Star Atlas Crew Guide For Beginners

Star Atlas crew play an important role in the Star Atlas metaverse. In Star Atlas, crew serve as both your personal avatar and as operators of your ships and equipment. Leveling up crew will give your ships significant buffs and advantages over other players.

By leveling up crew members, players can assign skill points to eight different crew aptitudes and unlock different skills and bonuses depending on the role selected. As you can see, having leveled up crew with you can give you significant advantages in the game.

This guide will walk you through the ins and outs of Star Atlas crew mechanics and the roles they play in game. Before we dive into the different skills, it’s important to understand a few different concepts when it comes to crew.

Aptitude

Aptitudes in Star Atlas are similar to different skill trees or skill paths in other MMO games. In Star Atlas, there are 8 different aptitude trees that a crew can be leveled in. All crew are capable of leveling up in every aptitude, however leveling becomes more difficult the higher you go.  Crew aptitudes are generally meant to be specialized to reach maximum bonus levels.

The 8 different aptitudes are:

• Command: This aptitude increases the crew’s experience gained when assigned to the Admiral, Commander, and Captain’s roles.
• Flight: This aptitude increases the crew’s experience gained when assigned to the Navigator and Pilot’s role.
• Engineering: This aptitude increases the crew’s experience gained when assigned to Engineering roles.
• Medical: This aptitude increases the crew’s experience gained when assigned to Medical roles.
• Scientist: This aptitude increases the crew’s experience gained when assigned to Science roles.
• Operator: This aptitude increases the crew’s experience gained when assigned to the Weapons Operator, Drone Operator, and Rig Operator roles.
• Hospitality: This aptitude increases the crew’s experience gained when assigned to various support roles such as: Chef, Mixologist, Entertainer, Clerical Officer, Security, Manager, Foreman, and Janitor.

Crew Rarity

Just like ships, Star Atlas crew come in different rarity tiers ranging from Common to Anomaly.

Rarity determines the number of Major and Minor aptitudes a crew member has. If a crew member has a Minor aptitude, they gain XP 25% faster than normal. If a crew member has a Major aptitude, they gain XP 50% than normal.

Anomalous crew are the only crew that can have Anomalous aptitudes which grants a 100% XP rate gain. Individual crew can have multiple minor and major aptitudes.

Leveling Star Atlas Crew

Now that we have the basic understanding of how crew aptitudes are determined, let’s dive into leveling crew and the bonuses they provide.

Importantly, while crew can have multiple Major and Minor aptitudes, they can only gain experience in what ever their active assigned role is at the time.

For example, if a crew member is assigned to a ship as a drone operator, that crew member would level up their Operator aptitude whenever they gained experience points. If that crew member’s Minor or Major aptitude happens to be Operator, that crew would earn experience at a 25% or 50% faster rate respectively.

Crew members can level up their aptitudes infinitely, however like all games, each level becomes harder than the last.

Bottom line if you want to level up a crew member in a particular aptitude, they must be assigned to a role that falls under that aptitude’s category.

Crew Member Aptitude Skills

Leveling up wouldn’t be complete without a requisite skill tree. Star Atlas provides eight different skill trees for players to level up their crew in. Each level in an aptitude grants one skill point in that respective aptitude tree.

Within each aptitude tree, there are four different skills to choose from that players can allocate aptitude points to. For certain skills, crews must reach a certain level within that aptitude to unlock that particular skill. Players can choose to store aptitude points until their crew reach a certain level to allocate all gained points to that particular skill.

For example, a player can wait until a crew is level 10 in Flight before allocating all available Flight aptitude points in Evasion. A crew does not have to allocate points to lower tier skills to unlock higher tier skills.

It’s important to choose skills wisely as respecing or rerolling skills on an individual crew member will likely cost some Atlas or potentially require you to visit a certain NPC in game.

Lastly, each skill has a different effect depending on which game mode is being played.  The same skill can have a different effect in UE5, where you the player take control of the crew member, compared to different effects in Star Atlas SAGE.

Star Atlas Crew Aptitude Skill Bonuses