Starfield crew
With our guide on assembling and assigning a top-tier Starfield crew, you can leave resource collection to your friendly NPCs.
Ships and outposts are two incredibly important aspects of Starfield’s gameplay, and staffing them with the best Starfield crew means you can benefit you in the short and long run. From getting resources to expand your outposts, to providing extra hands on deck throughout your fleet of Starfield ships, you’re going to spend much of the game relying on your workers, so it’s important to get used to the concept early on before you’re overwhelmed with NPCs trying to sign up for a space in your team.
Companions are, as we mentioned earlier, possible crew choices, so make sure to read up on our full companions guide so you can decide whose skills complement your ship build and outpost the most. Or, if you’re looking for populated cities to find new crew members, check out our interactive New Atlantis Map and Akila City Map.
What does “crew” mean in Starfield?
A crew member is different from a companion, though the latter does fall into your larger pool of Starfield crew. Your crew are NPCs that you hire from across the Settled Systems to work aboard your ship and/or in your outposts. Putting together a substantial crew is essential to keeping big and complicated ships working, with several modules having a crew requirement. Similarly, outposts require staff to run the various workstations, resource extractors, and buildings.
Without a crew, you’ll find yourself with very limited ship designs, or with bases that don’t produce a lot.
Here are all of the Starfield crew members you can recruit:
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Where do I find the best Starfield crew?
You can find new crew members throughout the Settled Systems. Some, like Marika Boros, like to hang out at spaceports in search of a dependable captain. Others, like poor Heller, can be found stranded on desolate moons or in the crash sites of various ships. You’ll more than likely encounter a wide variety of human crew members throughout your journey, and as rewards for quests.
The best Starfield crew members are often companions, with characters like Sarah Morgan, Barrett, and Sam Coe coming in handy as an extra experienced hand on your ship with their own special skills. However, other NPC companions do have some of their own skills, as you can see in the graphic below with Heller’s specialties in Geology and Outpost Engineering. Either way, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the skills of any new crew members so you can put them to work doing something they’re well equipped to approach.
In general, characters with tech skills are best placed on your ships, while science skills make a potential crew member ideal for placing at an outpost. Taking that into account, you’ll want to befriend or romance as many companions as possible to reap the most rewards from your crew.
How do I assign Starfield crew?
Now that you know how to find Starfield crew members, it’s time to put them to work. We’ve got bullet-point instructions for doing just that below, so check it out.
- Open the main menu and select the ship menu in the bottom-left corner.
- From the ship menu, select the ‘crew’ option.
- Select each crew member individually and hit the action button to assign them. If you have no outposts, the only option is to have them on your home ship, so it’s worth establishing at least one outpost in the early game.
Once you’ve selected specific roles for crew members, you can see what skills they’re utilizing in their work by the white highlight that surrounds a skill. It might take a bit of time to figure out who goes where, but it’s well worth testing a few combinations of crew members out to find out your most efficient setup.
How do I get rid of Starfield crew?
Well… there is one permanent solution that comes to mind, but you’ll probably want to avoid putting a shotgun to the back of every NPC that annoys you, just like the Adoring Fan.
Your crew is amazingly useful, so it could be more beneficial for you to send your less desirable crewmates to a distant outpost that you don’t think about very often. Considering that you can create trade routes between your outposts – allowing a constant stream of supplies – this option means you can still benefit from unwanted crew, even if you don’t want them anywhere near you.
It’s also worth pointing out that some have reported issues with losing crew members forever after unassigning them. We’re not quite sure if this is a Starfield bug or a nuance of removing a worker from a location, but if you don’t want to risk never seeing Lin again, be sure that your workers are always assigned to a specific job. If you do want to wave goodbye, though, the most simple option might just be to unassign your crew members from their roles and hope they tire of doing nothing all day.
For a better idea of how some of your Starfield crew skills work, head over to our skill database for more information. Or, if you prefer to go it alone, arm yourself for solo combat with our guides to Starfield legendary weapon effects and legendary armor effects.