Beyond These Stars Ending Guide: How to Get the Good Ending

Beyond These Stars has two endings, and only one thing decides which one you get: how healthy Kewa’s biome is when you reach the end. Nothing you say in the final conversation changes it, and nor do earlier dialogue choices. The game looks at two parts of the Kewa Health bar, the yellow Biome Improvement section and the purple Toxic Areas section, at the moment the last conversation with Kewa plays.

If Kewa’s health is above 85% when you enter the black hole, you’re guaranteed the good ending. Below that, use the table further down to check how much room you have.

How the game picks your ending

The check happens once, during Kewa’s final conversation, which starts as soon as you complete the Enter the Black Hole goal. Your answers in that conversation all lead to the same check, so pick whatever you like.

The rule compares the size of the purple and yellow sections, measured as a share of the whole Kewa Health bar:

So a Kewa with almost no toxic tiles can still get the good ending with a fair amount of biome left to improve. Every patch of toxic muck makes the biome target stricter. The orange Overheating section doesn’t count toward the ending at all.

The good ending earns New Beginnings and the bad ending earns Bad Friend. You need both for a full achievement list, so keep a save from before the black hole.

Reading the Kewa Health bar

The bar sits on the left of the Info Bar when you’re on the Galaxy Map. It’s split into colours:

• Green is Kewa’s current health.
• Yellow is health you can gain by improving Kewa’s biome. This is the section the ending cares about most.
• Purple appears when Toxic Areas are damaging the biome. Clean them up to shrink it.
• Orange appears when Kewa is overheated. Moving somewhere cool slowly removes it.

Until water flows down to Kewa’s lower plate, part of the bar is blocked off. Each plate can only ever provide half of Kewa’s biome health, so the good ending needs the lower plate settled and green as well as the first. Reaching the lower plate earns the That Feels Better achievement.

Shrinking the yellow section

The yellow section shrinks as you score points on each of Kewa’s plates. Each plate has four parts, and each part is worth up to 12.5% of the whole bar:

Each part fills in proportion. A plate with 150 Peeps gets half the Peep credit, and a plate where 5% of the land has Forest that counts gets half the forest credit. Kewa skin, glacier and water tiles aren’t counted as land, so they never drag the score down.

That gives you a clear order of work:

1. Make the land breathable. Forests create a breathable area around them, and two or more Forests next to each other spread it further. This part needs every land tile, so it’s usually the last one you’ll finish.
2. Plant Forest on fertile Dirt until one tile in ten is covered. A Forest only counts while it stands on breathable Dirt within 12 tiles of a water source, so a Forest on bare ground or far from water adds nothing to this part. Forest past 10% adds nothing either, and every Dirt tile you cover with Forest stops counting as fertile ground. Once you have a Tree Nursery (unlocked by producing 10 Compost), you can plant new Forests with Saplings.
3. Keep open Dirt near water. Roads and most buildings on a Dirt tile stop it counting as fertile ground. Decorations such as Wild Flowers, Park Benches and Fountains don’t, so put them on fertile tiles instead of paving over them. Spreading Compost with a Landscaper turns bare ground into Dirt.
4. Grow both plates to 300 Peeps. Peeps on planets don’t count, only Peeps living on Kewa’s plates.

Keeping the purple section small

Every 10 Toxic tiles on Kewa’s plates take up 1% of the bar. Up to 100 Toxic tiles keeps you in the first row of the table. From 101 the biome target gets stricter, and more than 400 locks you into the bad ending.

Toxic Areas grow out of heavy pollution. Every 15 minutes the game looks for a connected patch of polluted tiles. High pollution tiles count 2 points, Very High tiles count 3, and Medium tiles join a patch together without adding points. A patch worth 18 points or more turns toxic. On Kewa, each new Toxic Area also costs 100 of Kewa’s happiness.

Prevent it first:

• Keep High and Very High pollution apart. A ring of Medium tiles connecting two dirty clusters is enough to merge them into one patch.
• Run Cleaners near your heavy industry so tiles drop back below High. See the By-Products guide for keeping them supplied with Soot.
• The Inoculated Soil perk doubles the time between Toxic Area checks.

Then clean up what does form:

• The Toxic Tile Scraper unlocks the first time a Toxic Area appears. It uses no resources, but its workers lose a lot of Energy handling the muck.
• The Improved Toxic Tile Scraper uses Protective Clothing to protect its workers and disappears once the area is clean. It becomes available after you’ve produced Protective Clothing.
• A Cleaner can also clean Toxic tiles within 6 tiles, using 8 Chemicals per task.

The road to the black hole

The final stretch is a chain of goals. Use the time it takes to get Kewa’s health up, because the check happens as soon as you arrive.

1. Build a Stardust Collector, produce Stardust, and fully research Stardust at a Research Facility.
2. Build the Disinfector and research the Chorus Aerial with 200 Stardust.
3. Build four Chorus Aerials. Each one needs its own settled planet, since you can only place one per planet and none on Kewa.
4. Complete Enter the Black Hole. Kewa’s final conversation starts right away.

If you’re short of the target when the Chorus Aerials go up, there’s no timer pushing you on. Hold off on the black hole, clean up toxic tiles, and keep planting until the yellow and purple sections are where you need them.

Two other achievements are checked here too: Friend of Kewa for getting Kewa’s health above 85% at any point, and Perkless for finishing a story playthrough without spending a single perk point.