Sandbox mode
Sandbox mode lets you tune resource amounts, water and terrain, and the planets themselves before you start — with everything unlocked from the beginning if you want it.
Some players want the story. Some players want to build a sheep farm on a whale in a galaxy they designed themselves. Beyond These Stars ships both, and sandbox mode is a full second game wearing the same coat.
What sandbox mode lets you control
In story mode, what lives on Kewa's back is the developer's plan — the animals, the deposits, the rivers, the terrain. Sandbox mode hands you the clipboard for all of it, letting you pull in things that normally only exist on the habitable planets you discover in the story:
- Resources on Kewa. Pick and choose what's available from the start — sheep and cows, resource deposits, mineable nodes, the works.
- Water distribution. Start with a river, or without one. Yes, "no river" is an option, and yes, it changes everything about how you build.
- Terrain. Flat, hilly — or dramatic, with tall spires and mesas to build around.
- Planets. How many, which resources they hold, their biomes and their terrain.
- Unlock all buildings from the start. Skip the technology tree entirely if that's the game you want today.
The design in one sentence
Every selection nudges the game's difficulty, and the mode shows you exactly how: each individual choice and each planet carries a difficulty indicator, with an overall summary at the end. Sandbox isn't "no rules" — it's transparent rules you wrote yourself.
How the developers suggest using it
Their advice, and it's good advice: play story mode first. It's structured to teach the systems at a sensible pace, with optional tutorial helpers along the way. Sandbox is at its best once you already know what the knobs do — because the whole point is deliberately turning them:
- A city painter's mode: unlock everything, flatten the terrain, and design for looks instead of progression.
- A challenge generator: crank difficulty through brutal terrain and scarce resources until the whale back is a survival puzzle.
- A testing lab: want to know if a production block layout actually works before you commit in a story run? Build it here first.
- A baby-animal farm, proportionally: sheep, cows, and a galaxy with nothing urgent in it.
Should you care before launch?
If the demo's opening slice made you want to see the systems' full range without the pacing of a story campaign, sandbox mode is the feature to watch — it rolls in with the 1.0 release on October 16, and the developers have been openly excited to see what players build with it.
Next steps
- Planets and outposts — the planet systems sandbox lets you redesign.
- Release date — what else lands on October 16.
- Beginner guide — get the baseline skills story mode teaches first.
