How to assign crew to ships and outposts in Starfield

Starfield is a game about exploring the unknown quarters of space, so assembling and assigning crew members to your starship and, eventually, your outposts is a crucial part of the fantasy.

As you explore the hub cities and watering holes strewn across Starfield, you’ll come across plucky pioneers who you can Persuade and pay to join your crew, each with their own set of unique skills to consider based on the skills you can choose during the level-up process. As such, some crew members are more efficient when assigned to outposts, while others can leverage their skills to help you in a dogfight.

To help you put together a team to rival the crew of the Planet Express, our Starfield crew assignment guide will show you how to assign crew to your ship and how to assign crew to your outposts — once you’ve picked the perfect planet to settle on, that is.

How to assign crew to your ship in Starfield

During Starfield’s opening missions, you’ll pick up your ship and gain crew members, like Vasco and Sarah Morgan, as part of the main questline. You might also encounter the Adoring Fan if you picked the Hero Worshipped trait during character creation.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

Once you’ve got pals on your team, you can choose how they are assigned by opening up the main menu and selecting the ship submenu in the bottom left corner. Then, you need to hit the Y button to enter the “Crew” screen.

From here, you’ll have a list of your available crew and some tabs across the top showing different designations across your current ship and outposts. Select the crew member you want to assign, and then hit the A button to prompt another menu where you can choose to assign them to your ship.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

Bear in mind that the amount of crew you can assign to your ship will depend on the rank of your Ship Command skill and the parts of your ship that contribute towards the crew capacity metric.

How to assign crew to an outpost in Starfield

To assign crew to an outpost in Starfield, you must first settle on a livable planet. To do this, hit LB to open up your scanner on the planet’s surface and place an Outpost Beacon with the X button. You also don’t have to stick to one outpost — you can have multiple outposts in Starfield and split your crew across them accordingly.

Once you have an outpost, you need to build and place a crew station within it to give your buddies a new home. A crew station costs two iron, five aluminum, and three nickel, so ensure you’ve mined or extracted those resources first.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

Once you’ve placed a crew station at your outpost, you can open up the main menu, select the ship submenu in the bottom left corner, and then hit the Y button to open the “Crew” screen.

From here, you can select the crew member you want to assign to an outpost with the A button, which will open up another submenu displaying all your available outposts. As long as your outpost has a crew station on-site, you will be able to station your crew members there.

If you want to have more crew assigned to an outpost, you will need to build more crew stations and upgrade your Outpost Management skill, which, at the third rank, allows you to assign additional crew to an outpost.