Beyond These Stars Gardens Guide: Decorations & Happiness
Learn how beyond these stars gardens and decoration buildings like the Hedge Garden, Wild Flowers, and Fountain lift Peep happiness on your space whale.
Published: Beyond These Stars Wiki Editorial Team
Video Guide
Beyond These Stars Building Showcase 2 - Huts, Gardens and the Water PumpTable of Contents
Gardens and Decoration Buildings in Beyond These Stars
Building a city on the back of a space whale is not only about supply chains; your Peeps also need places to unwind. Balancing Monkey Games' city-builder includes a dedicated decoration category in its technology tree, and community playthrough footage shows the tech tree's categories running from accommodation and agriculture through power, terraforming, and logistics — ending in decoration.
The decorations players most commonly build are garden-type structures: the Hedge Garden, Wild Flowers, and the Fountain. Community videos show the Hedge Garden and Wild Flowers unlocking early — both become available after your colony has produced around 20 power in total — while the Fountain arrives a little later once your town has grown. Exact unlock thresholds have not been officially published, so treat those figures as community-reported approximations.
Decoration
What Community Footage Shows
Typical Placement
Hedge Garden
Unlocks early, alongside Wild Flowers
Between housing and industry as a green buffer
Wild Flowers
Unlocks early, alongside Hedge Garden
Dotted around rest spots and walkways
Fountain
Becomes constructible later in a town's growth
Town squares and central gathering areas
Meadows & benches
Also reported by players as decorations
Anywhere Peeps pass through or take breaks
How Decorations Help: The Happiness Loop
Peeps lose happiness while working — depending on where they work, and pollution makes it worse — and they recover it by eating, drinking, and relaxing between shifts. Community-shared guidance from the game's own tutorials puts decorations squarely in that recovery loop: placing decorative buildings where Peeps go to relax makes their breaks more effective, and footage of the game notes that decorative buildings with active adjacency effects are especially strong for happiness.
Situation
Without Gardens
With Gardens Nearby
Peep on a work break
Happiness recovers slowly
Relaxing near decorations recovers more happiness
Industrial district workers
Pollution drags morale down
Green buffers soften the visual and morale grind
New arrivals settling in
Few reasons to linger
Decorated routes give resting Peeps somewhere pleasant to visit
Diagnose Before You Decorate
If decorations are not lifting a Peep's mood, check their happiness graph first — selecting a Peep and hovering over the expanded graph shows the exact modifiers. Pollution overriding your gardens is a cleaning problem, not a decoration problem.
Placement Tips for Decoration Gardens
You can preview unlocked adjacency effects while placing a building, so use that overlay when positioning gardens. The community consensus is simple: spread decorations through the spaces Peeps actually use rather than walled off in one showpiece park.
Map the Rest Spots: Watch where Peeps idle between shifts — around homes and food buildings — and place gardens within a short walk.
Line the Industrial Edge: Use Hedge Gardens as a soft border between housing and your smoky production quarter.
Anchor the Town Center: Once the Fountain unlocks, community players like to make it the centerpiece of their main plaza.
Re-check Adjacency: Some decorative buildings gain extra happiness from being visited, so keep them reachable rather than fenced behind storage sheds.
Happiness Powerhouses
Community guidance describes decorative buildings with active adjacency as the strongest happiness tools in the game — worth pairing with the buildings they boost.
Greenery and Kewa
Gardens are part of a broader greenery picture: planting trees and restoring flora also matters to Kewa's ecosystem, so decorations and environmental care reinforce each other.
Decoration gardens such as the Hedge Garden, Wild Flowers, and Fountain give relaxing Peeps a happiness boost when they visit or rest near them. They are quality-of-life buildings, not production buildings.
How much happiness do decorations add?
Exact values are not officially documented. Community footage confirms the mechanic — decorations make breaks more effective, and decorated adjacency can be powerful — but any precise percentage you see quoted is an approximation.
When can I build gardens?
Community playthroughs show the Hedge Garden and Wild Flowers unlocking very early, around the time your colony has produced roughly 20 power in total, with the Fountain arriving later. Check the decoration category of your own tech tree for the in-game requirements.
Do gardens replace pollution cleanup?
No. Pollution lowers happiness no matter how many flowers you plant. If Peeps stay unhappy, clean the toxic tiles with cleaners and trees first, then let your gardens do their job.
