First loop with Crew. What to do?

[Kona Milano]

Just reached level 51 and unlocked Crew, and have been idling here a day or two now. I figure before I loop, I need to:

• Rank up to at least 12 on my first crew, unlock a second crewmember
• The second crew member has Ingenuity and the all-important synth bonus plus warp essence gain, so focus that.
• Meanwhile, switch first crew member to Acumen, grind Acumen at least up to All XP x2.
• Grind up to at least 25 total ranks between both crew
• By here, base 3 should be complete or nearly complete and I should be in a good spot to loop

At 40/500 it doesn't look like I can unlock any Mastery on this loop, I'm guessing that's a multi-loop reward. None of the one-point masteries look particularly important anyways, it looks like saving up for 2-point masteries and leaving the 1-pointers as gravy is the play there.

[Kona Milano]

I had meant this to be more of a question but by the time I had figured phrasing it I had more or less figured it out so uh.

Hi, everyone, hope you're having a good day in space today

[Excellion]

Originally posted by Kona Milano:

None of the one-point masteries look particularly important anyways, it looks like saving up for 2-point masteries and leaving the 1-pointers as gravy is the play there.

They are actually quite vital.

- The +3 starting biosleeves will enable you to reprint a crew members three more times right from the start of a cycle. This greatly helps early on, when printing a new sleeve can take up to four days. This unlock is essentially a crutch to get your mastery's sooner rather than later.

- The x2 generation speed upgrade doubles the speed at which you gain sleeves, and reduces the default cap on the maximum wait time. By default it can take 4 days to print a sleeve, this reduces it to 2 days.

- The x30 speed upgrades are downright essential. Crew levelling speed is split in two parts:

1. A bonus from the highest stat amount reach for a crew member, which equals 1.05^[Stat]. This is what increases speed after each reprint.
2. A separate bonus based on modifiers earned. This includes the x30 speed upgrade, the bonuses earned in the warp section and the bonuses earned from upgrades in the crew section.

The x30 bonus is massive in size in this context. All the other unlocks just increases it 2x or 3, so this unlock is vital for progress at a non-glacial pace. As an example, look at the x3 crew XP bonus you earn at rank 10. With the mastery XP unlock that is suddenly a x90 bonus and this keeps scaling rather heavily with the other unlocks.

In fact your goal should be to push for a mastery as soon as possible on the energy technician, unlock the +3 sleeves so you can rush for the mastery on the cyber specialist. With that mastery point you should unlock the XP bonus for the next crewmate which mastery you want to unlock (Hint: Go for the Materials Engineer with the Inguinity bonus as it's the next cheapest one) . Further unlocked crew require more and more XP to level up, so unless you want your progress to be rather glacial you'll want to get all the XP bonuses almost as soon as possible.

[76561199215865625]

mastery upgrades in order to progress quickly:
mastery 1 on ET: get starting biosleeves +3(massively helps all future mastery 1s and 2s)
m1 on CS: get acumen XP gain x30(helps R)
m1 on R: ingenuity XP gain x30(helps ME)
m1 on ME: proficiency XP gain x30(helps LM)
m1 on LM: engineering XP gain x30(to make stats more balanced)
all above ugprades cost 1 mastery point each!

after those, you should get warp(makes warp task take a reasonable amount of time),

then:
base(helps everything in general)
maximum active crew(great qol)

and then choose 2 of these:
link(also qol)
compute(makes compute task much faster and helps s75+)
reactor(qol for you to sustain lv999/1e90 max reactor without running ET/ME)

and finally: sleeve generation speed(helps s75+, as you dont prestige often there)

you can also take resource to replace something, which gives more crew skill

why not to take these:
synth(becomes useless in s75+ as you synth thousands of times faster than you can farm materials)
research(a qol, but you dont farm research often and the x10 gain translates to less effect)
module(how lazy are you?)

[MxWhiteKnight]

Originally posted by ryan180322:

mastery upgrades in order to progress quickly:
mastery 1 on ET: get starting biosleeves +3(massively helps all future mastery 1s and 2s)
m1 on CS: get acumen XP gain x30(helps R)
m1 on R: ingenuity XP gain x30(helps ME)
m1 on ME: proficiency XP gain x30(helps LM)
m1 on LM: engineering XP gain x30(to make stats more balanced)
all above ugprades cost 1 mastery point each!

Holy moly I've been looking for this exact thing since late december. Yeah, agreed. The main core ones are definitively Sleeves, Warp and Crew Slot. After that go full Crew XP. The warp alone explodes your warp gain, complete game changer.

[m662]

Do not underestimate Resource mastery either. The salvage is not worth it but the Voidmatter multiplier can get you to 2.2 crewskill which will significantly boost your stats.

[Aaron]

Originally posted by m662:

Do not underestimate Resource mastery either. The salvage is not worth it but the Voidmatter multiplier can get you to 2.2 crewskill which will significantly boost your stats.

I've been wondering about this but haven't bothered testing it out; perhaps I should.