Stars Reach How to Play: A Step-by-Step Path From Haven to Your First Homestead

The whole route at a glance

The table is the short version of this page. Each row is one step, what you actually do, and the build that last changed it. If you are coming back after a break, the third column shows which steps work differently from how you remember them.

Step 1 — Haven, mission by mission

Haven starts with a short area where you can practise movement and camera at your own pace. Follow the waypoint to Mayor Bob. He gives you a datapad and a starting kit. GUNC's guide lists that kit as a Grapple, Pathfinder, Pulsar, Terraformer and Harvester, and these basic versions are good enough for your first days. Do not spend Klaatus on duplicates of them.

Bob then sends you to three neighbours. The missions can arrive in any order, so work on whichever one is active:

1. Clint Rockford wants five Pyroxene. This is the only Haven mission that leaves the planet: you ride the Sky Skiff to Crucible, a rougher instanced area. Equip the Terraformer, press Tab, select Pyroxene and scan with E. The map marker only shows the search area, not the deposit itself.
2. Brunsa (written 'Bruna' in some guides) is in Haven's central park. She teaches the Pathfinder: follow its sound, compass and node colours to three survey nodes, and the map fills in as you go.
3. Gahgrum's mission is the longest. Hunt one batch of ingredients and harvest another (ten ingredients per batch), cook both at Good Leaf Kitchen, and hand in one finished food of each.
4. To hand in to an NPC, open the trade window, set the right quantity, press Set Offer, then press Trade.
5. When all three are done, return to Mayor Bob before you take the portal out.
6. Optional lessons, added in 8.4.0, cover camps and saving your state, dodge rolls and combat, the grapple, and the Harvester and collections. Do the camp lesson at least, because camps matter a lot later.

Click to play · loads YouTube — Stars Reach — Day 1: First 75 Minutes & Tutorial Guide, by Mature Minded Gamers

Haven snags that stall people, and the fix for each

Step 2 — Leaving Haven: the Starbase and the map

The portal out of Haven leads to space. The Transplanetary League (TPL) Starbase is where you find the Mission Boards, a Skill Kiosk, the Tool Shop, the bank and the public market. Since 8.5.0 a Space Map shows every portal and wormhole in the space zones along with its destination. 8.6.0 added the first Galactic Map, which shows how sectors connect and gives basic information about each one.

Here is how players described the layout in the Steam thread 'What do I do?' (September 2026). Each star system has two stable, habitable planets, reached through wormholes surrounded by cubes. It also has wild wormholes, which look spiral rather than cubed and lead to planets you cannot settle on. Players disagree on how many systems there are. One reply in 'What Do I Do?' (9 September) says five. A reply in 'placing homesteads' says six, counting an asteroid-only sector called Pewazi. The official notes give no count, so treat both as snapshots of a galaxy that changes.

When you go through a portal, the travel screen now shows that planet's mayor and Servitor edicts (8.7.0). Read it. Edicts are why a deposit that looks perfect can earn you a warning when you mine it. Our crafting and resources guide explains how edicts work.

Step 3 — Claim and place your free homestead

Homesteading is the quickest way to give yourself a goal, and since 8.5.0 (3 September) you no longer have to earn the deed first. The steps:

1. Enter any Space zone. Every character, new or old, gets a one-time Homesteader there, even with a full inventory (8.5.0).
2. Claim Fabricators, the tool that places and rotates building pieces, for free from your Homestead Console or the Tool Shop. They have no durability and can't be sold on the market (8.5.0).
3. Don't place on a wild wormhole planet. Players report that access to those planets is intermittent, the planets are eventually replaced, and people lost homesteads that way (Steam, 'placing homesteads').
4. Visit the town first. A Steam reply in 'What Do I Do?' advises asking a planet's citizens before you build, because some groups have planned roads and parks.
5. Place it. Since 8.4.5 the game asks you to confirm the spot, and answering No returns the Homesteader to your inventory. You can also set the homestead in the air so its bottom edge rests on the surface, which avoids half-buried plots.
6. Building with blocks needs an Instaformer and paths need a Paver. Both are tier-2 recipes on a Circuit Bench II, or you can buy them at the Item Shop (8.5.0).
7. Terrain shields are on by default on homesteads and zoning lots since 8.7.2, so dirt and rock from outside won't flow into your plot.

Step 4 — Pick one skill line, and why grinding alone doesn't work

Press K to look through the skill trees anywhere. To actually learn a skill you need a Skill Kiosk (there is one at the Starbase), and skills cost Klaatus. A Steam beginner's guide from August describes the active-skill limit as a pool shown as x/80 points, with a cooldown before you can reactivate a skill you turned off. In 8.7.0 the studio said it is 'exploring raising the skill cap'. There are no classes. Your character is whatever set of skills you keep in practice plus the tools you carry.

The rule that confuses most new players: you earn experience in a tree by doing that tree's work with its tool, then spend it at a Skill Kiosk along with Klaatus. Mining with the Terraformer earns Mineralogy experience; crafting a recipe earns Crafting experience; dealing damage earns experience in that weapon's tree. The 2024 design post framed this as experience for useful or risky action, and patches have added more routes since. Business experience comes from trading with other players (8.4.0), scanning creatures with the Bioscanner gives Xenobiology experience (8.4.0), and healing earns experience outside combat too (8.4.3).

In practice, start with something that pays off on its own. Mining, harvesting, combat and creature scanning progress without customers. Crafting and support trees pay out when other people use your work. Since 8.6.0, which recipes you can craft depends on your active skills, so choose a crafting line on purpose rather than spreading across all of them.

Step 5 — Earn Klaatus: how missions work after the 8.7.0 rework

The currency is Klaatus, not credits. Missions are the most dependable early income. At the Starbase, walk to a Mission Board, press G, choose View Missions and pick a planet. A planet can have its own board once its GovBot reaches level 2 and the town buys and places one, and that board only offers missions on that planet (GUNC missions guide).

Several rules have changed since launch. 8.4.5 renamed the difficulty labels from easy, moderate and challenging to near, mid and far, because difficulty was really travel distance. 8.7.0 replaced the old limit of one mission per type with a flat carry limit of three Mission Board missions, and you can take the same type more than once. It also added multi-step chains and branching choices whose outcome can differ each time. One player in 'A few stupid questions' (30 September) said the mission tier sets both the work and the payout, and suggested tier 1 for short sessions.

Which missions you can do depends on the tools you carry:

• Harvest: follow the waypoint and hold left mouse on the marked plant with the Harvester.
• Survey: the waypoint only gets you close. Search with the Pathfinder and turn back if you are more than about 30 metres from the marker.
• Find: the object is often buried a few metres down. Dig it out, press G and choose Collect.
• Kill: the creature spawns when you enter the mission area. If you retreat out of the area, it resets to full health.
• Heal: needs a Healix. Look near the spawn point for the named creature at about half health.
• Stuck on one? Press L and abandon it, then take another.

Step 6 — Travel further: wormholes, wild planets and camps

Once you have some Klaatus and a base, look past the two settled planets in each system. According to the studio's Wild Wormholes post, wild wormholes stay open for a random length of time and lead to planets beyond Servitor space. Players in Steam threads say those planets are where untouched resources are, because the settled ones get mined out.

Each planet's Servitor edicts list materials you shouldn't take. Raph Koster explained on Reddit (26 August) that if you collect too many warnings, Servitor drones will follow you or even attack, although you can fight them off.

Bring a camp. A Steam beginner's guide describes the camp kit as having tier-I crafting stations and a Re-Life pad, so you respawn nearby instead of back at the world station. GUNC adds that camps save your carried items, let you change your loadout, clear wounds and set a closer Last Station. Check your gear before long trips too: 8.7.0 fixed a bug that let a broken Grav Mesh keep working, so repair yours.

Step 7 — Party up, because few people are online

The Better Together update (8.6.0) added real parties. Type /party invite followed by a name, or right-click a player's name in chat. Other commands include /party accept, /party list, /party leave, /party kick, /party promote and /party disband. A party gets its own chat tab, and party members in the same zone show up as waypoints in the world and on the map. 8.7.0 added a compact roster next to the chat box that shows up to 10 members with their health and wounds. There is also a Friends button by the chat box (8.5.0).

This is worth doing because the server is quiet. Valve's Steam API reported 8 players online at 09:00 UTC on 11 October 2026. A player in 'What Do I Do?' put it plainly: you'll have the most fun right now by playing with a group, whatever your playstyle. The official Discord runs weekly community events, and the studio's Starside posts list them.

Beginner mistakes, and what to do instead

1. Leaving Haven before the three missions are done. Finish them and go back to Mayor Bob first.
2. Buying copies of Mayor Bob's tools. His basic Grapple, Pathfinder, Terraformer and Harvester are enough to start. Craft better ones once you know which material stats you want.
3. Placing the homestead on the first planet you see, or on a wild wormhole planet. Look around and talk to the town first.
4. Mining without checking edicts. Read the portal travel screen or the GovBot before you dig.
5. Repeating an action alone and wondering why your experience bar isn't moving. Experience comes from being useful or taking risks.
6. Expecting an unlocked ability to appear on your bar by itself. Each tool has two ability slots: right-click the tool in a safe area to choose which abilities it carries (8.1.5).
7. Trying to swap tools out in the open. Do it at a portal, camp, homestead or zoning lot.
8. Taking far missions with starter gear. Since 8.7.0 you can carry three at once, so stack three nearby jobs on the same planet instead.
9. Playing alone on a server this quiet. Form a party, join a planet's town and go to the Discord events.