Beyond These Stars — Beginner & logistics guide

Peeps restore Energy and gain Happiness when they eat and drink. Different kinds of food and drink provide different amounts of Happiness. Café Meals and Café Drinks restore around 50% more Energy than standard food and drink.

Peeps will try to eat one food item and drink one drink item every time they finish a work shift. If they can only eat or only drink, they will do so, but this will restore only half as much Energy and provide less Happiness.

Peeps will eat and drink either at home or in a Café. If a Peep arrives home and there’s no food and drink available, they’ll go and get some if they can (and may be late to work if it takes a long time). However, Peeps will go to work hungry and/or thirsty if they are unable to access food and drink during a break.

To control what types of food and drink Peeps will store in their homes, select the "Food Storage" button in the Known Resources drop-down. Preventing Peeps from consuming particular food and drink items can help with building emergency food stores, or ensuring Peeps only consume the best possible food items available.

Peeps can gain and lose Happiness from a variety of sources, including: their workplace, the type of accommodation they live in, the food and drink they consume, Adjacency Effects, pollution, and more.

When Peeps are relaxing, which they do after eating and drinking on their break between shifts, they passively gain Happiness. Providing nice places for them to visit when relaxing, like decorative buildings, will raise their Happiness faster. Better food and drink, and other wellbeing-related items, can also help increase or maintain Happiness.

If more than 40% of your population is below a certain threshold of Happiness, they will decide to collectively strike. However, strikes will not occur in small populations (Demands are met. The Demands will appear as goals on the right of the screen and will usually be related to whatever was making the Peeps unhappy in the first place. For example, if they’re unhappy because of Toxic tiles, their demand might be that the Toxic tiles are cleaned up.

After a strike occurs, there is a cooldown period in which Peeps won’t strike again, even if they’re unhappy enough to do so. The cooldown period provides an opportunity to improve Happiness, preventing further strikes from occurring.

The Home Spaceship lands with an initial group of 30 Peeps. Peeps will have children if the accommodation building they live in is within a School's range and has empty Peep slots.
A School nearby some HutsAdult Peeps attempt to distribute themselves roughly equally among available accommodation buildings - meaning some will move out of a full building if an empty one is available. The spaces they free up that are in range of a School will then be filled by children!
Buildings that produce resources require all of their work slots to be filled to operate. Keeping track of population size in proportion to available work slots is an important aspect of keeping a settlement running smoothly. Empty work slots are displayed by default on the right-hand side of the Info Bar.

The resource economy in Beyond These Stars is complex, with many resources being consumed and/or produced by more than one building. Below are a few thing to try in order to solve issues with buildings or resource production:

- If the building is currently impacted by a status effect, there will be an alert on the relevant tab. It may also have an Info Pin displayed above it, indicating what the status effect is. Some status effects can be resolved directly, while others may require more complex solutions.

- Does the building have enough of all of its input resources? The solution may be increasing production of the input resource or reducing consumption of that resource in other areas.

- Does the building have output space to store the resource it produces? Increasing consumption of the output resource or constructing storage buildings to store the output may get the building running again. Running buildings simply for the sake of running them isn’t the best idea, though. Is the output resource actually needed?

- Is the building in the right location? Buildings will spend a lot of time waiting for resources to be moved around if it’s far away from related production buildings or storage. This may be the biggest culprit behind a building that seems much slower than it should be based on supply/demand.

- If the building uses Power, is it connected to a Power Grid? Power can flow between any neighboring buildings that use Power, so if many buildings are chained back to only a single generator, it may struggle to keep up with demand.

- Are Peeps on break between work shifts? Some buildings can continue to function without Peeps present, but most require a full set of workers to operate.

Many buildings produce more than one resource with each task. The primary resource is the main point of the building, e.g., the Woodcutter produces Wood as a primary resource, and the Burner Generator produces Power. Both of these buildings produce a By-Product resource as a consequence of making the primary resource (Wood Waste and Soot, respectively).

If the By-Product resource storage is full, the building will be unable to produce its primary resource, even if there’s space to store it. Temporarily putting By-Product resources into storage is a good idea if the building’s primary resource is in short supply, but in the long term, finding uses for everything produced will be vital to a settlement’s success.

Power is an unusual resource. Peeps can’t pick it up and move it. Instead, Power flows between any neighbouring buildings that make or use it. Buildings display their connections visually with wires.

Power is also unusual in that it can be wasted. Power generators can be set to continuously run for as long as they have inputs to use, and their by-product output storage is not full. If there is no more storage space for Power in the power grid of connected buildings, the excess Power will simply disappear- and the generator will keep running.

Generators can be configured from the Power Settings dialogue, accessed from the Work tab of any generator’s Info Card. The Power Settings dialogue also allows for configuring which generators should be given production priority and provides information on Power consumption, production and storage.

By default, generators only run when needed to help prevent excessive By-Product production. Setting generators to run continously ensures a steady flow of a useful By-Product.

Pollution is an unfortunate side effect of industry. Many buildings that produce crucial resources also produce some amount of Pollution at varying speeds. Pollution will collect on the tiles surrounding polluting building(s) and can degrade into a Toxic Area if not cleaned up.

Toxic Areas are created when a tile has remained at a High or Very High level of Pollution for fifteen minutes. Peeps will refuse to work in buildings that are on Toxic Areas and avoid gathering resources in the area. Toxic Areas can be dealt with using Toxic Tile Scrapers or Cleaners, but it’s better to avoid creating them in the first place, as they damage the Whale’s biome.

As you progress along the Technology tree, you will unlock the ability to place Cleaners that help manage Pollution as well as Toxic Areas. However, the Forests that grow on the Whale’s back also have the ability to slowly absorb any Pollution within 4 tiles. Strategically placing buildings and/or planting new Forests to leverage this quirk can be shockingly effective at managing Pollution.