Crew

Crew help your ship with various functions. Every crew member comes with an associated Agenda. Each crew member has exactly one of the four different professions: Geologist, Astrogator, Mechanic, and Pilot.

Crew members have two shown stats - Education and Experience. They are continuous, but the interface only shows "milestones" of skill - for example, if someone's education is shown as "Self-Taught", that may mean an internal education stat anywhere from 0 to 0.25. Each profession has two skills, each scaling with one of the stats. Crew members also have a mostly-hidden Morale stat, which affects their skills.

Professions

Geologist

Education skill: Price prediction accuracy. Determines accuracy of price prediction by your geologist - both on station in Mineral Market and during ring dive.

Experience skill: Mineral discovery range. Geologist will estimate compositions and prices of minerals within a radius around your ship.

• Without a geologist on board, it's not possible to identify compositions of mineral chunks (except visually - they look differently depending on mineral and purity). This makes them rather essential crew members.

Astrogator

Education skill: Tactical awareness range. Astrogator will highlight ships around you by their transponders.

• Fairly essential to be able to detect threats, derelicts, and other ships outside of visual range.

Experience skill: Coordinate tracking time. The constantly shifting planescape of the rings makes it challenging to trace a specific location. Your astrogator will be able to keep track of them for a limited time.

• Without an astrogator on board, you won't be able to astrogate to waypoints. If at any moment you end up without any astrogators in your employ, you will furthermore lose all saved waypoints. This makes having an astrogator essential.

Mechanic

Education skill: Jury-rig efficiency. Changes how far mechanic can push your ship systems in OMS menu during ringdive.

• Can be very useful, e.g. turning a critical reactor leak that would cause the ship to run out of propellant in seconds into a merely concerning one.

Experience skill: Repair limit. Extends how much your mechanic can repair during maintenance on Enceladus prime station.

• Most equipment is significantly cheaper to repair than to replace (although some isn't), so this allows saving on repairs.
• Note, however, that repairs take more time that replacements, and you'll have to pay for crew wages and hotels in the meantime, which for large and skilled crews may be more expensive than the repair savings.

Pilot

Education skill: Adrenal slowdown. When in danger, pilot's perception of time will slow down.

• Available even without a pilot, albeit only a small slowdown.

Experience skill: Course anticipation. Pilot will predict the course of your ship and all surrounding objects to determine if ship is in danger of collision.

• This automatically enables adrenal slowdown if a collision is predicted to happen in that time, given the current velocity.
• Often toggles unnecessarily.