Crews perform actions in-game and are made up of one to five Crewmates. How well a crew performs an action depends on the classes and bonuses of its crewmates.
Players may have any number of crews.
Every crew has a Captain, or leader, which will receive additional benefits in a future update.
When performing an action, a crew will usually become busy for some time. This will restrict the actions that the crew can perform. Some actions might be queued to be executed one after another (e.g. queuing prospecting), some others can be performed while the crew is busy (e.g. purchasing goods on the market directly), and some other cannot be planned at all (e.g. placing a limit order on the market). Queuing a new action is only possible if the current queue does not exceeds 24 hours.
A crew can apply modifiers (bonuses or penalties) to the action they start. The main source of modifiers is the crew composition with the classes and traits of its crewmates. But there are also addditonal factors, like being in a low-population habitat or being in rationing mode due to lack of food.
For more details about how crew bonuses are calculated, refer to this page.
Crews can store an certain amount of food, that they consume over time. The food capacity and consumption rate depends on the number of crewmates:
* This is only a useful approximation easy to remember. The actual base rate is 1t per Adalian year, which lasts ~15.2 real days.
When below 50% rations, the crew will enter rationing mode and be subjected to an increasing action penalty, up to carying actions 80% slower when the rations reach 0%. More details can be found on the crew bonuses calculation page.