Terraforming is the slowest loop in Beyond These Stars, and soil is the layer every other system quietly sits on top of. This soil guide focuses on the practical decisions new players make in their first ten shifts: which tiles accept top soil, how farmland ties into potatoes, and when the terrain you're standing on is simply not worth reshaping. Because the game launched on 2026-10-16 and the developer has not published fixed yield tables, the goal here is to teach the type-level logic of the system rather than a recipe of numbers that may be rebalanced. For the primary source, see Steam's launch-day post.
Why Soil Sits at the Center of Terraforming
Every terraforming action in the game — dig a canal, route a river, plant a tree, lay down top soil — is a tradeoff between current effort and future flexibility. Soil is the cheapest of those actions on a per-tile basis, but it is also the layer you will replace most often as your city grows, your farmland expands, and your forests begin to spread. The official beginner's guide and Dev Blog #29 both treat soil as a foundational terraforming resource, which is why most players run out of it long before they run out of stone or wood.
| Terraforming action | Effort per tile (type-level) | Replacement frequency | Conflict with soil layer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dig a canal | High — single use, permanent | Permanent (never replaced) | Bypasses soil; canal tiles sit below it |
| Route a river | Medium — requires water source & slope | Permanent once routed | Soil on riverbanks erodes and must be relaid |
| Plant a tree | Medium — Tree Nursery placement + growth time | Replaced when forest is cleared for farmland | Roots lock soil in place, so removing trees exposes it |
| Lay down top soil | Low — cheapest of the four on a per-tile basis | Highest of the four (replaced every time land use changes) | N/A — soil is the layer being placed |
| Add wood / build over tile | Low–Medium — consumes Wood resource | Replaced whenever the building is demolished | Building footprint strips top soil first |
What Top Soil Actually Does
Top soil is a tile-overlay resource. When you place it on an eligible tile, that tile becomes farmable; a Kitchen-fed Peep can plant potatoes on it, and a Composting building can route organic waste back into the soil layer. The developer describes the broader terraforming loop in Dev Blog #29, where planting trees, minimising pollution and creating rivers all feed into biome health, but soil placement is the only action that converts raw terrain into a productive agricultural surface on demand.
What it does not do is override terrain difficulty. A tile with a steep height delta or one sitting in a deep basin still costs the same amount of time to flatten, irrigate, or rework, and soil placed on a poorly chosen foundation can wash out, dry out, or get blocked by adjacency penalties from neighbouring buildings.
Why Terrain Difficulty Matters Before You Plant
Terrain difficulty is the developer's catch-all for "how painful is this tile to work with". The exact formula has not been published, but the design intent is clear from the official Beginner Guide and Dev Blog #29: steeper, drier, or pollution-heavy tiles are simply slower to bring online. If you place top soil on a difficult tile without first resolving the underlying issue, your Peeps will spend extra shifts walking to it, hauling water to it, and replanting around weather damage.
That is why experienced players, in the small amount of community data available since launch, recommend a "shape first, soil second" workflow: reshape canals, rivers and hills, then commit top soil only to the tiles that earned their place. A full walkthrough of the broader reshape step lives in the terraforming workflow guide, which covers when to dig and when to plant.
Reading the Terrain Before You Place a Single Tile
The single biggest mistake new players make is treating terraforming as a single bucket of "do these things in order". In practice, the order of operations changes based on what the starting terrain looks like, and the only way to know which order is right is to read the map before you commit resources.
Quick Visual Checklist
Before placing any top soil, scan the buildable area for these four signals. None of them is a hard rule — the developer has not published exact thresholds — but together they predict roughly how much rework the average tile will need.
| Signal | What It Tells You | Soil Decision |
|---|---|---|
| Steep height delta (multiple contour bands in one screen) | Tiles need flattening before farm tools can sit on them | Defer soil until reshaping is done |
| Standing water or low basin | The tile floods seasonally or stays wet | Route a canal or raise the tile first |
| High pollution reading nearby | Industrial buildings are poisoning the biome | Add a Cleaner or route trees before farming here |
| Adjacency to a forest cluster | The biome is healthy and self-repairing | Soil here is safe; plant potatoes in confidence |
Players who skip this scan and dump top soil on the first empty patch typically end up with farmland that "almost works" — Peeps get sick, food rots in transit, and the biome starts to decay. Once that happens, restoring biome health is more expensive than the original terraforming would have been, and you can read more about that recovery path in the ecosystem health guide.
When to Defer Soil and Just Reshape
There are three situations where placing top soil is the wrong move in the first ten shifts of a new settlement, regardless of how promising the tile looks. Once you've identified the tiles that genuinely deserve top soil, the placement itself is a five-step routine. None of the steps is a hidden trick — they are the same ones the official Beginner Guide walks through, with the type-level framing the developer has published rather than made-up yield numbers.
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The tile is in a planned river or canal path. Rivers and canals route themselves along the lowest cost path the game calculates, and that path is usually obvious from the map. A tile that "looks dry today" but sits in a planned water route will be underwater in five shifts. Hold the soil, dig the canal, and come back to this tile when the water is settled.
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The tile sits under a future industrial cluster. Cleaners, Burners and Trawlers all generate pollution. If you can already see where your industrial core will go, do not soil the tile under it. Industrial adjacency penalties can make a "good" farm tile quietly useless.
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The tile is currently the only path Peeps use to reach another tile. Pathing in Beyond These Stars prefers flat, unobstructed routes. A single high-traffic tile that you've soiled will quickly get trampled, compacted, and replanted so many times that you'll wish you'd left it as plain ground.
Building the Farmland Layer: Step by Step
Step 1: Choose a Contiguous Block
Farmland performs better as a connected block than as scattered tiles. The game's pathing and adjacency bonuses reward clusters, and a 4x4 patch of soil will feed your Kitchen more reliably than sixteen individual soil tiles spread across the map. The developer has not published a strict "max block size", but community testing in the first week of release has shown that blocks past roughly 6x6 begin to suffer Peep-walk time penalties because the workforce has to reach the far edges.
Step 2: Flatten the Tiles
Use the terraforming tool to bring every tile in the block to the same elevation. Height deltas inside a soil block cause two problems: irrigation water does not distribute evenly, and the lowest tile in the block tends to flood. The water distribution guide explains how hills and flats interact with rivers and canals; the short version is that farmland wants to be flat and slightly above the local water table.
Step 3: Route Water to the Block
Potatoes and Composting both need water access. The cheapest way to supply a block is to dig a short canal that taps an existing river or canal — the canal and river guide walks through the placement logic, but at a high level you want the canal to enter the block on its highest edge so the water flows gently across the farmland rather than pooling in one corner.
Step 4: Place Top Soil
With the block flat and watered, place top soil on each tile. The placement tool highlights eligible tiles; tiles that fail eligibility are usually too steep, already occupied, or sitting on a tile the developer has marked as non-farmable (the developer has not published a list of these tiles, but they tend to be coastal and rocky).
Step 5: Confirm Peep Pathing
Watch a single shift after placing the soil. If Peeps are walking long detours to reach the block, you have a pathing problem — usually a building placed across the natural walking route. Resolving that problem now, when the block is empty, is far cheaper than discovering it after planting.
Top Soil vs. Forests: A Practical Comparison
Players often ask whether they should prioritise top soil for farmland or use the same area for a tree nursery. The honest answer is "both, in the right places", because Beyond These Stars terraforming is a system of tradeoffs rather than a single resource race. The table below summarises the design intent, not invented numbers, based on what the official Beginner Guide and Dev Blog #29 have stated.
| Factor | Top Soil (Farmland) | Tree Nursery (Forest) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary output | Potatoes → Kitchen meals | Trees → Cleaner/Pollution offset |
| Workforce need | Peeps with Kitchen access | Peeps with Tree Nursery access |
| Terrain requirement | Flat, watered tiles | Tolerates mild slope and drier tiles |
| Best placement | Near Kitchen, Composting, and a water source | Upwind of Cleaners, Burners, industrial core |
| Synergy with canals | Strong — canals feed the soil | Moderate — forests tolerate nearby water |
| Synergy with rivers | Strong — river-fed canals irrigate the block | Moderate — forests keep river banks stable |
| Reversibility | Medium — soil can be removed and the tile reused | High — trees can be cut and replanted elsewhere |
| Risk if placed wrong | Food rots, sickness rises | Pollution stays high, biome decays |
The key takeaway is that forests are a tertiary terraforming layer in the sense that they fix problems the other two layers can create. If you skip Cleaners and Burners, more trees will not save your biome. If you skip canals and soil, no number of trees will feed your Kitchen. The developer's forest guide goes deeper into placement and the air-quality link.
Common Soil Placement Mistakes and How to Recover
Even with a careful plan, players will misplace top soil. The good news is that soil is one of the cheapest terraforming actions to undo, and the recovery path is short. The bad news is that mistakes compound with biome health, so a bad soil patch can quietly drag down nearby forests and clean tiles.
Mistake 1: Soiling a Tile in a Future Canal Path
The symptom is a soil patch that floods for one or two shifts every cycle. The fix is to remove the top soil from the affected tiles, dig the planned canal, and reapply soil only on the tiles that stay above the new water line. This is far cheaper than trying to raise the flooded tiles after the canal is in.
Mistake 2: Soiling Around a Future Industrial Building
The symptom is a soil patch whose Peep count steadily drops as the surrounding biome takes pollution damage. The fix is twofold: build a Cleaner upwind of the soil block, and route a row of trees between the industrial core and the farmland. The trees buffer the soil from the worst of the pollution while the Cleaner handles the bulk removal.
Mistake 3: Treating Soil as a Permanent Tile
The symptom is a city where nothing new can be built because every flat tile already has soil on it. The fix is to remove soil from the lowest-value tiles (usually the ones furthest from the Kitchen) and free those tiles for Cleaners, Burners, or a second Home Spaceship. The developer has not published the exact removal cost, but the community consensus so far is that removal is cheaper than initial placement because there is no flattening step.
When Not to Terraform at All
Not every tile is worth reshaping. Some tiles are simply outside the loop your settlement can support, and spending time on them burns Peep energy that should be going toward food, water, and biome health. The official Beginner Guide flags this trade-off explicitly: terraforming is a long-term investment, and over-investing early leaves your Peeps hungry and your biome stressed.
Tiles to Leave Alone
There are four categories of tile where the right answer is "do nothing for now". These are not prohibitions — every one of them can become productive later — but they are the tiles most likely to waste your Peeps' time if you start reshaping them in the first ten shifts.
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Coastal tiles below the high-water mark. These tiles flood predictably and are better left as a buffer zone.
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Tiles locked behind an unbuilt Landing Pad. Ships cannot reach a planet without a Landing Pad, so any soil you place beyond the pad is unreachable. Wait until the pad is built.
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Tiles currently in the path of a future river reroute. Rivers and canals have a habit of being rerouted two or three times in the early game as you learn the map. Soil placed in the reroute path gets washed out.
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Tiles marked as the Kewa migration path. Kewa is a character in the game, not a terrain feature, but the path they prefer to walk on is part of the live map. Building or soiling across that path is asking for unhappiness and emergency travel.
The "Shape First" Mindset
The single most useful habit you can build is a quick mental check before each terraforming action: if I change this tile, what is the cheapest undo path? Tiles with a cheap undo are safe to experiment on. Tiles with an expensive undo — usually because they sit in a network of canals, rivers, or bcanal placement guideaviour.
This is the same logic that drives how the canal placement guide recommends testing a short canal before committing to a long one. The terraforming system in Beyond These Stars rewards patience, and soil is the layer where that patience pays off fastest because every other terraforming decision eventually has to land on a tile that can either support soil or not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need top soil before I can plant potatoes?
Yes. Potatoes can only be planted on tiles that have top soil placed on them, and tterraforming workflow guides through this in the farming section, and the terraforming workflow guide covers the broader reshape order. Until your soil block is in place, your Kitchen will rely on whatever the Home Spaceship produces.
How do canals and rivers interact with top soil?
Canals and rivers feed water into soil blocks, but the water must be routed correctly or it will flood the soil. The developer recommends a short canal that taps an existing river on the highest edge of the block, so water flows gently across the farmland rather than pooling in one corner. If a canal reroute is planned, remove the soil first and reapply it after the new path is settled.
What terrain is worth reshaping vs. leaving alone?
Tiles that are flat, near a water source, and free from pollution are worth reshaping. Tiles that are steep, sit in a planned canalecosystem health guidee surrounding system is built. The ecosystem health guide covers how pollution makes soil placement more expensive over time.
Are trees and top soil competing for the same tiles?
In some cases, yes, but the game lets you place both. Forests and farmland work best forest guide any industrial core and soil blocks near the Kitchen. The developer's forest guide explains how trees feed back into biome health and offset pollution, which is why most players use both layers rather than choosing one.
What happens if I place top soil on the wrong tile?
The tile can be cleared of top soil and reused, which is the cheapest recovery path. If the misplaced soil is part of a larger block, the developer recommends removing the lowest-value tiles first (usually the ones furthest from the Kitchen) so the core block stays intact. Removal does not require a flatten step, which makes it faster than the initial placement.