Mode

The main menu offers three paths: story mode, sandbox mode, and custom scenarios. For your first playthrough, run the tutorial inside story mode — it unlocks mechanics in a sensible order and walks you through the first tech tree steps.

Sandbox difficulty settings are surprisingly granular. You can set toxic tile generation speed to "never," lower the pollution rate, and choose how many resources you get back when demolishing. If you want to learn the systems without pressure, sandbox is a perfectly valid training ground before you commit to a story run.

Build Roads First, Everything Else Second

Roads are the backbone of your colony. Peeps travel along them to reach jobs, resources, and services, and unconnected buildings simply won't function. Before you place a single farm or workshop, sketch a simple road spine down the middle of your starting plateau and branch off it.

A few road rules worth internalizing early:

• Keep paths short. Long detours waste Peep time and slow your whole economy.
• Connect production to storage. A mine with no road to a warehouse is dead weight.
• Leave room to expand. Don't wall yourself in — future buildings will need access.

Buildings adjacent to roads also benefit from adjacency bonuses, so road layout doubles as an efficiency decision.

Chase Adjacency Bonuses

Adjacency is where a beginner colony turns into a thriving one. Certain buildings gain output boosts when placed next to compatible structures. Stacking these bonuses is the single biggest multiplier on your early economy.

Common patterns to look for:

• Group similar production buildings together so they share bonus ranges.
• Place housing near service buildings to keep Peeps happy.
• Keep polluting industry away from residences and food production.

Hover over any building's info panel to see exactly which neighbors grant bonuses. Plan clusters rather than scattering buildings randomly — a tidy district outperforms a sprawl every time.

Watch Pollution Like a Hawk

This is the mechanic that separates Beyond These Stars from a generic colony builder. Pollution doesn't just hurt your Peeps — it seeps into Kewa, the whale you're living on. High pollution spawns toxic tiles, damages the whale's health, and can cascade into colony-wide problems.

Practical pollution control for beginners:

1. Zone industry away from housing and farms. Create a dedicated industrial corner.
2. Prioritize early cleaning tech. Unlock pollution-reducing buildings as soon as they appear in the tech tree.
3. Check the whale's health regularly. The health readout is your early-warning system.
4. Don't overbuild. Every extra factory adds pollution — build what you need, not everything you can.

If toxic tiles start spreading, treat it as urgent. Left unchecked, they eat into buildable land and force expensive cleanup later.

Spend Perks Deliberately

Perks are your progression currency for colony-wide upgrades. Beginners often spread them thin, but you'll get more mileage from focusing on a couple of core needs first: food stability and pollution control.

• Take food and production perks early to stabilize your economy.
• Grab pollution-reduction perks before your industry scales up.
• Save niche or late-game perks until your basics are covered.

There's no single "correct" perk path, but a stable colony always beats a specialized one that starves or chokes on smog.

Terraforming and Whale Care

Terraforming lets you reshape the terrain on Kewa's back, opening new land for expansion and improving conditions for your colony. Use it to reclaim toxic tiles and extend your buildable footprint — but remember that terraforming interacts with the whale's wellbeing. Aggressive reshaping has costs.

Whale care is the long game. Keep pollution low, monitor Kewa's health, and respond to any warning signs before they snowball. A healthy whale means a stable home; a sick one means a colony on a ticking clock. Treat Kewa as a resource to protect, not a platform to exploit.

Your First-Hour Checklist

If you only remember one thing from this Beyond These Stars beginner guide, make it this sequence:

1. Play the tutorial in story mode.
2. Lay a road spine before building anything else.
3. Cluster buildings for adjacency bonuses.
4. Zone industry away from homes and farms.
5. Unlock pollution control early.
6. Spend perks on food and pollution first.
7. Watch Kewa's health every few minutes.

Follow that order and your first colony will survive its first orbital jump — and you'll have a foundation worth building on for the rest of the game.