Beyond These Stars Resources: Full Supply Chain Guide

Building a colony on the back of a space whale sounds cozy until your toolsmith stalls for lack of wood planks and your ore smelter drowns the neighborhood in soot. Understanding Beyond These Stars resources is the difference between a thriving settlement on Kewa and a toxic wasteland full of striking Peeps. Every good you extract, refine, or waste has a downstream consequence, and the game rarely spells those consequences out for you.

This guide breaks down the full resource web: what you gather, what you refine, which byproducts clog your warehouses, and how to keep pollution from eating your buildable land. Whether you're in the tutorial or pushing deep into the tech tree, these are the numbers and habits that keep supply chains moving.

Check out beginner guide for more details.

The Core Resources You Start With

Your home spaceship acts as a slow, automatic trickle of basic goods, which means you're never fully stranded — but you're also never fast enough. According to a first-look playthrough of the release build, the ship steadily produces water, potatoes, wood, iron, stone, and tools on its own. That trickle is a safety net, not a strategy.

The starting resource bar shows only a handful of icons, but clicking any one of them opens a dropdown of every resource currently tracked in your colony. New players miss this constantly — there are far more goods than the four or five displayed.

Adjacency Bonuses: Where Resources Are Actually Made

Placement is the single biggest multiplier on your resource output, and it cuts both ways. Every building's info panel lists its adjacency effects before you place it, and many of them trade a bonus for a penalty. A potato patch next to a water pump gains 20% speed; two potato patches side by side lose 20% speed but gain 30% extra potatoes. A woodcutter beside five or more trees gains 30% wood, while a second woodcutter next door slows it by 20%.

A few adjacency rules worth memorizing:

• Huts gain 20% happiness when adjacent to two potato patches, but three huts in a row cram in more Peeps at 20% less energy each.
• Burner generators produce 25% less pollution when surrounded by four empty tiles — but also run 20% slower.
• Sawmills placed next to a burner generator gain 20% speed with reduced pollution, at the cost of higher power draw.
• Toolsmiths emit heavy pollution from slag, so keep them on barren ground away from housing.

The takeaway: not every adjacency is a bonus. Sometimes the smarter play is accepting a small penalty to avoid a worse one.

Power, Pollution, and the Oxygen Bubble

Power transmission is positional. Buildings receive electricity only when directly adjacent to a powered building or generator — later, power lines remove that restriction. That yellow outline around a generator shows its supply radius, and hotfix #1 on Steam changed the displayed line to show power range rather than pollution range, which confused a lot of early players.

Pollution is the resource nobody wants but everyone produces. Heavily polluted tiles can turn toxic, and toxic tiles shut down any factory standing on them. Cleaners scrub soot and slag from nearby ground, and tree planting plus composting slowly restores fertility. The blue and purple boundary you see on the map marks the edge of breathable air — nothing can be built outside it until terraforming expands the bubble.

Community members on the Steam forums have flagged that the composter is slow and that landscapers sometimes ignore composting jobs — worth planning around rather than relying on as your only cleanup.

Storage Sheds and Logistics Settings

Storage is where most colonies quietly break. A basic storage shed holds a maximum of 80 items across no more than 10 different resource types, with 20 units per resource slot. You can edit exactly what a shed accepts from its work tab, and doing so deliberately — wood and planks near construction sites, soot near industry — prevents overflow chaos.

Each production building also has logistics toggles for when it fetches inputs and when it ships outputs. You can set a building to pull resources only when completely empty, half empty, or nearly empty, and to deliver only when full or whenever there's any load. These settings matter more than most players realize:

• Fetch late on expensive recipes so Peeps aren't hauling inputs that sit idle.
• Deliver always on byproducts like soot and slag so they don't back up and halt production.
• Pause or reprioritize any building from its info card when a chain stalls.

The resources flow graph in the location summary shows exactly where every good is moving, which is the fastest way to diagnose a stalled line.

Byproducts: The Hidden Resource Problem

The most common mid-game wall isn't a lack of iron — it's a lack of soot. A widely discussed player experience thread on Steam notes that soot was overproduced in the demo but is now scarce, forcing players to run extra burners and smelters and flood themselves with unwanted iron and copper just to feed soot-hungry buildings.

The fix is to treat byproducts as first-class resources:

• Soot feeds chemical recipes later in the tree; bank it early.
• Slag converts to fuel at the fuel plant, which produces goo as a byproduct.
• Goo plus water becomes chemicals at the chemical factory.
• Wood waste burns in burner generators for power.
• Sludge from fuel generators is another waste stream to manage.

This cascade — waste becoming input — is the core design loop deeper in the tech tree. Plan your industrial district so each byproduct has a consumer nearby, and you'll avoid the storage-full shutdown that halts entire chains.

Depleting Mines and Expanding Beyond Kewa

Mined resources are finite. Once a deposit runs dry, you must build a new mine elsewhere, which means scouting terrain and extending roads before you actually need the ore. Roads are free to build, but longer routes slow every delivery, so compact layouts beat sprawling ones.

Eventually the tech tree opens spaceship construction, a space port, and outposts on other planets. The official Steam store page describes outposts as a way to supplement scarce resources — but how long Kewa lingers in a system depends on your relationship with the whale, so over-exploiting your host has consequences. Keeping Kewa happy is itself a resource management problem.

Sandbox Settings That Change Resource Rules

If you want to experiment without the pressure, sandbox mode exposes difficulty toggles that directly affect resource flow. From the menu you can adjust toxic tile generation speed (even disabling it), lower pollution rates, choose how much you get back when demolishing a building (all, half, or none), and boost starting resources.

The two headline options sit at the bottom: Unlock All Buildings skips the tech tree entirely, and Instant Construction places buildings immediately. In testing, instant construction let players spam expensive structures like jewelers without consuming materials — a pure creative mode for building a beautiful colony on the whale's back.

Practical Resource Tips for New Colonists

A few habits separate smooth colonies from imploding saves:

1. Build five huts early to house the full 30-Peep crew — idle housing blocks population growth.
2. Place industry on barren tiles so slag and soot pollution doesn't touch homes.
3. Set storage sheds deliberately rather than accepting everything by default.
4. Watch the resources flow graph when a building shows "missing input."
5. Unlock buildings the moment requirements are met — perk points come from unlocks, and perks can patch shortages.
6. Don't expand past your food and water — the most common failure is overbuilding before supply chains stabilize.

For official basics, the developer's beginner's guide on Steam covers settlement management, Peeps, and Kewa care. You can also check the official Balancing Monkey Games site for patch notes.

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