There are two types of “crew” in X4: ship crew, and station workforce.

This information is about Ship Crew. See the Habitats section for information on station workforce.

Hiring

Method 1: Ship crew can be hired at any wharf/shipyard as part of “repair and upgrade”. Send a ship to dock, and specify the crew to hire as part of the “upgrade” for the ship. Crew hired this way will be whatever the station has available, generally low-skilled recruits (which are cheap, relatively speaking, and will learn to be better).

Method 2: You can also hire crew one at a time by landing at a station and walking around to talk to people. Crew available for hire this way may have higher skills, but the price to hire them becomes exponentially more expensive the more skill they have.

Once you hire them, crew members will automatically travel to their destination (you don’t need to transport them or wait for them to board a docked ship). Transit may take a short time if they’re headed to a posting in another sector.

Any crew hired onto a ship can be interacted with by going to the ship’s Crew tab in the ship information screen. There, you can talk to them by right-clicking and tell them to work somewhere else (e.g. go be a station manager, work on another ship, etc).

Moving crew:

Once crew are on a ship, you can also move them to any ship that has empty crew slots. Click on the first ship (in the Map View) to select it, then right-click on the destination ship. One of the menu options will be “transfer crew with…” and that bring up a dialog box where you can move them back and forth between the two ships.

Roles

Ship crew can be assigned to one of three roles:

• pilot (one per ship)
• service crew (run the turrets in battle, repair L and XL ships)
• marines (do nothing on the ship, but can be sent to board other ships)

You can freely reassign people on a ship any time, moving them from service to marines or back again. If you assign a new pilot, the existing pilot will be reassigned to service crew or marine role depending on their skills.

Station managers

Crew from a ship can also be assigned to be a Station Manager, removing them from the ship completely. Every station needs one Manager assigned. Station managers are covered in more detail in the Station Managers section.

Note that you cannot assign a new station manager until you fire or move the existing one (as they have no other job on the station they could move to when they’re “bumped” out of the Manager job).

Crew skill

Each person has “skills” that determine how well they perform a given job. Pilots use Piloting skill and Morale, service crew use Service skill and Morale, etc. (Non-job skills are ignored — a marine gets no bonus for being a great pilot).

Crew skill ranges from 0 to 5 stars in each category.

When you hire crew using Repair and Upgrade at a wharf/shipyard, you “get what you get” — generally novice crew. (Hiring marines at VIG stations, though, will generally get you some more experienced crew even though you still pay only novice-crew price for them.)

If you hire crew directly by talking to people on stations, those individual crew members may have higher skills, but will be correspondingly more expensive (prices for higher-star crew rise exponentially with each added quality star).

Crew effect

Crew is always useful. A ship can operate with no crew, but will be better with a crew, better still with a skilled crew. A pilot is required for a ship to be able to execute orders autonomously, but isn’t required if you want to fly the ship yourself. If you “take the chair” on a ship with a pilot, the pilot becomes the “standby” pilot until you stand up from the chair.

In X4’s implementation, there are debuffs on a ship if the pilot/service crew are less than 5 star skill. Ships are less good at things with lesser crews (pilots performing actions, crew firing turrets on M/L/XL ships and doing repairs on L/XL ships).

Crews level up skills (very slowly) by being on a ship performing orders. Until well into the game, be happy if you can get 3-star pilots and some 3-star service crew.

Experience

Pilots get better by carrying out orders (any order), but some have a bigger impact than others. Combat tends to be most effective, and trading is also effective but less so. Activities such as collecting crates earn very little experience.

Service crew get better mainly by firing ship turrets in battle, but serving on station builder ships actively engaged in station construction can be very effective as a means of constantly training up new crew.

Marines get better by performing boarding actions.

Generally all crew will improve faster by being on a ship in battle than by any other means.

Seminars

Seminar objects are personal inventory items you can buy at trade counters on stations (though not all stations trade counters will have them in stock).

Pilot and Manager seminars can be bought or found and given to someone by talking to them.

There are no seminars for Service crew or Marines.

Basic seminars can be given to zero-star crew to raise them to 1-star, seminars “for 1 star” crew can be given to 1-star crew to raise them to 2-star, etc.

You can buy basic and 1-star seminars in limited quantities, but better seminars can only be obtained by Missions for a war faction or a trade guild (or, very rarely, found as drop from a destroyed ship).

Note that by making a habit of buying up every pilot seminar you find, you can often start your ships with 2-star pilots as long as your supply of seminars lasts.

Marines

When boarding another ship, you send crew currently assigned to Marine role. Theoretically, marines on your ship will also defend against incoming boarders, but in X4 this never, ever happens. There is, therefore, no reason to put marines on any ship except ships you’re using to board enemies.

Because marines gain skill only by boarding, and boarding can kill them, skilled marines are very valuable to piracy-oriented players.

Using your marines in overwhelming force can help improve their odds of survival, as does eliminating or disabling the target’s turrets before putting your marines into their paper-thin boarding pods for the trip over.

Against experienced defending marines, inexperienced boarding marines will die quickly. Using inexperience marines against lightly defended ships can help them survive and gain experience.

See the Boarding section for more information about boarding and marine skill.