To increase your crew size in Starfield, you need to boost both your ship’s crew capacity and your outpost capacity, then actually go out and hire people to fill those slots.

How to Increase Crew Size in Starfield

Ship crew: getting more slots

There are two main levers for increasing how many people you can have on a ship: your skills and your ship modules.

1. Level the right skills

  • Take the Ship Command skill in the Social tree and rank it up; higher ranks allow more crew on a single ship (up to a high cap at max rank).
  • Improve Piloting so you can fly bigger class B and C ships, which naturally support more crew.

A simple example: a basic A‑class starter ship might only support a handful of crew, but a fully ranked Ship Command plus a large C‑class cruiser can support a significantly larger team.

2. Upgrade your ship’s modules

Your ship’s total crew capacity is limited by specific parts, not just its size.

Key points:

  • Cockpit and hab modules : Some variants add crew capacity or crew stations, others don’t.
  • Reactors, engines, shields, and weapons can also contribute to the total crew limit on certain models.
  • The effective crew cap is the lowest of three values:
    • The limit from Ship Command
    • The combined crew capacity of cockpit and habs
    • The combined crew capacity of reactor/engines/weapons/shields

How to upgrade:

  1. Talk to a Ship Services Technician (in places like New Atlantis’ spaceport) and choose to modify your ship.
  1. Browse cockpits, habs, and other modules and check the info box for crew or crew stations ratings.
  1. Swap in modules that add crew spots until your ship’s crew capacity number in the menu increases.

Outpost crew: expanding staff there

Outposts have their own separate crew capacity that you raise by building infrastructure and using skills.

1. Build more Crew Stations

  • In Outpost Build Mode , go to the Miscellaneous/Misc section and place Crew Station units.
  • Each Crew Station increases how many people you can assign to that outpost by one.
  • One Crew Station costs common resources like aluminum, iron, and nickel, so you can scale up fairly early.

2. Level Outpost Management

  • The Outpost Management skill (Science tree) increases how many crew can be hosted across your outposts when ranked up, especially at higher ranks.

How to check your current limits:

  • Open the Ship Overview from the pause menu, then the Crew screen.
  • Select a crew member, choose Assign , and you’ll see entries like “ShipName 3/5” or “OutpostName 1/3” showing current vs max slots for each location.

Actually increasing headcount: hiring more crew

Once your caps are higher, you still need to recruit people to fill those new slots.

Where to find recruits

  • Visit bars and hotel lobbies on major hubs; these spots often have recruitable NPCs.
  • A popular early hub is The Viewport bar in New Atlantis (Jemison), which frequently has specialists for hire.

How hiring works

  • Talk to a potential recruit, review their skills, and pay a one‑time fee to hire them.
  • You can often negotiate the fee down with persuasion.
  • Named characters usually have deeper backstories and stronger, more specialized skill sets than generic hires.

Once hired, assign them:

  1. Open the Crew menu.
  2. Highlight the new recruit and choose Assign.
  3. Pick a ship or outpost that still has free crew slots (e.g., 3/5 instead of 5/5).

Quick checklist: how to increase crew size (ship + outpost)

  • Max out Ship Command to unlock higher ship crew caps.
  • Improve Piloting to fly larger class B/C ships that can support more crew.
  • Swap in cockpits, habs, and other modules that add crew capacity or crew stations.
  • For outposts, build additional Crew Stations in Build Mode to raise local caps.
  • Level Outpost Management for larger total outpost staffing.
  • Regularly visit bars and lobbies (like The Viewport) to recruit new crew, then assign them via the Crew menu.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.