When do people begin to matter?

[Owlchemist]

Does anyone feel like the whole human-element of the game is kinda forgettable? After some 4 or 5 hours it finally dawned on me that I know nothing about the meatbags on the ship. Didn't know their names, their skills, how many there were... I just sorta never even looked at them really cause they never mattered (other than manning a communicator or bridge once in awhile).

Honestly it sorta sapped a lot of my motivation to make a thriving, *living* ship all prettied up and presentable with quarters and amenities if their importance is so muted like that.

[spajus]

Humans can be valuable, if you take care of them properly. If you will want to fly, you will need to have a pilot that will operate the bridge controls. You won't be able to run research beyond 250kW your ship computer can do, unless you build research stations that are operated by humans. If your humans will have space suits, they can go outside the safe zones and do construction work. They can craft items for you in crafting stations.

You can choose to neglect them and play as an evil AI, but you can also try to make them happy.

As of their usefulness and importance, there will be a lot of work done with this aspect in future updates. Humans will become more complex than right now, and either more useful (if you take care of them), or more dangerous (if you neglect them).

[Roadie]

I feel like part of this is that so much about the humans (and robots) is buried in submenus. Compare to, e.g. even lightly modded Rimworld where distinctive traits are really put up front and center.

[Marcus]

Dissenting opinion here, I really liked that I felt like the humans weren't as important in this game compared to Rimworld.

I feel more like an uncaring AI shepherd in this game that must abide by Asimov's rules than the direct "almost deity" influencing the humans in Rimworld. RImworld does it's thing really well and this game is it's own spin on things that seems to work as well. I would say while the human and bot interaction could be improved a bit, you should always feel like you're somewhat apart from the human populace in this game.

An idea for improvement would be to give the humans wants/needs that they ask for directly, almost like a quest/request system for their AI overlord. Would be funny to see Jim Bob Joe request a cloned cat for X reason, for approval by ShipOS. A little more personality, but still you're outside looking in on the humans.