Beyond These Stars Beginner Guide: Your First Hours

Beyond These Stars is a colony city-builder about raising a settlement on the back of a space whale, and the quickest way in is to treat the opening as a guided story rather than a sandbox: follow the tutorial questline, keep the settlement small and stable, and don't scale industry before you can deal with its waste. The closest thing to an official primer is the Steam guide Beyond These Stars Beginner's Guide, posted by Hooded Horse's Antony and promoted in the Steam Community hub — it covers settlement building and management, caring for your Peeps and Kewa, terraforming, technology and perks. What follows is a practical orientation for the first few hours, drawn from the official Steam listing and player posts and reviews in that hub, rather than a full walkthrough.

Start with the questline, not the tech tree

The tutorial is structured as a questline, and early progress is gated behind it. One player's early account — a review posted on 2026-10-16 after about 45 minutes of play — describes working through the tutorial, following the story, building a first school and looking after roughly 50 Peeps, with the perk list and tech tree still mostly untouched. That is a useful pace to aim for: expand when a quest or a need pushes you forward, not because the build menu is open.

A playtester who reviewed the 1.0 release describes the result as a cosy, story-driven exploration and settlement game rather than a worker-shuffling optimisation puzzle, and says the early game was rebalanced after the demo to be friendlier. If you bounce off colony sims that demand constant job-slot micromanagement, that player's experience suggests this one is not asking for it.

Build around the land, then reshape it

The official Steam page sets out the intended loop: you arrive on a largely barren patch of Kewa with a small green area by the water, and you're meant to plan around the contours of the land — weighing plain placement against terraforming for adjacency bonuses and shorter travel times. Terraforming is the mid-game answer to a cramped start: digging canals and adding top soil prepares ground for farming, and planting trees gives you a renewable raw-material flow while forests help spread the atmosphere and let the city expand. Treat the early layout as provisional, because you will be reshaping it.

The two bottlenecks new players run into

Soot. A discussion thread in the Steam Community hub, "Not Enough Soot", describes a player waiting on soot production because many buildings want it while few of the buildings they actually want produce it — and notes that running burners and ore smelters hard enough to fix the shortage floods them with iron and copper instead. Before you commit to a big industrial block, check what your supply chain is actually short of; that thread is a player's report rather than a solved formula, and the answers in it are worth reading rather than guessing.

Pollution and toxic waste. The same over-building instinct bites in a second way. The reviewer mentioned above describes industrialising too enthusiastically with mines, metal smelting and electricity, then leaving the Peeps to clean up a large toxic area. Separately, a player reported that landscapers were not performing composting jobs, leaving the composter alone unable to keep up with pollution — a report with no confirmed fix in the thread as of 2026-10-17. The safe beginner habit is to expand heavy industry in steps and watch the ground around it, not to build the whole ore-to-power chain at once.

Keep Kewa on side

Kewa is not scenery. The official page describes a relationship system: understanding the whale's needs and desires builds a symbiotic relationship, and that relationship affects how predictable your time at an outpost is — without a strong bond, you may not know how long you have in a system before Kewa moves on. Outposts on nearby planets are how you cover resource gaps without over-exploiting Kewa's fragile surface, and alien species you meet along the way offer objectives, trade and new technologies. Practically: spread extraction across outposts, and don't treat the whale as an infinite quarry.

If something looks stuck

A player in the hub reported being blocked at a tutorial step requiring power: a burner generator and an adjacent ore smelter both complained about missing power connections, and no obvious way to link them was found. That thread shows no confirmed resolution as of 2026-10-17, so treat the following as general suggestions rather than tested fixes — confirm both buildings are actually placed and connected rather than merely adjacent, check whether the step expects a specific building, and if the quest still won't advance, ask in the Steam Community hub or the game's Discord, which the developer links from the store page.

Two things worth knowing before you conclude the game is buggy: the first hotfix, released 2026-10-17, fixed buildings getting blocked when Peeps cancel a move action and changed the range line on a selected Power Generator to show power range instead of pollution range. If your build predates that patch, updating is a reasonable first step.

A smaller open question: a hub thread asks whether huts can be upgraded to houses without bulldozing and rebuilding each time, and requests an upgrade button. As of 2026-10-17 that thread has no reply on the page, so plan housing layouts with rebuilding in mind.

Version, platform and setup notes

Beyond These Stars left early access as version 1.0 on 2026-10-16, developed by Balancing Monkey Games and published by Hooded Horse, with a demo still available on Steam. The official Steam page marks it Steam Deck Playable and lists accessibility options including adjustable difficulty, save anytime, adjustable text size, a mouse-only option and no required quick-time events — all useful if you want a slower first run. As of 2026-10-17, the official Steam page lists only Windows system requirements and does not list a console version.

For more on the same game, see the general guide, the walkthrough, tips and the space whale explainer.