EVE Crews is an AI-assisted passion project that injects bridge officer and crew activity straight into your EVE experience.
By running alongside EVE Online as an API-linked browser-based companion game, EVE Crews enhances the immersive narrative aspects of the player’s spaceship command experience by providing the background extras to the epic space odyssey.
The dramatic visual style of EVE Online’s science fiction universe has been a source of inspiration for more than two decades. Most well-known for its epic spaceship battles involving thousands of players, the EVE game experience delivers a high-level strategic view of vast spacecraft and planetoid-scale space stations.
The existence of actual humans in EVE’s gameplay is mostly left to abstract suggestions and lore (of which there is plenty), but the potential for in-game content is vast.
Great science fiction has always featured the interactions and challenges faced by spaceship crews of all types and sizes, from Star Trek, Blake’s 7, and Battlestar Galactica to Firefly, The Expanse, and er… more Star Trek? So much Star Trek (see also: Galaxy Quest, Red Dwarf, Star Wars, Mass Effect, Sunshine, Alien et al).
EVE Crews offers that bridge officer and rank-and-file crew dynamic while staying true to the EVE universe. In EVE lore, player ‘capsuleers’ in EVE are neurally linked to their ships, making many more traditional command roles obsolete. However, some ship functions – and therefore a command structure – still require hands-on maintenance and control. How many crew are required is influenced by the hull type and your character’s Spaceship Command skills.
Your Executive Officer (XO) oversees your human workforce by commanding a number of Department Heads. How well these bridge officers perform depends on what choices the capsuleer makes and how they interact. Officer loyalty is key to their efficacy and what impact they have on their department.
EVE Crews links to your EVE Online account using the official third-party Single Sign On, which lets the EVE Crews app know what ship you’re flying and other key triggers that might affect your crew.
The crew complement comprises three core departments; Engineering, Security, and Medical, with a number of specialist departments available according to hull type (Flight Deck for drone ships, Industrial operations for mining vessels, Science department for explorers, and Logistics for haulers).
Departments can be crewed by staff from any of the four Empires, and many of the more fringe pirate/mercenary organisations, but recruitment should be carefully considered to avoid friction points and culture clashes. These interactions can be monitored in each individual department and more broadly in the Personnel Integration Dashboard.
When docked, the player can interact with station recruitment services to obtain more staff, including enlisted naval crew, lowly conscripts, additional line officers, and a better XO. Take a walk on the seedier side of New Eden and press-gang cheap labour from the low-hab districts, and perhaps link up with some underworld contacts to hire some clandestine ‘specialists’.
EVE Crews reacts directly to your EVE Online activity by listening to API data that EVE’s server outputs. This allows your XO and the crew to respond to the ship’s location, condition, and capsuleer skills to simulate activity aboard your vessel.
There is more depth to the crew analysis and management, but the detail shown here gives an overview of what EVE Crews is on the surface.
At its heart, EVE Crews is intended to provide a background ‘layer two’ experience for those idle ship-spinning moments when you’re wondering what’s going on inside. Wonder no more.
Enhance your EVE Online experience now by visiting https://eve-crews.com/
Your journey through New Eden will never be quite the same.
Disclaimer: An EVE Online account is required to play. EVE Crews is entirely free and in a state of constant development by one enthusiastic and arguably misguided individual. It is more of an experimental proof of concept than a polished product. Please enjoy it for what it is (and if you really like the idea, ask CCP Fenrir Creations to do it officially. Actually, if you have their ear, ask them to do the same for planetary installations, stations, and star gates too).
I’m happy to receive constructive feedback in the comments below, on the dedicated EVE Crews EVE-O forum thread or on any of my socials (I’m most active on Twitter/X and BlueSky)
I can also occasionally be found on Discord as Freebooted. There is also an EVE Crews Discord server.