Beyond These Stars peeps guide
Two meters drive everything: happiness (food quality, home, decorations) and energy (shifts, rest). Low energy causes sickness; unhappiness causes strikes after three shifts.
Peeps are the heartbeat of your settlement: they work one shift, break, eat, drink, relax, and go back out. Run that rhythm smoothly and the city hums; let it slip and you get sickness, mourning and — if you really let it slip — a picket line through your production district.
The daily rhythm
Every working peep follows the same cycle: work one shift → break → repeat. All peeps work and take breaks at the same time, which has a quiet consequence — if there are more jobs than workers, low-priority workplaces simply get neglected during a shift. Your job is to keep the cycles short on stress and long on recovery:
- During a shift, peeps spend happiness and energy.
- On break, they return home, eat and drink from the resources stored there, then relax.
- Better food and drink restore more energy than plain fare. Potatoes are fine; more valuable meals are better.
- A peep who can visit a decoration on break recovers happiness faster than one who just sits at home.
What moves the happiness needle
| Raises happiness | Lowers happiness |
|---|---|
| Eating and drinking at home (better fare, more restore) | Spending shifts at work |
| Decorations (a triangle of 3 early decorations is +20% each) | Pollution in the settlement |
| A hut placed next to 2 potato patches (+20%) | Homelessness — some peeps will never even come out to work |
| Kewa fruit trees spawned on a happy whale | Kewa being unhealthy (Thorny Stems) |
| Visits to a Memorial Statue during breaks | Death in the community — everyone dips, some mourn |
Sickness, the Apothecary, and death
At the start of every shift, each peep has a chance of becoming sick — and the lower their energy, the higher that chance. A sick peep stays home from work until they recover, so untreated sickness is a silent production tax.
- Build the Apothecary once it unlocks: it produces items that restore extra energy, and peeps store them in their homes for when they are needed.
- If a peep stays sick too long, they can die. A very tired peep can also make a fatal mistake at work.
- When a peep dies, the whole settlement loses happiness and a mourning period can follow. Peeps gather outside the deceased peep's home.
- The Memorial Statue gives mourners somewhere to pay respects — visiting it on a break grants an instant happiness bonus.
Strikes: what they are, how they end
When enough peeps are unhappy enough, they go on strike. Strikers stop some of your production lines — never all of them, but enough to notice — and they deliberately park themselves in the paths of peeps who are still working, slowing them down.
- At the start of a strike you receive a goal tied to the root cause — build more houses, clean up toxic areas, and so on.
- Completing the goal ends the strike early. That is the whole game: fix the cause, not the symptom.
- Strike length is variable: the first strike lasts 3 shifts, and the next one gets shorter or longer depending on whether you met the previous goals.
Strikes exist because the alternative was worse. In Before We Leave, unhappy peeps just worked slowly — which compounded itself into a resource death spiral that took ages to dig out of. Strikes keep the same signal but make it solvable.
Celebrations: the upside
High happiness is not just avoidance of problems. If a large share of peeps in one place sit above a high happiness threshold, they throw a celebration — and the new Fairground building is where they party (masks included). Celebrations happen between shifts, so nothing stops working, and each celebration hands out a bonus to production, movement and sickness resistance.
Keep-the-peace checklist
- Watch energy before it dips — that is where sickness begins.
- Keep food and drink varied and stocked in the homes themselves.
- Cluster decorations: three early ones in a triangle give +20% happiness.
- Place huts beside potato patches (+20%) instead of scattering them.
- Handle deaths with the Memorial Statue so mourning resolves into a bonus, not a spiral.
- If a strike starts, read the goal and build the fix — it ends early, and the next strike stays short.
