Original Post --- Hey everyone! It's been a little difficult to find things to show off on the blog lately that aren't massive mission spoilers, but today I've got something pretty cool! When you establish a colony and befriend a colonist by completing tasks for them, they may ask if they can join your ship's crew! If you accept them into your crew, they'll wear a Protectorate uniform and beam up to your ship. When your crew is large enough you'll receive a ship upgrade license. Alternatively, if you'd like to avoid the colony system altogether, you can spend a bunch of pixels at the Penguin Bay for a shady fake upgrade license.
Do they haaaave to wear the protectorate uniform? : \ being able to pick their uniform and weapons, of them and guards, would be more than welcome. It'd allow us to empty some storage and customize our crew to look the way we want.
We should be able to give them weapons and armor, too. that uniform is fugly. So much so that someone else posted the exact same thing in the same second.
I really hope this gets expanded on and isn't just a case of "oh look at this colonist who will annoyingly follow me on my ship and die if they follow me onto the planet." I know it's asking a lot but please Chucklefish... please throw some actual details into this. Give me a reason to actually go this route instead of just saving pixels. Oh, have enough crew members? Here, have a shop you can put on your ship, let me set up something on the ship for them to do, maybe teach the buggers to organize my mess of inventory instead of running around like they would be doing on the planet I left them on. Not trying to be sour or anything, just don't want this to be a silly distraction that'll get stale after the first hour or two. It'd be nice to have function with my form.
so its essentially "Your Starbound Crew" mod, only more annoying and less useful? *Hate to be cynical, but.... ya
I'm gonna go out on a careful limb and say that no they don't have to be Protectorate uniforms. It should be pretty damn straightforward to mod 'em into another costume.
If we can equip them with better outfits and gear, and be able to bring them into missions, great. If not... nah.
'twould indeed be nice to have only if they serve a real purpose. A navigator in your Bridge/CIC to hunt down interesting planets for you, perhaps. Someone in engineering designing new things for you to craft, or technologies to use. A chef and a medic to provide you with food and healing items, and a quartermaster to sell off your junk to (or to put in requests for certain materials you want him to procure). Plenty they could actually do that would make them useful, but having them just wandering around would be rather dull and pointless. It does seem a little odd to me though that you spend plenty of time and effort helping make their lives in the colony easier...then as a reward they decide to run away and live on your ship instead.
Wow it's almost like this game is in beta and this probably isn't even the second to last form of this they will test and work on.... Neat idea! I love that there are multiple ways to get licenses and things. Grinding every colony mission got old after the second character. Anyone complaining about "less useful" crew can still do it the ol' colony deed way. I presume they're going to do a lot more with this than what it is now and can't wait to see it. It'll be cool to have fighters, a ship cook, a trader, etc on board eventually. Pick and choose whom you bring with you and all that. The nastiness of this "community" never fails to astound me.
Honestly that's what I'm expecting and worried about. It's just a few extra snips of already used code and you have a bunch of jerks just wandering your ship bringing nothing to the party at all. Okay to be fair, as you said the game is in beta and as such the community needs to push and pull alongside the devs for the game to hit an optimal point of success. None of the major posts in this thread so far have been hostile let alone nasty, we're all brainstorming and pushing at this point. We'd like to see a feature like this be molded into all it can be; if that is wrong then I'm fearful for the future.
I wonder if that means a bigger ship size at all, thatll be nice, cause the ships are the way they am...well..to me they are not big enough to be honest. They are allready cool, true. But if you spend alot of time with this game and really also want to customize the ship alot, there are not that much possibilities. I thought about something aslike a another following ship maybe(just an idea) which is enterable via another teleporter which will be placed into the ship via upgrading. Anyway, nice progress
Maybe we could have SAIL assign them jobs? Like, oooh make this guy a janitor and he'll make sure items in boxes are organized or something and another could be tagged Looter who will help pick up dropped stuff planetside then drop it in the ship inventory. Customization could be a SAIL built in page too.
These are all really great ideas that would breath life into our ships in the best of ways. I just hope the devs are willing to listen.
That's not cynical. That's just impatient. Obviously, the video shown is not the final implementation, plus Your Starbound Crew forces you to select from a limited pool of crew members instead of the wide array that are feasible with this feature. Yes, there will be less background for these crew members, but the cool part is you can make one up or just forego a background completely.
I think this is a very interesting step forward, and I hope there are more steps in this direction. I think it would be nice if they made up a crew management interface in the S.A.I.L. computer allowing you to design your preferred uniform, and assign duties around the ship. There were some very good suggestions made so far. I like the idea of taking your gear and issuing it to your crew as well.
Now I really hope that the ship upgrades actually provide something, besides more space. The possibilities!