Beyond These Stars does not hand you a research queue. Buildings unlock by doing: construct the buildings before them, then put them to work. The tree reads like a dependency chart, and the fastest route through it is boring to describe and effective in practice — keep every unlocked building running.

How the Technology Tree Actually Unlocks

Every settlement starts with four buildings unlocked (official wiki): the Hut, the Potato Patch, the Water Pump and the Woodcutter. From there, the tree grows through prerequisites. For most buildings, the condition is another building's construction and initial successful use — production, not just placement.

The Compost Heap is the example the official wiki walks through. It unlocks once the Landscaper is unlocked and constructed. The Tree Nursery that follows needs the Compost Heap both built and working: 10 Compost must be produced in it before the nursery becomes available. The Burner Generator, the first power building, opens after a Mine produces its first Iron Ore. Each of those steps asks you to run a building for real before the next one appears, which makes idle buildings a progression cost rather than a neutral choice.

Two planning consequences follow. First, do not stockpile unlocks you cannot supply — a smelter with no ore, power or roads does not move the tree forward. Second, when you check the tree, look for the building that is nearly used: something constructed but not yet producing usually sits directly on your next unlock.

The rhythm matters for the launch build too. The official wiki and demo builds are the source for everything on this page, and the studio has confirmed the 1.0 release includes the full technology progression with complex endgame buildings, so the tree grows further than the opening settlement shows.

Reading the Tree

The tree lays buildings out in eleven columns, drawn as labelled stripes with matching icons — Accommodation buildings sit leftmost under a dark teal label, for instance. A prerequisite frequently comes from a different column than the building it unlocks, which is why the interface includes a click-to-highlight behaviour: selecting a building draws lines to both its prerequisites and whatever it leads to.

Unlock Prerequisite Why it matters
Compost Heap Landscaper unlocked and constructed Opens the composting half of the terraforming chain
Tree Nursery Compost Heap constructed and producing (10 Compost made) Saplings and forests expand atmosphere and suppress pollution
Burner Generator A Mine produces its first Iron Ore First power building; early industry runs on it

When you plan a push through the tree, follow the colony's bottlenecks rather than the most exciting icon. Food and water stability come first, and the four starting buildings already cover water, wood and potatoes — keep them staffed before reaching for anything new. The mining line is next, because stone, iron and power unlock the construction tier. The terraforming spine (Landscaper to Compost Heap to Tree Nursery) is the one most players postpone and regret: it is the chain that physically expands where you can build, and it feeds the pollution control described in the pollution guide.

Keep power in mind while reading the tree. Buildings that need power must initially touch the Burner Generator, so an unlock that lands far from your generator is effectively an unlock plus a construction detour. The buildings guide maps the full roster into groups, and the production chains page traces what each unlock consumes and emits.

Research Facilities and the Material Layer

The building tree is not the only progression system. Preview builds show a Research Facility on Kewa as a build objective, alongside a goal to research Sludge — an unusual material that the preview objectives treat as something to study. That layer's details are not documented at the time of writing: the official wiki covers the building side of the tree in depth, while the material side has only these preview glimpses so far.

What can be said safely is that both layers reward the same habit. Progression of the documented kind is consumption — wood waste into compost, ore into iron — and a colony that runs clean, supplied lines will outpace one that chases unlocks it cannot feed. The demo stops before most of this content, so the early tree is what most players have seen; the demo guide sets out exactly where it ends.

Pro tip: After a new building unlocks, run it immediately for one full cycle before you start an unrelated project. The tree advances on successful use, and the most common quiet slowdown is a settlement full of unlocked buildings that nobody has switched on.

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