NPC crew

NPC crews are a planned Star Citizen feature.

Gameplay purpose

It will allow players to play the roles they want, while using NPCs to fill the roles they do not want to play. Senior NPC crew members are to be an enhancement of the ship and the player overall capabilities. NPC crews will be a resource to manage and a way for players to differentiate their style of gameplay from other players, for example going with three lower quality engineers or a single stellar one, thus customizing the gameplay experience. CIG wants them to matter to the players.

Micromanagement will be avoided and oftentimes players won't have to do anything other than hire an NPC and assign them to a ship. However while a doctor NPC will automatically heal any injured crew member to the best of their ability, some positions will require more frequent communication, a ship's pilot for example will need to know where the player wants to go or whether to break off from a particular encounter, while the engineer efforts might need to be prioritized.

NPC crews will be required for some of the larger ships such as an Idris.

Their release will most likely be a post 1.0 plan.

Jobs

They will be able to do things like operate scanners and weaponry on a ship, serve as onboard security, or act as general purpose engineers capable of effecting repairs.

Personnel shop

NPCs will be able to be hired from personnel shops.

Larger landing zones will have a personnel shop where players will be able to peruse a library of hirable characters, each of whom will require a daily salary based upon their skillset and current demand. NPCs can then be rented but never actually purchased, retaining them is thus going to be an ongoing expense.

While CIG's efforts go towards smaller crews, some larger ships require large crews, many dozens or even hundreds of NPCs, to that end CIG will probably allow players to hire a base crew from the personnel office while specifying only a few keys things like wether the player wants a skeleton crew or a full crew and the average level of competence. Cooks and janitors for example could be hired en masse allowing the player to focus on hiring just the individual specialists.

The crews price will fluctuate depending on how many other players are requesting similar services.

During travels

Some NPCs encountered during the players travels may offer their services as crew depending on how the conversation goes, this method of recruitement will be considerably more time consuming but will oftentimes be how players will be able to find a bargain or a multi-discipline NPC or someone with a higher than average potential to excel.

Alts

Players will be able to use their game packages to create a corresponding number of customizable characters, using a game character slot, going through the same character creation process, controlling their name, clothing, and being able to play as any of them, let friends control them, or let AI control them as NPC crew. This isn't necessary, the player will be perfectly able to hire normal NPC crew with in-game money.

The difference between a Game Character slot converted into a NPC crew member and a regular NPC crew member is that players will be able to customize the Game Character NPC’s look, name and backstory.

There is an additional bonus of being able to specify one of the Game Character NPC crewmembers as the player successor in the event of the player's main characters death, at which point the Game Character NPC will become playable again, with the assets of the deceased old character conveying.

Quality

NPC crew members will come in varying quality depending on the salary paid to them.

The intention of CIG is that all things being equal an NPC crew should be just as effective as a human crew. A solo player with a high quality NPC crew will be able to compete with a skilled human crew as far as operating turrets go, as far as problem solving goes such as deciding that something needs to be repaired at a given time, that's behaviour that CIG needs to work on more.

The best NPCs won't be found in the local personnel office, they will be discovered by players who are willing to take a chance on them before anyone else realizes their true potential.

Players will need to invest their time and attention, not just their money, if they want to gradually build an exemplary crew.

Skills

NPC crews will have basic stats like morale, accuracy, not all of them visible to players and not as developed as in an RPG, but enough to rate them. NPC crew members will be able to get better over time.

They will have attributes associated with them that denote their proficiency in a variety of disciplines, how well they can pilot, operate a gun turret, control a tractor beam, or repair ship damage. Every attribute is going to be associated with another value that determines the NPC maximum potential in that area, how good they can ever become in that particular discipline.

Most NPCs are going to be specialists with a notable capability really only in a single area, although there will be some exceptions.

Traits

CIG will likely track psychological components as well, such as aggression and intelligence as well to influence how that NPC behaves in some situations.

They can be cowardly or show-off, which might also enable or complicate players tactics. A show-off pilot would be more likely to do tricks, but his piloting skills would determine how useful those tricks are, he could actually make himself an easier target.

Pay

Crew member will need to be paid, as part of ongoing operations cost. How long they will remain with the player and how often they will be paid will depend on the contract.

Morale

Allowing the crew to have downtime will have to be taken into account.

Pushing the crew beyond their limit will be possible but will have consequences, it will lead the NPCs to be less happy, to demand more money, eventually their effectiveness at their job will start to deteriorate, they will become careless.

Crews will be able to mutiny.

Food

The crew will need to be fed.

Housing

Each NPC will need somewhere to live on board.

Schedule

NPC crews will follow a normal 24 hours schedule, which will have effects on how players go about accomplishing missions. They will have schedules that say when they're on duty and when they're not, they need to eat, sleep, shower, exercise, so if a turret is to be always manned, it will need crew rotations, with one of the turret assigned gunners at his post while another rests.

There will be states, such as a state of emergency, where all the crew knows to get to their position, switching from their normal schedule to their combat schedule. Keeping the crew always on red alert will make the crew go hungry, lack sleep, which will drop morale and decrease performance.

Death

Crew members can die, including permadeath. As senior crew members are to matter to the players, and given the difficulty and expense in replacing them, CIG might allow the concept of ship insurance to be extended to cover senior officers of the NPC crew for an additional charge commensurate with their capabilities.

Autonomy

In 2015 Chris Roberts said it would probably be possible run NPC crews from a static location, such as sending a crew to deliver cargo somewhere else while the player stays ingame planetside in a bar waiting for the crew to finish the mission. However in 2016 Tony Z said that it is It is not planned to be able to send crews alone autonomously,

It is not planned for NPC crews to work while the player if offline.

Comparison to AI Blades

NPC crew members should not be confused with AI Blades. While they can both fulfill some identical functions, such as using a turret to shoot at an enemy, an AI blade is a subcomponent on a ship, it can be plugged in, assigned a turret, but blades will be worse than NPCs. An average player will be better than an average NPC, and an average NPC will be better than an average blade. The turret blades are going to occupy a valuable blade slot, which means the player can't equip a blade for another functionality. There won't be enough blade slots for every single turret. AI blades are automation without personality nor skills. They can only do what they do, unable to take another job at all, as opposed to AI crew members who can take another job even if they're bad at it.

Source: StarCitizen.tools. Source content is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.