Crew

Crew play a vital role in Cosmoteer. Crew members are needed to deliver Power throughout the ship in the form of Batteries, move Resources between Storage and Production facilities or to Stations for trade, load Ammo into Projectile Weapons, and operate duty stations (e.g., a Cockpit or Sensor Array). With all these varied roles, effective crew management can save Credits, reduce ship size, and improve overall reliability.

Characteristics

In Career, crew can be hired by hailing Stations or friendly Ships and selecting the Hire Crew button at the top, provided your active ship has free crew beds for them in the form of Crew's Bunk or Crew's Quarters. The maximum number of crew that can be hired simultaneously is limited by the player's Fame, even if you have free crew beds available. An important game mechanic to know is the cost in Credits increases as crew are hired, but decreases as Fame is gained. Thus, it can sometimes be beneficial to wait and hire crew until your fame is higher to save on credits, hire crew after turning in a mission instead of before, and/or only hire as many crew as are truly needed (i.e., optimizing your ship).

Individual crew members come with a wide variety of skin tones, hair styles, hair colors, and randomized names; these are purely aesthetic as all crew can perform all tasks equally. If desired, players can customize their crew by opening the Manage Crew button of their ship, selecting the Roster button in the lower left, and right-clicking on the appropriate crew member to change.

Crew Movement

An individual crew member's base walk speed is 3.2 tiles / second, and is affected by several different things:

• Crew can only move orthogonally, not diagonally.
• Crew speed is the same whether they are carrying an item or not.
• All Parts have a Crew Speed factor, which is a simple multiplier that can be viewed in the statistics for that part:
  • Corridors have the default 100% multiplier, meaning crew walking through a Corridor walk at 3.2 tiles/second.
  • Moving Walkway tiles have different multipliers depending on what direction crew are moving relative to them (200% forwards, 75% sideways, and 25% backwards).
  • All other crew-accessible parts have a 50% multiplier.
• Crew members that run into each other will slow each other down, often referred to as crew congestion. Congestion halves each crew's speed multiplier, but will never lower their individual total multiplier below 30%. If the multiplier was already below 30%, it will not change.
• Parts affected by fire will slow down crew walking through them, on a per-tile basis. The slowdown is significant, dropping the multiplier to one-fifth its current value, but will never lower the total multiplier below 20%. If fire and congestion take effect on a tile simultaneously, fire takes priority and congestion is ignored.

All crew require Doors to move between ship parts (e.g., from a corridor into a storage bay). Crew also have the ability to use a ship's Airlock Hatch to exit the ship and perform Extravehicular Activities (E.V.A.) operations, such as repairing a damaged part, salvaging resources, or even moving to another area of the ship not accessible internally. While at least one crew are on E.V.A., your ship's speed indicator will change and instead show how many crew are not on board. Crew outside the ship have an Oxygen meter and will need to return to a friendly airlock to refresh their O2 before the meter runs out, else the crew member will perish.

Warning

When hiring crew, make sure to leave enough time for the new crew members to reach your ship before flying away!

Crew can be transferred in multiple ways by using the widgets menu on the ship and selecting Transfer Crew / Resources...:

• To another ship in your fleet, provided both ships have airlocks and the destination ship has free crew beds;
• To another player's ship in career co-op (thereby removing them from your roster and adding them to the recipient's), provided both ships have airlocks, the destination ship has free crew beds, and the recipient player has enough Fame;
• To a derelict (abandoned or wrecked) ship found through play in career, to take it over and add it to the player's fleet.

Crew Logistics

Main articles: § Crew Roles, and Crew Logistics Guide

As crew are required to move all resources and power throughout the ship, logistics plays an important role in the overall effectiveness of a given ship. Good logistics can be accomplished through a combination of crew beds placement (e.g., Crew's Quarters); distances between producers and consumers (e.g., between a Small Reactor Core producing batteries and a Laser Blaster consuming them), including both physical distance and logical distance (e.g., Moving Walkway usage); and task specialization through Crew Roles. Tradeoffs exist between all those factors, as well as the Credits and Fame limits of hiring additional crew. Mastering logistics can sway the outcome of a battle between two otherwise equally-matched ships.

Crew Roles

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