What You Are Actually Doing
You are not building a city from scratch on empty land. You are building on a living creature. Kewa the space whale is your entire map, its back is your surface, and its health determines how good your land produces. That one idea explains every system in the game: extraction, ecology, trade, and research all compete for the same whale.
A new colony fails when it treats Kewa like an infinite resource. Grow gently, repair as you go, and the whale will carry you a very long way.
How to Read Your Resource Bars
Every core resource has a production bar and a consumption bar. The number that matters is the ratio between them, and understanding this is most of the early game.
Ratio Bands
| Ratio | Meaning | What to Do |
|---|---|---|
| Above 1.5 | Large surplus | Safe to expand one production line |
| 1.1 to 1.5 | Healthy surplus | The band you want to sit in |
| 1.0 to 1.1 | Break-even | Stop expanding and build storage |
| Below 1.0 | Deficit | Fix this before anything else |
The Four Core Resources
- Power feeds everything. A blackout stops farms, labs and extractors at once.
- Oxygen caps your population. Low air quality gets colonists into trouble before food runs out.
- Biomass is the feedstock that nutrient processes turn into food.
- Nutrients feed the hydroponic farms. Starved farms underproduce food.
Your First Five Buildings
Do not improvise your opening. Placement order matters more than placement speed, and this sequence keeps the colony solvent from cycle one.
Opening Build Order
- Solar Array for steady power. Everything you build next depends on it.
- Habitat Dome so your starting colonists have somewhere to sleep.
- Minerals Extractor for the construction material your next buildings need.
- Hydroponic Farm so food is a buffer rather than a daily emergency.
- Warehouse so the surplus you are about to produce is not wasted.
Wait for the Research Lab
The sixth building is a Research Lab, and you should only place it once every resource bar sits above 1.0. A lab running on an empty mineral supply stalls research and wastes the building.
Skip the Comforts
Inns, bathhouses and statues all look appealing and all draw power and materials you do not have yet. Build them once your ratios are stable.
Your First Research
When you finally unlock the Research Lab, the order you queue technology in determines how quickly the rest of the game opens up. Efficiency research pays for itself immediately because it shrinks every bill that follows.
First Research Queue
- 1. Resource Efficiency cuts extraction and processing costs across the board.
- 2. Supply Chain Optimisation raises output without adding new buildings.
- 3. Basic Ecology slows ecological decay before you open heavy extraction zones.
- 4. Advanced Power unlocks reactors for when your colony outgrows solar.
Build the Energy Cell Factory
Almost every advanced building and lab upgrade costs energy cells, and they are the resource most likely to run out mid-project. One Energy Cell Factory early prevents a long stall later.
Growing Your Population
Population growth is gated by housing, oxygen and morale together, so it stalls for three different reasons at once. Here is the order to fix them.
Growth Checklist
- Beds before people. Build or upgrade housing ahead of the population you expect.
- Oxygen next. Air quality caps how many colonists a district can support.
- Food at 1.3 times consumption. Starving colonists lose morale and leave.
- Morale is a resource. Keep food and oxygen healthy and add comfort buildings once you can afford them.
- Upgrades beat stacking. An Advanced Habitat holds more than a second dome and frees land.
Beginner Mistakes to Avoid
- Expanding before stabilising: adding buildings to a colony with a deficit simply scales the deficit.
- Strip-mining Kewa: a colony on a dying whale inherits the collapse. If yields drop on old ground, you are extracting too hard.
- Ignoring oxygen: crews fail before food runs out when air quality slips.
- Building storage last: production above storage capacity wastes every overproduced cycle.
- One-route dependency: a single power plant or a single trade partner is a single point of failure.
- Over-researching luxury: comfort tech before efficiency tech is a slow spiral you will feel for hours.
Where to Go Next
- Walkthrough: the five-phase progression from first settlement through the endgame, with milestone goals for each phase.
- Strategy Tips: resource priority order, early build order, ecology management and trade negotiation.
- Buildings: what every structure does, its requirements, and where it works best on Kewa's back.
- Pro Tips: buffer sizing, power redundancy, ecology routing and research acceleration for large colonies.