Beyond These Stars How to Use the Scout Ship: Probes & Scans

The Scout Ship is your first window into the galaxy in Beyond These Stars, and learning how it actually works changes the entire pacing of your run. Kewa bolts light-years from your home planet in the opening story, the Spaceship Builder unlocks very early, and the moment you finish your first conversation with Kewa the Solar System View opens up around you — but until you actually pilot a Scout Ship, the planets, debris, and stranger objects floating in the system stay as unidentified icons. Sending that ship out to probe nodes on the Galaxy Map is the difference between wandering blindly and choosing the next world your Peeps will settle.

The information below is built only from official sources — the developer's Balancing Monkey Games' presskit, the Beyond These Stars Steam store page, and the official Balancing Monkey Games site. Because the game launched on 2026-10-16, only one day before this article was written, third-party wiki data simply does not exist yet. Where the developer has not published a specific number or formula, the article states that openly instead of inventing one.

Scout Ship and the Solar System View: What You Actually See

Right after your first conversation with Kewa, the game opens a second layer of zoom called the Solar System View. According to the developer's own diary on the ship layer, this view shows Kewa, the local star, and any celestial objects around you, but you cannot identify those objects until a Scout Ship investigates them — probing is what reveals whether a planet is a viable settlement candidate. The Scout Ship is the only early-game vessel capable of running that probe, and the crewmate you talk to while flying it is José, one of the named characters aboard the vessel.

That distinction matters because the Scout Ship is not a transport. It does not carry cargo, and it does not ferry Peeps. The Trade Ship, by contrast, ferries supplies to and from Kewa and is the backbone of your shipping lines. Mixing up those two roles is the most common early mistake, because both ships look similar in the builder queue and both use the same Spaceship Builder interface.

The Spaceship Builder itself is the only player-facing construction screen for space vessels, and the developer confirms it unlocks fairly early in the story. From the Spaceship Builder you can launch the two early ship types — Scout and Trade. The Settlement Ship is explicitly not built through the Spaceship Builder; it is an upgraded Home Spaceship that trades its resource production for larger storage and a Landing Pad attachment, and it is the only ship that can land without a Landing Pad. Once the Settlement Ship touches down on a new world, it cannot take off again until you build at least one Space Port in the area.

How Probes Translate Into Map Data

When you launch a Scout Ship and direct it to a node, the ship travels, scans, and writes the result back to the Galaxy Map. According to the developer, the Galaxy Map is only partially visible at the start, and the rest unlocks over time as you push probes further out. Dev Blog #28 on the Galaxy Map and travel lists what a node can actually contain once scanned: barren planets, space junk, strange objects, trade stations, and aliens. Trade stations are not a building you place — they are a type of map node you fly to, which is a useful distinction to remember when you start planning shipping routes.

The practical loop is short. You open Solar System View, pick an unidentified node, send the Scout Ship, watch the scan complete, and read the result. If the node is a settleable planet, your Settlement Ship is the vessel that takes you there — the Scout Ship never settles anything itself.

Galaxy Map Nodes, Scans, and Reading the Results

The Galaxy Map behaves like a fog-of-war overlay. You start with a tight ring of nodes visible around Kewa, and probing the edges of that ring is what extends the visible area outward. Dev Blog #28 is explicit that the map unlocks over time rather than revealing everything at once, so the early-game Scout Ship loop is essentially: scan a node, get a result, that result either opens new shipping routes or it opens a new settleable planet. The Neutral Sector mentioned in the same dev blog is a named region holding a moderate-climate planet with chickens and cows — useful real estate once you have the infrastructure to reach it.

Scan results also affect how aggressively you should expand. A node that turns out to be space junk has no settlement value but might still host a Trade Station you can route through later. A strange object can be a quest hook rather than a resource. A barren planet is exactly what it says — visually distinctive, but not currently a settlement target. Knowing those categories in advance prevents you from sending the Settlement Ship toward a node the Scout Ship has not yet cleared.

Why a Scout Ship Beat Matters More Than a Fast Trade Ship

Once you have a Trade Ship running, it is tempting to skip the Scout Ship and focus purely on shipping. The developer's design pushes back on that instinct: until a Scout Ship has probed a node, you do not know whether the destination can even host a Space Port, whether the climate is worth settling, or whether a trade station is sitting between you and the next star. A fast Trade Ship on a route to an unscanned node is just a fast ship that has nowhere useful to go. Treat the Scout Ship as the cartographer and the Trade Ship as the delivery van.

The Spaceship Builder, Trade Ship Construction, and Space Port Logistics

The Spaceship Builder is the single production surface for both the Scout Ship and the Trade Ship. You unlock it early, right alongside the first conversation with Kewa, and from that point onward the builder is the gate every new ship passes through. According to the developer's own Spaceship and Space Shipping dev diary on Steam, ships do not shuttle between planets directly — they shuttle between Space Ports. That is the load-bearing rule of the whole shipping system, because it means your shipping capacity is bounded by Space Port coverage, not by raw ship count.

A Space Port is a player-built space structure that can hold up to four Landing Pads, and each pad takes exactly one ship at a time. Space Ships cannot land on Kewa itself or on a planet unless there is a Landing Pad present, which is why building a Space Port is the very first action you take on any newly settled world. The Settlement Ship is the lone exception because it carries its own Landing Pad attachment — but that exemption ends the moment it lands, because the Settlement Ship stays put until you build at least one Space Port on the new planet, and only then can it lift off again.

Reading the Four-Pad Rule for Trade Ships

The four-pad ceiling on a Space Port is a soft multiplier on the entire shipping guide. A planet with one Space Port can host four Trade Ships at once, plus the Scout Ship if you keep one parked there, plus the Settlement Ship if it has not yet been upgraded into a permanent Space Port. A planet with two Space Ports doubles that. Because ships shuttle between Space Ports rather than between planets, expanding shipping capacity is really a question of expanding Space Port coverage — and because the developer has not published a per-pad throughput number, the practical advice is to treat pads as parallel slots rather than as additive throughput.

When players ask how to ship resources efficiently in the early game, the honest answer from the dev diary is: build a Space Port, fill its pads, route between ports, and only then think about adding more ships. Adding a fifth ship with no pad to dock at simply queues it in orbit.

Building Your First Trade Ship: A Step-by-Step Shipping Guide

The Trade Ship is the workhorse of the entire shipping layer, and learning how to build and deploy one cleanly is the most repeatable task in the late-early game. The order below reflects the dev diary's framing rather than any community-mined recipe, because at the time of writing the game has only been live for one day and no community guide corpus exists yet.

Step 1 — Confirm Kewa's Current System

Open the Solar System View and check which star Kewa is passing through. The dev diary is explicit that Kewa bolts light-years from your home planet at the very start of the story, and the local star matters because the Scout Ship's probe range is the local star, not the wider galaxy. Shipping out of your current system without first scanning it is a common early mistake.

Step 2 — Run a Scout Ship Sweep

Launch your Scout Ship, send José to probe every unidentified node in the local system, and wait for the scan results. Until probes complete, the nodes are still unknown. This step is also the gating action for the Galaxy Map, because Dev Blog #28 confirms the map only unlocks over time, and probing is what extends the visible ring.

Step 3 — Place Your First Space Port

Build a Space Port on Kewa's back using the build menu. You do not need a Landing Pad to use the Space Port itself, but every ship you want to dock needs a pad. The dev diary caps this at four pads per port. The first port is the foundation of every later shipping line, so place it where future Trade Ships can reach it without crossing the whole city.

Step 4 — Open the Spaceship Builder

Open the Spaceship Builder and queue a Trade Ship. The builder handles both Scout and Trade vessels, and the dev diary confirms both are early-game unlocks. The Trade Ship ferries supplies to and from Kewa, which is the part most directly relevant to any beyond these stars how to ship resources question. builder handles both Scout and Trade vessels, and the dev diary confirms both are early-game unlocks. The Trade Ship ferries supplies to and from Kewa, which is the part most directly relevant to any beyond these stars how to ship resources question, and once you've got that logistics loop running, you'll want to know which worlds are worth routing those supplies to in our guide to Beyond These Stars settleable planets and outposts worth colonising.

Step 5 — Assign a Landing Pad and Pick a Route

When the Trade Ship finishes, assign it to a free Landing Pad and select its destination port. The dev diary's load-bearing rule is that ships shuttle between Space Ports rather than between planets, so the destination must be a port, not a planet. If you do not yet have a second port, build one on a settleable planet your Scout Ship has just cleared, then route the Trade Ship there.

Step 6 — Repeat Until Pads Are Full

Keep queuing Trade Ships until every Landing Pad across every Space Port is occupied. The four-pad cap on a Space Port means the next bottleneck is port count, not ship count, so the natural follow-up is to settle a new planet with the Settlement Ship and build a second Space Port there.

Step 7 — Use Trade Stations as Mid-Route Stops

Once the Galaxy Map reveals trade station nodes, treat them as routing waypoints rather than destinations. They are map nodes you travel to, not buildings you place, but they are useful as mid-route stops when you push the shipping layer further out.

Interstellar Shipping: Linking Systems Over Time

Once the Scout Ship has cleared a ring of nodes around Kewa's current star, the shipping layer starts behaving like an interstellar network rather than a local delivery service. The dev diary does not publish travel times between stars — at the time of writing the developer has not released a number for that — so the honest framing is type-level: longer routes are slower, and route choice is what you optimize, not raw speed.

Dev Blog #28 frames the Galaxy Map as a fog-of-war that unlocks over time, which is why a good interstellar shipping plan usually starts with a Scout Ship sweep of the outermost visible node. If the scan reveals a settleable planet, the Settlement Ship takes over and the new planet becomes a forward base for further shipping. If the scan reveals a trade station, you can route Trade Ships through it without settling anything, which is useful when you want to extend range without committing Peeps to a new world.

The Neutral Sector mentioned in Dev Blog #28 is a good example of a named region worth reaching: it is described as holding a moderate-climate planet with chickens and cows, both of which are verified resources in the official material. Routing a Trade Ship line toward that sector is therefore a long-term investment rather than an emergency fix, and the Scout Ship is what tells you whether the path is even open.

Common Shipping Mistakes to Avoid

The shipping layer is forgiving in the sense that the rules are short, but it punishes the same handful of errors over and over. A few worth flagging:

• Building a Trade Ship before the Scout Ship has scanned the destination. Until a node is probed, the route is just a guess. The dev diary's framing of the Solar System View treats unknown nodes as unidentified, so a Trade Ship launched blindly is one that may need to re-route the moment a scan result comes in.

• Assuming Trade Ships dock on Kewa. They do not. Kewa has no Landing Pads in the usual sense, and ships dock on Space Ports. The dev diary is explicit that Space Ships cannot land on Kewa or on a planet without a Landing Pad.

• Forgetting that the Settlement Ship is not built in the Spaceship Builder. The Settlement Ship is an upgraded Home Spaceship handed to the player through the story. Players sometimes queue a settlement hull from the builder and then wait for it to finish; that queue never resolves because that ship type does not come from this screen.

• Treating a trade station as a building. Dev Blog #28 lists trade stations among the things a Galaxy Map node can hold. They are a node you travel to, not a structure you place, so it is wrong to leave a build menu open looking for a "Trade Station" structure — it does not exist as a player building.

• Trying to settle a node the Scout Ship has flagged as barren or strange. Only some node types become settleable planets. A barren planet scan should redirect your effort to a different node, not to a Settlement Ship queue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Scout Ship actually do in Beyond These Stars?

The Scout Ship probes unidentified nodes in the Solar System View and the wider Galaxy Map, revealing what each node holds — barren planet, space junk, strange object, trade station, alien contact, or a settleable planet. You pilot it with José and you build it from the Spaceship Builder. The dev diary is explicit that you cannot identify celestial objects until a Scout Ship investigates them.

How do I build a Trade Ship and where does it dock?

You build a Trade Ship from the Spaceship Builder, the same screen that builds the Scout Ship. Trade Ships ferry supplies to and from Kewa, and they dock on Space Ports using Landing Pads, not on Kewa itself. Each Space Port can hold up to four Landing Pads, with one ship per pad.

Can the Settlement Ship land without a Space Port?

Yes. The Settlement Ship is the only ship that can land without a Landing Pad because it carries its own Landing Pad attachment, and it is an upgraded Home Spaceship rather than a player-built vessel. After it lands it cannot take off again until you build at least one Space Port in the area, so plan a port immediately.

What is the difference between a trade station and a Space Port?

A Space Port is a player-built structure with up to four Landing Pads that ships dock at. A trade station is a type of Galaxy Map node you travel to, listed alongside barren planets and aliens in Dev Blog #28. Trade stations extend shipping range but they are not buildings you place.

Why are some nodes on the Galaxy Map still hidden?

Dev Blog #28 states the Galaxy Map is only partially visible at first and unlocks over time. Pushing the Scout Ship outward and probing edge nodes is what reveals new areas, so early shipping lines should expect the visible map to grow as the Scout Ship pushes further.