Beyond These Stars - Developer Diary: Space Ships, Space Shipping

So you’ve travelled to a new system, and found your first habitable planet - now what?

Any spacefaring society demands a robust interstellar infrastructure, and some solid logistics to keep the wheels of production turning.

Let’s take a look at how the player will be getting from Kewa to new lands, and how they’ll manage a growing network of trade between these places.

🚀 Space Ships

At the very start of the game, Kewa suddenly bolts and travels many light-years away from your home planet. The Peeps are thrust into their journey of galactic exploration a little earlier than they may have anticipated.

As a result, you’ll be unlocking the Space Ship Builder fairly early on, and with it the ability to create two early types of ship:

1. Scout Ship

Right after your very first conversation with Kewa, you’ll unlock the Solar System View, which shows the position of various things floating about in space: Kewa, the local star, and various celestial objects (if any).

You won’t be able to properly identify these objects until you investigate them with a Scout Ship. We won’t go into detail here about what kinds of objects there are, but as an example: investigation by a Scout Ship will tell you whether a planet is able to be settled or not.

2. Trade Ship

You’ll be needing these to ferry supplies to and from Kewa, and you’ll probably end up building a fair few of them throughout the game! We’ll talk more about shipping below.

And we of course allow you the satisfaction of pressing the big shiny launch button once your ship’s ready to go. How could we not??

Space Ports & Settlement Ships

In Before We Leave, ships would travel between planets; but in Beyond These Stars they shuttle between Space Ports, giving players greater control over their destinations. Space Ports can have up to four Landing Pads, with each pad able to accommodate one ship at a time. Space Ships cannot land on Kewa or on a Planet without - you guessed it! - a Landing Pad.

(Space Port with multiple Landing Pads, and a Spaceship Builder in the foreground)

How, then, is the player able to land and get started on a new planet?

The Settlement Ship is designed for exactly that. You don’t build it via the Spaceship Builder; instead, it is an upgraded form of the Home Spaceship. The “upgrade” here is that the Home Spaceship’s ability to produce a consistent supply of vital resources has been removed to make way for larger storage, and a Landing Pad attachment which permits it to act as a Space Port.

The Settlement Ship is also the only type of ship that can land without a Landing Pad, but once it has landed, it won’t be able to take off again until you’ve built at least one Space Port in the area. You don’t want to leave those Peeps stranded!

(Note the Landing Pad popping out on the left!)

It’s worth noting another divergence here from Before We Leave, for those who are familiar with that system. In BWL, you would land your ship with some resources and peeps, and that was that; you would have to then spend some time building up your town before it could be connected to the broader trade infrastructure between your various settlements.

In Beyond These Stars, because you have immediate access to a Landing Pad (and thus the ability to ferry ships to and from your new settlement), and because these planets are designed to be lacking in some of the basic resources needed to be fully self-sufficient, your immediate priorities have changed. Instead, once you land on your very first planet, we want to encourage you to familiarise yourself with our – drumroll, please –

📦 Shipping System

Your initial shipping experience will be in pursuit of establishing yourself in foreign lands, building up basic infrastructure like wood cutters and water pumps, and bridges. Eventually, though, that flow is reversed: once your new settlement gets going, and you gain access to the unique resources offered by the new planet, you’ll want to start shipping those back to Kewa to unlock new buildings and materials.

We believe that managing an interstellar network of resources should be rewarding - but as you can see, there’s the potential for things to get all kinds of confusing and complex here. This is where a well designed shipping system comes into play!

Manual vs Automated Shipping

There are two modes of shipping, each offering different benefits to the player.

Manual shipping gives you a high degree of control over exactly what, where, and when resources are being sent. It’s good for when you need a specific, finite amount of a resource (I need exactly 20 wood and 15 glass over there!), and for emergency situations (stop what you’re doing and give me 20 wood and 15 glass, stat!).

Automated shipping is more of a “set and forget”, and is better suited to maintaining an ongoing supply of a resource. It’s more-or-less equivalent to what was called ‘smart shipping’ in BWL, only much easier to use and understand.

(A glimpse at the automated shipping interface in System View.)

In Before We Leave, when we first introduced smart shipping it was after players had grown accustomed to making use of an intermediary port when shipping from planet A > island A to planet B > island B. This led to a lot of confusion when they assumed that this was also how smart shipping worked. (spoiler alert: it wasn’t.)

In Beyond These Stars, though, we hope to avoid this situation entirely in a few ways: by having automated shipping available from the very beginning; by making the UI a lot cleaner and easier to understand; and through this new method of shipping directly between Space Ports instead of between islands or planets.

Additionally, the new shipping algorithm is much more effective at figuring out what to do and where to direct resources based on what the player says they want.

The new Space Ports should also help address feedback that Before We Leave’s shipping felt “slow”. Congestion will be less of a problem considering the ability to build up to four Landing Pads per port; and having Trade Ships travel directly between Space Ports will be much quicker for trade.

(Also - switching between Local View & System View is quite seamless!)

Further notes on shipping

A couple of things that we want to note early to avoid any confusion. Currently, shipping works only with Resources; although your initial settlements will always include ten Peeps to get you started, you cannot specifically transport Peeps between locations.

Also - and this is mostly for the Before We Leave players - we want to flag that at this stage sea ships won’t be included in our Early Access release. We're still mulling over if and how we want to include them. For a variety of reasons at the moment they don't have much use, and their absence shouldn’t pose practical issues considering the direct Space Port-to-Space Port shipping system.

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That’s all for this development diary! Transport and logistics are very important, but so often very overlooked; they can sometimes threaten to make-or-break player engagement once you get deep enough into games like ours. We want to make resource management stimulating and hands-on without it being tedious and repetitive, and nailing this is something we really hope to get right during Early Access!

As always, we welcome any and all feedback and questions; and if you’d like to chat to us more directly, do consider joining our Discord.

In our next Dev Diary we’ll be talking about Animals, Food Production & Clothing! Look forward to seeing it next month.

- Lia, Community Manager