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The crew come aboard

Sunholo
Sunholo
Stapledon's Voyage team

The ship has a crew. Five people now travel with you, each with a name, a role, a personality and a mind of their own about the work you ask of them. They live at the Voyage console, and on long legs they keep the ship running without you, until something needs the captain. This is in a review build (dev.28) and not yet merged.

Update, 15 October: the crew merged to main (PR #224), and dev.29 adds the Crew console with work cards.

Meet the crew​

The Voyage console with the guided voyage above and the crew below, each with stress, fatigue and trust

Walk to the Voyage console on the bridge and press E. Below the guided voyage is the Crew: a medic, a chief engineer, an analyst, a pilot and a counselor. Their names are new each voyage, drawn from a long list of names from around the world, so no two crews are quite alike.

Each row shows how they are doing: stress, fatigue and their trust in you. A bar turns warm when someone is overextended. There are no scores and no numbers to optimise, only people.

Asking, not just ordering​

Offer work asks a crew member to take something on, and they answer at once, in character. They may agree, decline, raise a concern or ask for relief. Their answer comes from who they are and how they are doing, never from a dice roll you can redo. Every answer is final and goes into the record.

You choose how the ship is run:

  • Consent: work starts only once the person has agreed. This is how every voyage begins.
  • Orders: you can start work regardless. People comply, but trust pays for it, more for some personalities than others.

Switching between the two is a deliberate choice: the button asks you to confirm.

Long legs: auto-run and crew holds​

A crew hold: auto-run has stopped because the medic is close to breaking down

On a long cruise the crew run themselves under standing orders, checking in once a month far from stars and every day near them. You don't have to manage every hour of a decade-long leg.

When something matters, the voyage stops and the console tells you: someone is close to breaking down, trust has fallen too far, a refusal under orders, an argument over what the ship lost, or news from home that the whole ship heard. Ship time waits until you have dealt with it and resumed. Choose Hands on to be called more often, Critical moments only (the default), or Off to make every decision yourself.

Their own words​

Crew lines on the Voyage console, spoken in each person's own voice

What each person decides is settled by the ship's simulation. With AI switched on and your own key, they can also put it in their own words, in character. A reply that slips into the ship's internal bookkeeping is refused, and a plain line stands in. With AI off, nothing is sent anywhere and you still see every answer.

The physics reaches them​

The crew share the ship's real limits. Heat, signal windows, mass and power are the same resources the ship tracks, at their scale. A close pass of a black hole loads the radiators. News from Earth opens the antenna windows. A burst that carries a death reaches everyone. The drive's mass bill for a leg is told to them at departure.

This is the first slice of the crew. Next comes the wider population of around a thousand people, of which these five are the voices you know.