How to increase Crew Capacity in Starfield
How to get more crew for your ship and outposts.
Increasing crew capacity in Starfield is the ideal way of ensuring that your Outposts and your Ship runs smoothly while you're elsewhere. It's particularly useful to have crew members or companions with skills suited to specific environments or systems assigned to your ship and Outposts to boost productivity.
As with a lot of aspects of Starfield, increasing your crew capacity will take a little time as well as a few Credits here and there. Also, we highly recommend spending time levelling up your character to collect skill points to spend, you'll see why you need them in a bit.
Without further ado, we're here to show you how to increase crew capacity in Starfield.
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If you’d like more help in your galactic adventures, visit our Starfield guides, tips and tricks page.
How to increase Ship Crew Capacity in Starfield
To increase your Ship crew capacity in Starfield, you need to upgrade different areas of your ship with modules that increase your maximum crew capacity and you should increase your 'Ship Command' skill to its highest rank. However, you first need to know how to figure out your current crew capacity.
How to find out your ship's crew capacity
Your ship's crew capacity is decided based on whichever of the following areas of your ship or character have the lowest 'crew' number:
- Your combined crew capacity - The number of crew members your ship can hold spread between the capacity's stated on Reactor, Weapon, Engine and Shield modules.
- The total number of crew stations in your cockpit and other modules.
- How many active crew members you are allowed based on your 'Ship Command' Skill.
If that sounds a bit too complicated, we found two much easier ways of finding out how many crew members your ship can hold.
The easiest way is to go into your ship Overview screen in the pause menu and your ship details will tell you how many crew members it can currently have.
However, if you want to know your capacity and how many crew member slots you have left, follow these simple steps:
- Head to your Crew menu through the Ship Overview screen in your pause menu.
- Select a crew member/companion and select the 'Assign' option.
- A list will then appear of the places you can assign them to.
- Next to the name of your ship will be two numbers, such as 3/5. This tells you that your Ship has five crew slots, with three already filled. This means there is space for two more crew members with your current crew capacity.
Upgrade your Ship Modules
Different ship manufacturers tailor their modules to different needs, some will have a lower crew capacity to focus on combat, while others will have a higher crew capacity and crew stations to focus on research and exploration. It's worth shopping around to find out which modules you want to buy for boosting your overall capacity.
When you're shopping for a module at a ship technician, you'll get a small box appear on the left side of the screen that shows you details about the module which will include the amount of crew it can support or the amount of crew stations it has.
The more you combine modules with a higher crew capacity, the more crew you can get on your ship - provided that you have increased your 'Ship Command' skill.
Upgrade Ship Command Skill
The Ship Command skill is in the final tier of the skills in the 'Social' category. The skill allows you to increase the amount of crew members you can have assigned to your ship. We highly recommend upgrading this skill once you reach it.
Here's a list of the Ship Command skill's ranks and rewards:
- Rank One - You can have up to four active crew members.
- Rank Two - You can have up to five active crew members.
- Rank Three - You can have up to six active crew members.
- Rank Four - You can have up to eight active crew members.
How to increase Outpost Crew Capacity in Starfield
To increase your Outpost crew capacity you need to build more crew stations within your Outpost. The more stations you place down while building your Outpost, the more crew stations you can have assigned there.
Crew stations can be found in the 'Misc' inventory tab when you're building your Outpost. Also, if you increase the Outpost Management skill to rank three you can host more crew at all of your Outposts.
You can find out how many crew members you can have at an Outpost by doing the following:
- Head to your Crew menu through the Ship Overview screen in your pause menu.
- Select a crew member/companion and select the 'Assign' option.
- A list will then appear of the places you can assign them to and next to the name of the ship/outpost will be your current crew limit for that specific Outpost.
If you're looking for a new ship, check out our guides showing you how to get the Kepler R ship, the Star Eagle ship and the Narwhal.