Beyond These Stars Sawmill Guide: Wood Production, Wood Waste & Smart Placement

Your first hours on Kewa boil down to one question: how do you turn the trees scattered across the whale's back into the lumber your growing village needs? That's the job of the Beyond These Stars sawmill. On the surface, it's a simple converter — raw wood goes in, building materials come out — but Balancing Monkey Games added a twist that changes how you think about every production building in the game: byproducts. Wood Waste is one of the waste types the developers have explicitly shown off, and lumber processing is where most players meet it for the first time. In this Beyond These Stars sawmill guide, we'll cover what the building does, how to fit it into your hex-based layout, and how to keep its leftovers from smothering your settlement.

What Does the Sawmill Do in Beyond These Stars?

Beyond These Stars is the city-building sequel to Before We Leave, officially revealed in February 2023 after its life as the mysterious "Project Charlie." Instead of rehabilitating abandoned planets, your Peeps now live in a village carried on Kewa, a giant Space Whale. The sequel keeps the hex-based tiles, Peeps, pollution, and happiness systems fans remember, while layering in new depth: nuanced elevation with water that flows between levels, terraforming, underground resource deposits, and — most importantly for this guide — a full waste-management loop built around byproducts like Wood Waste and Soot.

The sawmill sits at the heart of the wood chain. Based on player experience shared in community discussions, it acts as the mid-step between raw timber and the processed lumber that most construction projects demand. Because Peeps have a post-modern, slightly futuristic toolkit — vehicular transports, sheet metal, compact rocketry — the Beyond These Stars sawmill behaves like a genuine industrial facility rather than a Peep with a hand saw. Expect it to need workers, a steady input supply, and real estate: many buildings in the sequel are multi-tile, and production buildings of this type are no exception, so reserve a few connected hexes before you commit.

For background on the game's core systems, the official Balancing Monkey Games website and the community-run Beyond These Stars wiki are the two best bookmarks.

Sawmill Inputs, Outputs, and Byproducts at a Glance

Before placing anything, it helps to see the sawmill as a chain rather than a single building. Here's the full loop:

One honest caveat: Beyond These Stars is in active Early Access development, and Balancing Monkey Games tunes production rates regularly. Any exact number you encounter — in this article, on the wiki, or in a Discord thread — should be treated as a snapshot rather than gospel. The relationships in the table above, however, hold steady: wood in, lumber out, and Wood Waste to deal with.

How to Unlock and Build Your Sawmill

The precise research requirements shift between patches, but the workflow below reflects how experienced players approach the building, based on player experience shared in the community.

That fifth step is the one new players skip. In Before We Leave, you could mostly ignore what your buildings discarded. Here, waste and byproducts are a designed mechanic, and treating them as an afterthought is the fastest route to a messy, unhappy village.

Best Placement Tips for Your Sawmill

Placement is where the Beyond These Stars sawmill stops being a simple building and becomes a puzzle. The sequel's playfield is larger in scale than the planets of Before We Leave, and terrain elevation now genuinely matters, so where you drop a multi-tile industrial building creates knock-on effects for the entire run.

A note on terraforming: community reports highlight that reshaping terrain is absolutely possible in the sequel, but it consumes time and resources you'd often rather spend elsewhere. It's almost always cheaper to place the sawmill correctly the first time than to sculpt the land to rescue a bad spot. Do a slow lap around your forest region before committing — the extra two minutes pays for itself all run.

Managing Wood Waste, Pollution, and Air Quality

This is the section that separates a thriving Kewa village from a struggling one. Waste and byproducts are a key mechanic in Beyond These Stars, with Wood Waste and Soot both shown as part of the waste-management system. Every plank your sawmill produces generates refuse, and if you scale lumber production without scaling waste handling, you'll watch efficiency and happiness slide together.

There's a second, sneakier trade-off: air. The game asks you to manage breathable, oxygenated air for your Peeps by taking care of foliage and the environment. Trees are your oxygen infrastructure — and they're also your sawmill's raw material. Clear-cutting a forest to feed a production boom can quietly throttle your air supply while your storage yards look fantastic.

Habits that keep a lumber industry healthy:

• Build waste capacity ahead of demand. If your sawmill is running at full tilt, your waste handling should already be expanding.
• Harvest selectively. Leave foliage corridors intact so your air resource stays stable while timber keeps flowing.
• Mind pollution drift. Industrial output and byproducts both feed the pollution system that returned from Before We Leave.
• Decorate the industrial district. Peeps now relax at decoration-type buildings, so a few well-placed comforts offset the happiness cost of nearby industry.
• Listen to your Peeps. They emit interface "barks" — short text snippets that flag problems before your resource panel does.

When something does go wrong, run down this quick diagnostic table:

Beyond These Stars Sawmill FAQ

What does the sawmill produce in Beyond These Stars? The Beyond These Stars sawmill converts raw wood harvested from Kewa's trees into processed lumber used for construction, and it generates Wood Waste as a byproduct — part of the sequel's new waste-management loop. Staffing comes from your Peep population, and exact production rates change patch to patch during Early Access, so verify current values in-game.

Does the sawmill cause pollution? The pollution system returns from Before We Leave, and industrial buildings contribute to it. Community reports suggest the bigger near-term headache is actually solid byproducts like Wood Waste, which pile up without dedicated handling. Distance from housing plus adequate waste capacity covers most of the problem.

Why isn't my sawmill producing anything? Nine times out of ten it's an input issue: no workers assigned, no raw wood arriving, or a haul route that's longer than it looks on the hex grid. Work through the troubleshooting table above before assuming the building itself is bugged.

Where should I place my sawmill for the best results? Near dense forests, on flat connected hexes, with a buffer from housing and open adjacent tiles for expansion. Keep foliage coverage healthy nearby — trees feed your sawmill and your Peeps' air supply at the same time, and balancing those two demands is the real endgame of wood production on Kewa.