Beyond These Stars Connect Power Guide: Fix Buildings With No Electricity

Nothing stalls a young colony on the back of a space whale faster than buildings that refuse to work. In Beyond These Stars, connect power correctly and your mines, ore smelters, and toolsmiths hum along; get it wrong and production grinds to a halt while your Peeps wander around idle. The catch is that electricity behaves differently here than in most colony builders: early on, power only flows between buildings that sit directly next to one another. This guide breaks down exactly how to connect power in Beyond These Stars, why your buildings show no electricity, and the fixes for every common power problem players have run into since the game launched on October 16, 2026, from developer Balancing Monkey Games and publisher Hooded Horse.

How Power Works in Beyond These Stars

Power is a special resource that certain buildings consume to do their jobs. According to the community wiki, it is generated by the Home Spaceship or produced at a Burner Generator, and it is used by most production buildings — mines, ore smelters, toolsmiths, and similar structures. Without power, these buildings simply cannot produce resources, no matter how many workers you assign to them.

One quirk catches almost every newcomer: power cannot be stored in a Warehouse. Unlike potatoes or iron ingots, you can't stockpile electricity for later. If your output dips overnight or between shifts, the solution is more generation capacity, not more storage.

The tutorial treats power production as a tracked milestone, too — producing 20 power unlocks the hedge garden and wildflowers, and every building you unlock along the way earns perk points you can spend elsewhere.

How to Connect Power in Beyond These Stars, Step by Step

The core rule is adjacency. When you select or place a generator, a yellow outline appears around it showing its power range — the tiles directly touching the building. Anything placed inside that outline receives electricity. Anything outside it doesn't, no matter how close it looks on screen.

Before you connect power, make sure the generator itself is set up properly. A freshly built Burner Generator produces nothing until you tell it what to burn.

By default, power stops at the first building. It does not pass through. That changes with a specific perk — buildings that are receiving power can supply it to other buildings — which effectively lets you chain a grid across several structures. The tutorial even tells you to place the toolsmith next to the ore smelter to see this in action once you've claimed the perk.

Common Power Problems and How to Fix Them

Most "my game is broken" reports around electricity come down to one of the issues below. Run down this table before you tear up your roads.

If you can't connect power to a building on the far side of the whale, don't panic — adjacency-only transmission is the intended early-game constraint, not a bug. Power lines, found deeper in the tech tree, exist precisely so you eventually don't need buildings touching each other.

A note on that last table row: pollution is a core tension in this game. Preview coverage and community reports highlight a useful generator adjacency effect — with four nearby empty tiles, a Burner Generator creates 25% less pollution per cycle, at the cost of 20% slower production. Placing generators on the barren edge of your buildable area pays off later, when soot and slag start spreading. The cleaner building, unlocked a bit further into the story, removes soot and slag from tiles before they can spawn toxic areas.

Perks and Technologies That Change the Rules

Early on, adjacency is the whole game. Later, several unlocks rewrite how you connect power entirely. Every building you unlock earns a perk point, and the perk web contains 154 perks in total per preview builds — the ones near the center are basic, while outer-edge perks are more powerful.

The fuel plant pairing is worth flagging for troubleshooting purposes: it gives slag — the pollutant byproduct from toolsmiths — somewhere to go by converting it into fuel your generator can burn. Community reports from early playthroughs describe this as the moment industrial colonies stop fighting their own waste stream.

Layout Tips for a Reliable Power Grid

Planning beats repair work. Roads are free in Beyond These Stars, so there's no cost to sketching out an industrial district before you commit — and that's the cleanest way to connect power across a growing colony.

• Cluster your industry. Keep the Burner Generator, ore smelter, and toolsmith adjacent so one generator serves several consumers.
• Respect adjacency trade-offs. Many adjacency effects bundle a bonus with a penalty, so don't chase every positive effect blindly.
• Build generators on empty tiles. The four-empty-tile pollution reduction matters a lot in heavily industrial zones.
• Keep power infrastructure away from housing. Soot and slag tank happiness and can spawn toxic areas if ignored.
• Leave gaps for power lines. Once researched, they free you from adjacency, so leave a corridor through your colony.
• Watch the resources flow graph. The location summary shows where resources are flowing, which helps you spot bottlenecks before buildings go dark.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I connect power in Beyond These Stars? Place a power-producing building — the Home Spaceship generates some power, and the Burner Generator is your first dedicated source — then put the building you want to power directly adjacent to it. A yellow outline shows the powered tiles. To reach buildings farther away, unlock the perk that lets powered buildings supply other buildings, or research power lines.

Why is my Burner Generator not producing electricity? Three usual culprits: no fuel type is enabled in its production controls, no Peeps are assigned to work it, or it hasn't finished construction. Click the building, enable wood and/or wood waste, check for red staffing icons, and give it priority if your builders are stretched thin.

Can I store power in a Warehouse? No. Per the community wiki, power cannot be stored in a Warehouse. Treat it as a flow, not a stockpile — if demand exceeds supply, add generation capacity rather than trying to bank electricity.

Does the Home Spaceship need to be connected to the grid? The Home Spaceship is a power source, not just another building, so you don't need to wire anything into it. Player experience suggests treating its output as a starter supply while you work toward your first Burner Generator and a proper industrial district.