How to assign Starfield crew and use their skills

By recruiting and assigning Starfield crew members, they'll be able to run outposts and utilize their skill aboard your ship, making things far more efficient. You'll meet a lot of interesting NPCs as you complete missions in Starfield, explore, and get boozy in a spaceport’s watering hole, and many of these are looking for work. It's tough out there.

Once you've got these new recruits on board, you'll need to decide whether they're best suited as an outpost manager or a skilled spacefarer aboard one of your ships, and I can help you do just that with this guide to recruiting and assigning Starfield crew members.

How to recruit Starfield crew members

Recruiting more Starfield crew is essential if you want productive outposts and buffed starships. There are two main ways to get more crew members in Starfield:

• Hire people looking for work at spaceports and bars: Spaceports and bars in major Starfield cities often have specialists looking for work. Most of them have a couple of Skills, so they’re good for filling gaps, but others offer more, so look around, their skills are shown on screen before you hire them. You’ll also need to pay them an upfront fee when hiring them.
• Explore and complete missions to find new recruits: Plenty of crew members can be unlocked just through playing missions, especially the Constellation main missions as these unlock Constellation members as crew and companions. For example, after saving Moara in Starfield, you can find him in Cydonia, ready to be recruited to your crew.

Be aware that recruiting a crew member is not the same as a companion that follows you around. In short, all Starfield companions are crew members, but not all crew members are companions. You can get companions to follow you by asking them to tag along, but crew members need to be assigned to posts if you want to use them.

How to assign crew in Starfield

When you’ve recruited some crew members in Starfield, you need to assign them so that they apply their Skills wherever you place them. Here’s how you assign Starfield crew members to stations:

1. Open the main menu and select the Ship menu.
2. Follow the button prompt at the bottom to open the ‘Crew’ menu and view all your available crew members in the roster.
3. Scroll down the roster list and follow the button prompt to assign your chosen crew member to a station.
4. Choose an assignment from the list, such as one of your ships or outposts, and that crew member will head off to their assigned location. The Skills that become highlighted in white are the ones that the crew member is using at their post.

To assign crew members to an outpost, you must have built a Crew Station for them to live in. You can increase the number of crew members that an outpost can hold with more Crew Stations and by upgrading the Outpost Management Skill to Rank 3. Meanwhile, the number of crew members you can assign to a ship is determined by the number of Crew Stations it has. Increase the number of crew stations during Starfield ship customization, by using a better cockpit, adding better habs and more of them (this will require the Starship Design Skill), and by upgrading the Ship Command Skill.

Assignments aren’t permanent, so you can reassign and unassign people via the Crew menu when your ship has landed to optimize your operations, just like how you can dismiss and team up with companions. However, it’s obviously important to make sure you’re assigning crew to where they’ll be most helpful.

How Starfield crew Skills work

Each Starfield crew member has one to four Skills, from the same options as the player, ranked with one to four stars. When a companion is assigned to a location, they’ll apply their relevant Starfield Skills, therefore providing some extra benefits. For example, robo-pal Vasco has three starship-related Skills, so if you assign him to your starship, it’ll receive the benefits of those Skills. Similarly, Lin and Heller also have outpost-related Skills, so send both to one of your outposts for better management.

However, you never directly receive the benefits of a crew member’s Skills. Take Sarah Morgan and her Botany Skill, which increases the rarity and quantity of resources looted from plants. Having Sarah around as a companion does not give you these benefits as though you had the Skill unlocked. Instead, only Sarah has these benefits, and occasionally she’ll offer you what she finds as a gift. The same goes for Barrett and his Gastronomy Skill, as he can offer you nice food items every so often, but you can’t cook them yourself.

Best Starfield crew

Crew Skills can’t be improved or changed in any way, so try to assign crew members in such a way to ensure there are as few Skill gaps as possible. With that in mind, it’s usually a good idea to keep crew with Tech Skills assigned to ships, and those with Science and Social Skills assigned to outposts to get the most out of them. A crew member with good Combat and Physical Skills can make for a good combat companion, such as Andreja.

These are just some examples of the best crew members to hire, and where to place them:

• VASCO, found at The Lodge on Jemison - Ship crew
• Heller, found at Dalvik on Narion - Outpost management
• Lin, found at Vectera on Narion - Outpost management
• Rafael Aguerro, found at The Viewport on Jemison - Ship crew or Outpost management
• Erick Von Price, found at Jane's Goods on Mars - Ship crew

The above crew all have two or three high-tier skills suited to a particular profession, but any crew is better than none, and you can always move people around as needed. Just talk to people, and see who fits your needs the best.

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