Beyond These Stars Sandbox Mode Guide: Settings, Instant Construction, and Creative Tips

Beyond These Stars sandbox mode turns the game's whale-back city builder into a fully customizable playground where you control every rule — from pollution rates to whether buildings cost resources at all. Balancing Monkey Games' colony sim, published by Hooded Horse, launched on October 16, 2026, and it offers three ways to play: a narrative-driven story mode, a guided tutorial, and a deeply configurable sandbox. If you'd rather skip the story beats and design the ultimate city on the back of Kewa the Space Whale, this guide walks through every Beyond These Stars sandbox mode setting, explains how instant construction actually behaves in-game, and shares building tips that make creative play shine.

What Is Beyond These Stars Sandbox Mode?

Sandbox mode is one of three options on the New Game screen, alongside story mode and the tutorial. In story mode, your 30 Peeps arrive on Kewa with narrative events popping up as you expand — story beats about eager explorers, alien discoveries, and the mystery of the Space Whales themselves. Sandbox mode strips those events out and replaces them with a long list of adjustable dials, letting you decide how harsh (or how painless) your whale-back civilization becomes.

The core game remains the same either way: you land on a small breathable patch of Kewa's back, lay free roads, and grow a colony around your home spaceship while juggling adjacency bonuses, supply chains, and pollution. In short, Beyond These Stars sandbox mode is the same deep colony sim with the difficulty dials fully exposed.

Every Sandbox Setting Explained

The Beyond These Stars sandbox mode setup screen splits into world generation options and difficulty tweaks. Here's what each setting does, based on the setup menu and early player experience:

The Two Toggles That Change Everything

Two options at the bottom of the difficulty list define what most players consider creative mode: Unlock all buildings and Instant construction.

Unlock all buildings does exactly what it says — every structure in the tech tree, from humble huts to the jeweler and spaceship builder, is available from the first minute. You skip research progression entirely, which is perfect for experimenting with late-game production chains like fuel plants, electronics factories, and hydroponics gardens.

Instant construction is the more surprising one. According to player experience shared in early first-look coverage, buildings placed with this option enabled appear immediately and don't consume any resources — one tester spammed a row of expensive jewelers with a limited stockpile and lost nothing. Combined with Unlock all buildings, you can sketch a sprawling, fully decorated metropolis on Kewa's back in minutes.

You can also use each toggle independently. Want to earn your tech tree but hate waiting on construction timers? Leave research on and flip instant construction only. The flexibility is the point.

How to Set Up Your First Sandbox Game

Starting a Beyond These Stars sandbox mode run takes about two minutes:

1. Launch the game and select New Game from the main menu.
2. Choose Sandbox mode from the three game options.
3. Name your save and set the seed for your starting planet if you want a specific map.
4. Pick your space whale and how many planets you want to discover.
5. Open the difficulty options and adjust toxic tiles, pollution, refunds, and starting resources.
6. Decide whether to enable Unlock all buildings and Instant construction.
7. Start the game and begin plotting roads — remember, roads are free.

Not sure which combination to pick? These three setups cover most playstyles:

Building Tips: Adjacency, Roads, and Pollution

Sandbox is the ideal place to master the systems that make or break a colony. The most important is the adjacency system — nearly every building gains bonuses or penalties based on its neighbors, so placement matters more than raw production numbers.

A few principles worth internalizing during a sandbox run:

• Roads are free, but distance isn't. Every tile of road adds travel time for your Peeps, so compact layouts outperform sprawl.
• Quarantine your industry. Toolsmiths, ore smelters, and fuel plants pump out soot and slag. Keep them on barren tiles far from housing, and build cleaners nearby to scrub pollution away.
• Watch the oxygen line. The blue-purple boundary marks where breathable atmosphere ends — you can't build beyond it until you terraform.
• Spend perk points deliberately. Every unlocked building earns a perk point, and the 154-perk web rewards planning; basic perks sit in the center while powerful ones line the edges.

Sandbox is also the perfect testing ground for the mid and late tech tree. A few buildings worth planning around:

Sandbox vs. Story Mode: Which Should You Choose?

If this is your first Balancing Monkey Games title — the small New Zealand studio previously released Before We Leave in 2021 — start with the tutorial or story mode. The guided objectives teach the resource loop, the tech tree, and the pollution economy in a sensible order, and the narrative events give context to Kewa's journey across the galaxy.

Choose Beyond These Stars sandbox mode when you want to:

• Experiment with late-game production chains before committing to a story run
• Build showcase cities for screenshots without resource pressure
• Learn the adjacency system with every tool available from the start
• Play a personalized challenge, like a no-pollution run or a harsh low-resource start

There's no wrong answer. The game's official Epic Games Store page for Beyond These Stars describes a journey about coexisting with a sentient world — sandbox simply lets you decide how much of that journey to simulate yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Beyond These Stars sandbox mode remove the tech tree? No. The Unlock all buildings option is a toggle, not a requirement. Leave it off and you'll research technologies and earn perk points exactly as in story mode — just without narrative events interrupting your build.

Do buildings cost resources when instant construction is enabled? Based on player experience from early gameplay footage, no. Buildings placed with instant construction appear immediately and don't consume materials, even pricey structures like the jeweler. If you want construction to still cost resources, simply leave the toggle off.

Can you still fail in sandbox mode? It depends on your settings. With default difficulty, food shortages, pollution, and toxic tiles can still threaten your colony. But you can set toxic tile generation to never and reduce the pollution rate, effectively creating a failure-proof creative environment.

What's the difference between story mode and Beyond These Stars sandbox mode? Story mode includes narrative events, a fixed difficulty structure, and the full arc of traveling with Kewa. Sandbox mode removes the story events and opens every dial — planet count, whale selection, pollution, demolition refunds, and construction rules — so you can shape the experience however you like.