Star Atlas SAGE Crafting: The Best Way to Get Crews Cheaply

Dec 16th, 2022 — Back in August, we published an article theory crafting what would be the best and most efficient way to gain crew members for crafting in Star Atlas SAGE. Today, with the release of the draft SAGE game manual, we finally have some more clarity.

Disclaimer: Information in this guide is subject to change and without warning by Star Atlas. The information below comes from the Star Atlas SAGE manual with additional amplifying Q&A from the Star Atlas Devs.

Basic Crew Mechanics

1. To begin, we establish the premise that Crafting capacity in SAGE will be determined by amount of Crew Members docked in a Central Space Station or Star Base.

2. Second, total crafting capacity management is determined by the number of privilege points a player has invested into that skill. A player can only earn 142 total privilege points on one account

Theoretically, a player could invest all 142 points into Crafting Capacity, but that would leave no room for other important privileges like fleet size. We’ll cover a potential side option a bit later.

3. SAGE is no longer using a hangar gating mechanism and players are free to deposit ships into SAGE (This was a recent change and may change before the release of SAGE). These ships, theoretically, should not count against a players fleet size or command limits so long as they remain docked. However, the benefit here is that these ships will count towards your Crew available to craft.

So What is the Cheapest Way to Get Crews?

That’s right, the FIMBUL Airbike is currently the cheapest and easiest way to accumulate a large crew staff for any crafting mogul.

Compared to a single Commander ship or even Titan, the crew cost per ship ratio for the Airbike is 1/1000th the price of any larger ship.

So how many should you have?

First, its important to understand that these mechanics could change in the future. However, given the current cost and understanding of future SAGE gameplay, we recommend no more than 50 Airbikes depending on the amount of crafting you plan on partaking in during SAGE.

To fully utilize 50 Airbikes, you will need 50 points in the Crafting Capacity privilege. 50 points in Crafting Capacity governs the amount of active crafting crew you can have across the entire SAGE map at one time, not a single Star Base. Don’t think you can have 50 crew at each Star Base crafting simultaneously in your little empire.

Alternatively, you could increase your Crafting Capacity Privilege to a lesser amount and then split your Airbike crews across multiple Star Bases depending on factors like proximity to resources and faction allies.

Say a privilege score of 25, you would have two star bases with 25 crews each. Or 5 Star Bases with 10 crews each. Its all up to your playstyle.

Maximizing Crew Capacity

Again, the Crew Capacity Privilege maxes out at 142, meaning you can at most have 142 active crew at once. This is due to the Privilege Point cap on a single account.

Here is where we get into a little grey area. If you begin to find that having a large crafting privilege is preventing you from strengthening one of your other player areas, you could theoretically create a second account specifically for crafting.

However, that’s not something we can universally recommend at this time as its unclear what the disadvantages of doing so are; there will likely be some. While we’re not talking TOS violations, your main account could be missing out on applicable career progression bonuses.

If anything changes, we’ll continue to update this article or publish a completely new one if the changes are significant. Make sure you follow and subscribe to get the latest info direct to your inbox