Should crew be able to do labor jobs?

I'm looking to gauge the community opinion more than anything but should we nudge Chucklefish on possibly looking at labor jobs for your crew.

Long story short, you're in your ship and you're about to make planetfall. You noticed Jerry and Gurlbl'-Splrutz are pretty square just screwing around sitting on all the toilets and crying randomly at each other; you settle down and tell Jerry he needs to go harvesting for wood and fiber and you tell BIG G-MONEY he'd be better off mining for you while you're exploring the planet. After you're done exploring for the better part of 20 minutes you come back to your ship and find that both of them were pretty active, both bringing in a decent but not crazy amount of resources each.

Again, this is a thought and one that I'd like some more opinion on before maybe nudging a suggestion or bringing it up directly to Chucklefish. Personally this would answer my final problem with the game of a general lack of automation. I have a crew, they could be harvesting for me and being generally useful when I don't want to drag them into combat which is something I usually do better alone.

Also, is there a hard-cap towards how many crewmembers we can have or is it limited to ship upgrades? I'm sure it won't matter if there is a hard cap as it'd be one of the first mod fixes that would probably come out, but I'm curious.

For that matter I'm extending the overall thought of labor jobs to also include a crew command that would have a crew member start smelting things for you. Might as well have the ability to have a small mining team on your well taken care of vessel.

If anyone is question how this would be doable in game, there are two methods. One, the easy route, where your crew leaves the ship and you can't find them but after a while you can find them on your ship again with some resources, or the more difficult manner where you can find them on planet and actively see where they've started their operations (trees missing, mineshaft dug up maybe with torches or a machine doing the mining).

 

I honestly wouldn't mind if I can have a crew member mine for me. Gotta be honest, while mining can be enjoyable when starting out you kinda get bored of it by the time you see the later planets.

As for crew limits, I believe you gotta start a colony to get the NPCs and if they are happy enough they will ask to join your crew (or alternately just hire them after doing a task in the Outpost) and the ship itself will increase in size as you obtain crew members and maybe do a quest, can't honestly remember what is require to increase the ship size the legit way. Alternately you could just buy the ship upgrades from the black market for a huge amount of pixels. There is a cap based on the largest ship size I guess but if I recall you can only carry two crew members to fight for you anyway. The rest would just for style or switching out say a medic for a fighter if you don't need to heal as much. To my knowledge there is a limited amount of crew member types. Fighter, Medic, Engineer (help to save on fuel) and one that allow you to change the crew outfits. There may be more but those are just the ones I am aware of.

 

I am more interested in them farming for me, but mining is also really nice, but if this were to become true, then what would we do with all these excess materials that the AIs will bring? Maybe it should be made that they can be sold or that AIs will consume food, materials, and pixels in exchange for colony happiness or production.

 

Oh well of course they'd be sellable friend, just as much as they'd be usable I would imagine. You're essentially using your crew as minor resource aids. They'd give you their loot as you're their leader and you'd use it however you see fit.

 

this sounds good. my one apprehension when it comes to having a crew is this: my fps drops pretty crazy in the outpost sometimes. i'm envisioning that many npc's or more in a smaller space (my ship). back early in the giraffes (i think...it was just after colonies were introduced), i built a supercolony. just like...a big apartment building, stretching far underground. nearly unplayable with all the npc fps drop. are optimizations going to fix these before i have to have a ton of folks in the one place i've (thus far) been free from any save my ship pet?

edit: but if i have to have a crew, they might as well be benefiting me somehow.