Crews! That's right, they're here. We've just implemented a new crew system that allows you to recruit members to your ship, assign them to positions and from those assignments gain stat boosts. Here's the gist of the mechanics.
- A crew member has a level, a class, stats (strength, speed, intellect), a personality type and an ability.
- Levels affect the effectiveness of a crew member's abilities, and the size of the team the crew member manages, the bigger the team, the more life support you'll need to support the crew member and their team.
- Stats will be used later for assignments and missions, where you deploy a crew member (or multiple crew members) to complete missions
- Each crew member has an ability, this ability yields improvements in a ship's stats. This ability might increase jump range, or decrease fuel usage, it might mean that generators use less fuel, or supply a greater amount of power.
- Each crew member has a personality, this personality affects other crew members (if your ship has more than one crew member), the personality can increase the effectiveness of other personality types, or decrease the effectiveness depending on the mix of personalities aboard your ship - no personality is inherently bad, but some are more useful than others, and some work better with others
Things to know:
- This is a big new update, although on its surface it may not seem like a lots changed, under the hood it has required major modifications to the core game code
- There's still new content to come, we're still introducing new personalities, new abilities, and the ability to send crew members on away missions, all of this will be coming over the next few weeks
- Crews are procedurally generated and still experimental! I haven't made available all the personality types and abilities yet. This means that, if you recruit a crew member now, your crew member's abilities and personality might change
- We're still updating related assets to match the new code. For example, some ships may not yet have crew slots available on them, these will be coming soon (a couple of days at most)
TL;dr the hard work developing the crew code is done, now the fun part of release lots of content on top this code begins, stay tuned over the next couple of weeks as we bring in loads of new content.
As always, please join us on Discord where you can share thoughts, feedback and complaints!