Beyond These Stars sandbox mode: Settings, Free Building, and Setup Guide

Explore Beyond These Stars sandbox mode settings, including building unlocks, instant construction, pollution controls, and suggested setups.

2026-10-17Beyond These Stars Wiki

What Beyond These Stars Sandbox Mode Offers

Build a city on a space whale with every building available from the start. Beyond These Stars sandbox mode offers settings that can remove technology progression and construction delays, giving you more freedom to experiment with a colony layout. Choosing those settings carefully lets you focus on creative building or keep the resource management challenge.

The supplied evidence for sandbox options comes from player experience in the Beyond These Stars first-look video and sandbox demonstration. Its creator identifies the game as a preview build, so the menu options and construction behavior described here are observations from that build rather than independently verified current mechanics.

The most useful finding comes near the end of the video: the creator enables Unlock all buildings and Instant construction, then places several jewelers without construction waiting times or material consumption. Earlier speculation about an infinite-resources option is replaced by this more specific demonstration.

Sandbox also supports a progression-focused approach. According to the same player experience, you can leave those shortcuts disabled and continue gathering resources and unlocking technology as your colony develops.

The official Beyond These Stars description on Steam establishes the wider setting: your Peeps build a settlement on Kewa, a sentient space whale. Terrain, production chains, travel distances, and the health of the surrounding ecosystem shape that settlement. The official description does not detail sandbox settings; those details come from the video.

How to Set Up a Sandbox Game

In the first-look demonstration, sandbox is available from the new-game menu. The creator returns to that menu after playing the tutorial, selects sandbox, and opens its difficulty options to find the building shortcuts.

To follow the demonstrated setup:

Open the new-game menu and choose Sandbox.
Review the world options, including the number of planets.
Open the difficulty options.
Enable Unlock all buildings if you want immediate access to the building selection.
Enable Instant construction if you want to reproduce the immediate placement shown in the video.
Adjust pollution, toxic tile generation, and resource settings to suit your goal before starting.

These steps follow the supplied player experience. Check the labels in your installed version when setting up a new game.

The distinction between the two building options matters. Unlock all buildings provides access to structures that would otherwise require technology progression. Instant construction addresses the construction stage. The demonstration uses both together, making that combination the clearest supported choice for a free-building session.

For a first experiment, keep the goal small: lay out a residential area, a food-and-water section, and a compact industrial block. That gives you a manageable space to inspect building footprints and connections before covering the available terrain.

Sandbox Settings Explained

The video shows more flexibility than a single easy-or-hard preset. Its creator reviews controls for environmental pressure, demolition refunds, starting supplies, and repair costs alongside the building options.

All settings in the following table are reported from that preview-build player experience.

Setting	What the source reports	Why you might adjust it
Unlock all buildings	Makes buildings available from the beginning	Explore advanced structures or plan a complete city layout
Instant construction	Places structures immediately; the combined setup also allows the demonstrated jewelers to be placed without material consumption	Experiment with layouts without construction delays
Toxic tile generation speed	Includes a Never option	Remove toxic tile generation as a source of pressure
Pollution rate	Can be reduced	Give yourself more room to experiment with industry
Demolition resources	Offers full, half, or no material refunds	Control how costly rebuilding is when construction uses materials
Starting resources	Can provide extra supplies	Make the opening resource situation more forgiving
Repair resource use	Adjusts the resources used for repairs	Change the material burden of maintaining buildings
Planet count	Can be adjusted in sandbox setup	Customize the number of planets in the generated game

Does instant construction mean infinite resources?

The strongest supported claim is narrower: with both building shortcuts enabled, the creator places multiple jewelers immediately without consuming construction materials.

That observation supports free building in the demonstrated setup. It does not establish an unlimited stockpile of every resource, free manufacturing, or the removal of citizen needs. The source does not test those outcomes.

Use this distinction when planning a colony. Access to an advanced building lets you place and inspect it, but the demonstration does not show that every advanced production chain becomes operational automatically.

Can you turn pollution off?

The creator reports that the pollution rate can be turned down and toxic tile generation can be set to Never. Those are separate controls.

If you want a relaxed building session, review both. Setting toxic tile generation to Never does not, by itself, establish that pollution stops accumulating or that all environmental effects disappear.

The official game description makes ecosystem management central to the broader game: neglecting Kewa’s environment can reduce usable habitat. Sandbox provides ways to adjust the pressure, but the supplied evidence does not establish a universal switch that removes every ecological constraint.

Suggested Settings for Different Playstyles

The following combinations are editorial recommendations based on the observed controls. They are useful starting points, rather than named presets shown in the game.

Creative city planning

For a session focused on architecture and layout, enable Unlock all buildings and Instant construction. Reduce the pollution rate and select Never for toxic tile generation if you want fewer environmental interruptions.

This matches the broad approach demonstrated at the end of the video. It lets you explore building sizes and arrange a settlement without working through each technology requirement first.

Start with roads and reserve routes between districts before filling the gaps. The official description highlights reduced travel times and efficient production chains as city-planning considerations, so a visually appealing layout also benefits from clear connections.

Relaxed colony progression

Leave the building shortcuts disabled if you enjoy earning new technology. Use extra starting resources, reduce environmental pressure, and choose full demolition refunds to make early mistakes less costly.

This is a useful approach for learning how a colony develops while retaining the resource collection and construction progression described in the player experience.

Change only a few settings at first. If you remove every source of pressure immediately, it becomes harder to judge which part of the economy or layout needs attention.

Production and adjacency experiments

Enable all buildings to inspect the structures you want to compare. Add instant construction when your goal is to rearrange a small test area quickly.

Use the placement information to examine adjacency effects before committing to a larger district. In the tutorial portion of the video, the creator encounters effects that exchange one benefit for another, such as increased output alongside reduced speed. Those examples show why an adjacency effect deserves a closer look before you treat it as an improvement.

For a useful comparison, change one part of the layout at a time. Moving several buildings and changing logistics rules together makes it difficult to identify what affected the result.

Planning a Colony Beyond Construction Shortcuts

Sandbox is especially useful for exploring the relationship between terrain and city design. The official description says players can reshape land, dig canals, add topsoil, and plant forests to support expansion. Immediate access to buildings offers a way to inspect those possibilities earlier, subject to the operating requirements of the structures involved.

Keep these planning priorities in view:

Preserve travel routes. Leave space for roads through residential and industrial areas instead of closing every gap with a building.
Inspect adjacency effects. Read the placement panel and weigh both benefits and drawbacks.
Plan industry and cleanup together. The player experience shows soot and slag becoming pollution concerns during the tutorial.
Check production inputs. When testing an advanced structure, inspect what it consumes and how those supplies will reach it.
Leave room to expand. The official description emphasizes limited space and resources on Kewa, making spare routes and flexible districts valuable.

The tutorial footage also illustrates why construction and operation are different problems. Buildings wait for inputs, industrial byproducts accumulate, and workers travel between tasks. The sandbox construction test does not establish that its shortcuts remove those systems.

For a practical learning session, build one production chain and follow its inputs, outputs, and waste before adding another. That keeps the experiment readable and helps you decide whether your next change should address placement, supply, storage, or pollution.

The official description also confirms planetary outposts as part of the wider game. However, the supplied sandbox demonstration does not explain their setup or test how sandbox options affect travel and outpost logistics. Treat those as separate systems to investigate once your initial colony is working.

FAQ

Does Beyond These Stars sandbox mode let you unlock every building?

Yes, according to the supplied preview-build player experience. The sandbox difficulty options include Unlock all buildings, and the creator demonstrates a game with the building selection available from the start.

Can you build instantly without spending resources?

In the demonstrated setup, yes. With Unlock all buildings and Instant construction enabled, the creator places multiple jewelers immediately without consuming construction materials. The source does not establish that production inputs, repairs, or all other resource costs are also removed.

Can you play sandbox with normal technology progression?

The player experience says you can retain resource gathering and technology progression in sandbox. Leave Unlock all buildings and Instant construction disabled if you want to preserve those parts of colony development.

What settings make sandbox more forgiving?

Based on the observed options, consider extra starting supplies, full demolition refunds, a reduced pollution rate, and toxic tile generation set to Never. Add the two building shortcuts when your priority is immediate city design. These are suggested combinations; the source does not demonstrate them as a preset or guarantee that they remove every management challenge.