Beyond These Stars First Look: Building a Civilization on a Space Whale
Our Beyond These Stars first look explores Balancing Monkey's space whale citybuilder — adjacency effects, pollution loops, tech trees, and sandbox tools.
What do you get when a citybuilder trades a flat map for the curved back of a giant space whale? This Beyond These Stars first look digs into Balancing Monkey Games' eco-citybuilder to find out — and the short answer is that yes, you really can build a civilization on a whale. The bigger question, and the reason this Beyond These Stars first look matters, is whether you can do it without smothering your new home in soot, slag, and regret. Launched on October 16, 2026 via publisher Hooded Horse, the game blends cozy colony building with a surprisingly sharp pollution-and-logistics brain.
Beyond These Stars at a Glance
Balancing Monkey Games is a small studio based in Aotearoa New Zealand — a team of roughly eight people, according to the preview footage — best known for Before We Leave, its cutesy 2021 colony builder published by Team17. Beyond These Stars is a semi-sequel that scales the concept up dramatically. Instead of a tiny spherical planet, your peeps now live on the back of Kewa, a colossal space whale wandering the galaxy in search of resources, trade, and answers.
The premise lands immediately thanks to a beautifully voice-acted intro: a species hunted by insatiable creatures retreats into deep bunkers, forgets its own history over quiet centuries, then finally follows its curiosity back to the stars. One early player compared the setup to Terry Pratchett's Discworld, except riding a whale instead of a turtle — and honestly, that's a fair shorthand.
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Developer | Balancing Monkey Games (New Zealand) |
| Publisher | Hooded Horse |
| Release date | October 16, 2026 |
| Genre | Eco-citybuilder / colony sim |
| Setting | The back of Kewa, a giant space whale |
| Modes | Story, Sandbox, custom scenarios, tutorial |
| Platform | PC (Steam) |
Beyond These Stars First Look: The Opening Hours
In this Beyond These Stars first look, the story mode doubles as a tutorial, easing you in with a home spaceship that shelters your starting crew of 30 peeps. Three begin outside; the rest wait for housing. Your first tasks are pure genre comfort food: place five huts, two potato patches, and a water pump, all connected by roads. Roads cost nothing to build, which encourages sprawling layouts — though longer paths mean longer travel times for your workers.
The camera deserves a shout-out. You get standard WASD movement, Q and E rotation, mouse-wheel zoom, and middle-mouse tilt, which matters here because the whale's back creates a gorgeous curved horizon. Zooming out reveals just how much buildable real estate Kewa offers.
| Step | Objective | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Build five huts, two potato patches, a water pump | Covers food, water, and shelter basics |
| 2 | Place a wood cutter near trees | Produces wood and unlocks the mine |
| 3 | Construct stone and iron mines | Feeds the ore smelter and toolsmith chains |
| 4 | Add a burner generator and ore smelter | First power and iron ingot production |
| 5 | Build a toolsmith | Produces tools and slag; unlocks the sawmill |
| 6 | House the remaining crew, add cleaner and storage shed | Full population housed; pollution control begins |
A few rough edges surfaced during this early hands-on session. There's no visible construction progress bar, so you never quite know how long a building needs. Peeps are tiny armless figures that are genuinely hard to click unless the game is paused. And building info cards can clip off-screen when you select something near the bottom edge. None of these break the experience, but they're worth knowing going in.
Adjacency Effects: The Real City-Planning Puzzle
The mechanical heart of Beyond These Stars is its adjacency system. Every building displays a list of effects triggered by its neighbors, and crucially, most pairings carry both a bonus and a penalty. This turns placement into a genuine puzzle rather than a rote checklist — you can't simply paint a grid and call it a city.
| Building Pairing | Positive Effect | Drawback |
|---|---|---|
| Hut next to two potato patches | +20% happiness | — |
| Three huts adjacent to each other | Increased housing capacity | Peeps suffer 20% less energy |
| Potato patch next to water pump | +20% production speed | — |
| Two potato patches together | +30% potato output | −20% speed |
| Wood cutter near five or more trees | +30% wood output | — |
| Wood cutter next to another wood cutter | — | −20% speed |
| Burner generator near four empty tiles | 25% less pollution | 20% slower production |
| Sawmill next to burner generator | +20% speed, less pollution | Higher power consumption |
The strategic takeaway from this first look: industry belongs on the barren outskirts, far from housing, and clustering identical buildings is usually a trap. Power adds another layer — electricity only transmits between directly adjacent buildings until you research power lines, so early energy networks demand careful chaining. The curved whale-back terrain makes all of this more interesting than it sounds, because every district bends around Kewa's spine.
Pollution, Byproducts, and the Closed-Loop Economy
Balancing Monkey has built its identity around environmental consequence, and it shows. Burn your wood, smelt your ore, or craft tools, and soot and slag start bleeding into nearby tiles. Polluted tiles slow production significantly, and ignored contamination eventually spawns toxic zones — the previewer was fielding pollution complaints within the first hour. The cleaner building vacuums up soot and slag, compost heaps recycle organic waste into fertilizer, and tree nurseries actively scrub the air.
What elevates the system is that waste is never just waste. According to a detailed community review shared on the game's Steam hub, byproducts chain into entirely new industries:
| Byproduct | Produced By | Later Use (Community Reports) |
|---|---|---|
| Soot | Ore smelter, wood burning | Ingredient for glass and steel |
| Slag | Toolsmith | Fuel plant converts slag and water into fuel |
| Goo | Fuel plant byproduct | Chemical factory turns goo and water into chemicals |
| Sludge | Fuel generator | Processed back into sand and water |
| Wood waste | Lumber production | Burned for power or composted |
That same community review highlights the philosophy underneath: debris dug from canals fills exhausted mines, and nothing disappears into the aether. Everything finds a second purpose. It's a closed-loop economy that makes the game's ecological message mechanical rather than preachy — you feel the interconnection because the systems force you to.
Tech Tree, Perks, and Late-Game Ambition
The technology tree spans eleven categories: accommodation, agriculture, peep resources, construction, power, terraforming, pathing, logistics, hazardous, advanced, and decoration. Unlocking works through production milestones rather than research points — produce five iron ore and the ore smelter opens; produce ten tools and the sawmill follows. Clicking unlock notifications jumps you straight to the relevant node, a small but thoughtful touch.
Every building you unlock also grants perk points, which you spend on a sprawling web of 154 interconnected peep perks. Basic nodes sit in the center — extra energy from food, reduced workplace sadness — while the edges hold more powerful effects. You chart your own path through the web, which adds a light RPG-flavored progression layer to the citybuilding.
The late game is where ambitions reveal themselves. Schools let your population grow naturally once housing thresholds are met. Fuel plants, spaceship builders, and space ports hint at expansion beyond Kewa, and radiation shielding reportedly grants access to the galaxy's mysterious central sector. Sandbox settings mention multiple discoverable planets and even additional space whales, so the fantasy clearly isn't staying on one back forever.
Story Mode vs. Sandbox: Pick Your Playstyle
| Feature | Story Mode | Sandbox |
|---|---|---|
| Narrative events | Yes, story beats throughout | No narrative events |
| Tech tree | Progressive unlocks | Optional — unlock all buildings |
| Pollution | Core challenge | Adjustable rate, or effectively off |
| Construction | Standard pacing | Instant construction toggle |
| Demolition refunds | Standard rules | Configurable: all, half, or none |
| Whales and planets | Fixed progression | Adjustable counts and difficulty |
The sandbox flexibility is genuinely generous. During this preview session, the toggles for unlock-all-buildings and instant construction were tested together: buildings placed instantly without consuming any resources, letting you spam a jeweler across the map purely for aesthetics. If you'd rather play properly — earning every tech, managing every resource — that path remains fully intact. Toxic tile generation can even be set to never, making sandbox a legitimate relaxation space rather than a lesser mode.
Early Verdict: Should You Board Kewa?
| Strengths | Considerations |
|---|---|
| Charming art style, hexagonal clouds, curved horizon | Small QoL gaps: no build progress bar, fiddly peep selection |
| Adjacency system creates real planning depth | Lighter than hardcore sims — no taxes or transit networks, per community reports |
| Closed-loop waste economy with genuine meaning | Mid-game shift toward shipping logistics may surprise genre veterans |
| Exceptionally flexible sandbox options | Preview build; final balance may differ slightly |
The early community response paints Beyond These Stars as something rarer than another efficiency simulator: a wholesome citybuilder about interconnectedness, where your starting settlement becomes one spoke in a web of trade and shipping lanes. Players describe zooming in at day's end to watch peeps gather in parks and cafes while Kewa sings alongside them — one reviewer called it "the perfect hug from an alien." If you enjoyed Surviving Mars or Before We Leave, or you want a citybuilder with an ecological conscience, this belongs on your wishlist. You can find full details and system requirements on the official Beyond These Stars Steam page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Beyond These Stars a sequel to Before We Leave? It's best described as a semi-sequel from the same New Zealand studio. It carries over the peeps, the eco themes, and the curved-world charm, but moves the action from a tiny planet to a traveling space whale and adds deeper logistics and production chains.
Can you actually build a full civilization on the back of a space whale? Yes. This Beyond These Stars first look confirmed you start with 30 peeps and a home spaceship, then expand across Kewa's back with housing, farms, mines, and industry. Late-game tech like spaceship builders and space ports suggests your civilization eventually spreads to other planets and whales.
Is Beyond These Stars beginner-friendly for citybuilder newcomers? Very much so. The story mode functions as a structured tutorial that introduces one system at a time, roads are free to build, and sandbox mode lets you disable pollution entirely or unlock everything for pressure-free experimentation.
What makes Beyond These Stars different from other colony builders? Three things stand out: the adjacency system that penalizes careless clustering, a closed-loop economy where waste byproducts like soot, slag, and goo become raw materials for new industries, and the sheer novelty of planning a city around a living whale's curved spine.