Beyond These Stars Buildings: A Practical Overview

Beyond These Stars is a city builder about raising a settlement on the back of a space whale, so "buildings" here means housing, production chains, power, pollution control, and the landscaping tools that keep the whale's back habitable. There is no published building list yet: the official Steam store page describes building systems and priorities rather than individual structures, and the developer's launch-week notes on the Steam Community hub only touch buildings in passing. What follows is a practical overview drawn from those pages and from what players have been reporting since the 16 October 2026 release.

The short answer

Plan your layout around land contours and adjacency, expect to move buildings rather than bulldoze them, and treat power and pollution as two separate ranges you have to look at when you place a generator. Beyond that, the specific building names and costs are something you learn in-game or from the developer's Beginner's Guide.

Layout, adjacency and terraforming

The store page frames the early game as a planning problem: you work around the contours of the land, weigh where production chains sit relative to each other, and decide whether to simply place buildings where the ground allows or reshape the ground itself for adjacency bonuses and shorter travel times. Terraforming is part of the building toolkit — digging canals, adding top soil for farming, and planting trees both for raw materials and to maintain forests that spread the atmosphere and let the city expand. If you enjoy the landscaping side, our city building overview goes deeper into that loop.

Moving buildings

Buildings can be relocated. The 17 October 2026 hotfix notes on the Steam Community hub fixed a case where a building being moved could get blocked if the Peeps fetching resources for the move cancelled their action — for example because their home was demolished or covered in Toxic. Two practical takeaways: a move has a resource-fetching step performed by your Peeps, and Toxic contamination can interrupt work. If you are rearranging a district, it is worth clearing contamination and making sure workers have somewhere to live before you queue up moves.

Power generators: two ranges, not one

The same hotfix changed the range line shown when you select a Power Generator so that it displays the generator's power range instead of its pollution range. That tells you generators have both, and that the overlay you see depends on what the game chooses to draw. When you are placing one, think about who needs the power coverage and who you would rather not blanket in pollution.

Pollution, cleaning and compost

A launch-day review describes experimenting heavily with mines, metal smelting and electricity, then having citizens clean up a large area of toxic waste. Players on the Steam Community hub are discussing two routes for dealing with that: cleaners, or planting trees and managing pollution that way. One thread reports landscapers not performing composting jobs, which blocks the tree-planting approach because compost is the input, and describes the composter as very slow. Our cleaners page collects what players have found about the cleaning side.

Supply problems players hit early

• Soot. A player thread reports spending long stretches waiting on soot. Many buildings want it, but the things that produce it — burners and ore smelters — also flood you with iron and copper, so running them hard creates a surplus you may not want before chemicals are unlocked.
• Housing upgrades. A player asked whether huts can be upgraded to houses in place or must be bulldozed and rebuilt, suggesting an upgrade button in the hut tooltip. As of 2026-10-17, the official Steam page and the developer's hotfix notes do not describe a hut-to-house upgrade, so the question appears to still be open.
• "No power connections." One player reported a burner generator and an adjacent ore smelter both complaining about power connections, with no obvious way to link them, blocking tutorial progress. The thread had no visible answer, so this is unresolved rather than a known fix. If you hit the same message, the conditional things worth checking first are whether the buildings actually fall inside the generator's power range (select the generator and read the range line) and whether the generator itself has fuel and workers — but treat that as a checklist, not a confirmed solution.

Outposts and expansion

Buildings are not confined to Kewa. The store page describes creating outposts on nearby planets to supplement resources the whale's back cannot provide, with the caveat that unless your relationship with Kewa is strong, it is hard to predict how long you have at an outpost before Kewa moves on. Outpost construction is therefore a logistics decision as much as a building one.

Where to learn more

The developer's Beginner's Guide, linked from the Steam Community hub, covers settlement building and management basics, Peep and Kewa care, terraforming, technology and perks. For building-specific chatter, the hub's discussions are the liveliest place to see what other players are currently stuck on.