Starter packs and your first crewmates

Facts checked 31 Oct 2026

A starter pack is the quickest way to begin on Adalia Prime, the belt's largest asteroid: a small crew, land to build on, and everything you need for the guided starter missions. This guide compares the three packs and, most importantly, helps you choose your first crewmates well, because a poor choice of classes can slow you down for weeks.

The three packs

Starter packs are bought by card via the in-game Store, whether you sign in with an Influence Account or with your own wallet. Each one gives you a new crew, with allowances to lease your first lots and put up your first buildings on Adalia Prime. The packs are designed for crews starting there: you can recruit a starter pack crew on another asteroid, but it won't get the free lot leases, building materials, or food resupply. Here's what each pack includes:

Every pack comes with some building materials and food to see you through your first days or weeks. Packs don't include SWAY; see Your first SWAY. Prices are in US dollars, checked 31 Oct 2026; the Store always shows the current price.

Which pack? The starter missions go from a warehouse and extractor, through a refinery, to a bioreactor and factory, so only the Industrialist pack includes every building the full set of missions asks for. With a smaller pack you can still follow the missions, but you'll need to arrange the later buildings yourself.

Starting on Adalia Prime or on another asteroid

• Adalia Prime: Your pack's free lot leases, building materials, and food resupply all work here, and the markets are the busiest in the belt. But it has only seven resources (no metals among them), and competition is intense.
• Another Asteroid: More resources, less competition, and the chance to learn the deeper production chains, and the starter missions are still open to you. But you won't get the pack extras, so you'll lease your own lots and buy your own food and materials.

Our previous guide, Where to start, covers starting on another asteroid in more detail.

Starting without a starter pack or crewmates

You don't have to buy anything to begin. The Academy's Training Ground lets you hire an Academy tutor crew by the day on adalia.exchange, for a few SWAY, and learn the basics on the Academy's own asteroid before you decide on a pack or a crewmate of your own.

This needs a browser wallet of your own, such as Ready X (formerly Argent X) or Braavos, holding a little SWAY and STRK. It doesn't work with an Influence Account yet. See Creating a Starknet wallet.

Why classes matter

Every crewmate has one of five classes, and each class makes the crew better at certain jobs:

• Miner: Core sampling (faster, and better results) and extraction.
• Engineer: Construction, refining, manufacturing, and building ships.
• Scientist: Food production, and extra output from some refining.
• Merchant: Lower marketplace fees, and more efficient transport options for your goods.
• Pilot: Flying ships further and faster on less propellant.

Here is the catch: a crew with no crewmate of the right class takes twice as long to do that job. One crewmate of the class brings it to normal speed, and a second makes it a quarter faster again. Further crewmates of the same class add less each time.

So a two-crewmate crew of Pilots would take twice as long to sample, mine, and build, and a new player has no ship to fly. Pilots and Merchants become valuable later, once you are moving and trading goods between asteroids; they are the wrong place to start.

Choosing your first crewmates

After you buy a pack, the game asks you to create its crewmates one by one: a name, a class, four traits, and a look. It fills in classes for you, in the order Miner, Engineer, Pilot, Merchant, Scientist, so check each one before you confirm. The Academy's recommendations, from experience:

• Explorer (Two Crewmates): A Miner with the Prospector trait, and an Engineer with the Refiner trait. The game suggests a Miner and an Engineer already; just add the traits.
• Strategist (Three Crewmates): Two Miners with the Prospector trait, and an Engineer with the Refiner trait. The game suggests a Pilot for the third; change it to a Miner.
• Industrialist (Five Crewmates): Three Miners, an Engineer, and a Scientist. The game suggests an Engineer, a Pilot, and a Merchant alongside one Miner; change the Pilot and Merchant to Miners. Give the Miners the Prospector trait and the Engineer the Refiner trait.

Why so many Miners? Almost everything early on starts with core sampling and extraction, and each extra Miner makes that work go faster. Simply having an Engineer in your crew doubles the speed at which buildings are constructed. The Refiner trait speeds up refining, which will be a bonus for as long as you play, so it is well worth having. A Scientist in your crew increases the quantity of secondary outputs from refinery processes, which can be an extremely nice bonus to have. Give your Scientist the Dietitian trait: the other two traits offered to Scientists, Scholar and Experimenter, relate to future updates and don't do anything yet.

Traits

Each crewmate has four traits. Three of these are cosmetic only, but one is impactful and gives the crew a bonus. The impactful traits that matter most early on:

• Prospector (for Miners): Better core sample results, so your samples tend to find bigger deposits, and bigger deposits mean faster extraction.
• Refiner (for Engineers): Refining 5% faster.
• Builder (for Engineers): Construction 5% faster.
• Surveyor (for Miners): Core sampling 10% faster.
• Dietitian (for Scientists): The crew's food lasts 10% longer.

Some traits on offer don't do anything yet, as they relate to future updates: Scholar and Experimenter (Scientists), Mechanic (Engineers), and Operator (Pilots). Recycler (Miners) gives back more materials when you take a building down, which matters little early on.

Recruiting crewmates individually

If you'd rather recruit crewmates one at a time than buy a pack, choose their classes carefully, as they will do most of the early work for you; a Miner with the Prospector trait is the best first choice. You only need a single crewmate to play Influence, and one is fine for very casual play, but you will accomplish far more with several: the more crewmates you have, the more you can do, and the more you'll get from the time you put into the game. If you plan to play for more than an hour or two each week, you'll want several crews, not just several crewmates: each crew does one job at a time and holds at most five crewmates, so more crews means more work going on at once.

You choose the class and traits in the same way, and you recruit at a Habitat that allows new recruits (a step-by-step guide to recruiting is planned for Starting for Real).