Pirates are the core of your crew. They come from different populations across the galaxy, each with unique lifespans. Some pirates are born with special traits that give them powerful abilities.

Populations

The galaxy is home to seven populations. Each has a different lifespan, which affects how long a pirate stays in their prime and how much you can get out of them before they retire.

Population		Age Range	Best Skills
Human		16-65	Balanced, regional height variations
Yardalaim		35-120	Strength, Brawl
Polpett		14-41	Aggression, Steal
Juppa		50-110	Long Range
Galdari		80-220	Vision, Charisma, Steal
Pupparoll		6-45	Vertical, Rebounds, Brawl
Octopulp		3-18	Close Range, Steal, Brawl

A pirate's age affects their hiring cost: younger pirates (relative to their population's lifespan) are more expensive because you'll get more years out of them. Pirates hit peak performance at about 70% of their lifespan.

Special Traits

Some pirates are born with a special trait. These are rare, make the pirate more valuable, and synergize with specific crew roles.

Killer

A natural brawler. Killers are better at fighting during games based on their reputation. They also boost the team's Weapons bonus by 25%, making them a great pick for Engineer.

Relentless

Never gets fully exhausted. A Relentless pirate's tiredness caps out at 80% instead of 100%, meaning they can keep going when others need rest. They boost the team's Tiredness Recovery bonus by 25%, synergizing well with the Doctor role.

Showpirate

A crowd favorite. Showpirates attract bigger audiences to games based on their personal reputation, and they're more likely to dunk. They boost the team's Reputation bonus by 25%, making them a natural fit for Captain.

Spugna

A legendary drinker. When a Spugna drinks Rum, their morale instantly goes to maximum. It is said that a drunk Spugna pilot could bring you somewhere unexpected... They can keep drinking even at max morale.

Crumiro

The legendary trait of the Emperor's crew. Crumiros have a floor on their morale (it won't drop below 15%) and their tiredness caps at 85%. They work for free and never get fed up enough to leave. However, they cannot be trained and their reputation is fixed at 0. You won't find these in the wild.

Hiring Pirates

Free pirates can be found on planets and hired from the Pirates panel. The hiring cost depends on:

• The pirate's average skill level (this dominates everything else)
• How good their best court positions are - a specialist who fits somewhere is worth more than a generalist who fits nowhere
• Their age relative to their population's lifespan (younger costs more, past their peak costs less)
• Their reputation, and whether they have a special trait (special-trait pirates cost more, scaled by their reputation)

Your team's reputation doesn't affect hiring costs. Hiring resets a pirate's morale and satisfaction to a happy starting point, and reveals their whole card at once.

You can't hire or fire anyone while your crew is playing a game.

Scouting

You don't automatically see everything about a pirate outside your own crew. Their card is partly hidden until you've scouted them, and each pirate has their own scouting level that rises the more you learn about them.

The five category star ratings (Athletics, Offense, Defense, Technical, Mental) are always visible. Hidden until scouted are:

• Individual skill values, which show as --. They are revealed a few at a time, in an order that's random but fixed per pirate, until the whole card is exposed;
• Court position fitness, revealed best-position-first: you learn where a pirate shines before you learn where they're useless;
• Potential, shown as a range of tiers (from washed-up to galactic talent) that narrows as you scout, down to a single tier when you know them fully;
• Special traits, which stay hidden until the pirate is about half scouted.

Your own crew is always fully scouted, and hiring a pirate reveals everything about them at once. For everyone else, scouting builds up in a few ways:

• Reputation: well-known pirates start out more scouted, so a famous free agent already shows more than an unknown one;
• Playing games: every game against a team scouts that team's pirates a little, at a rate set by your Pilot's Scouting bonus - a better Pilot learns opponents faster;
• Pirates you meet over the P2P network keep the highest scouting level you've reached for them.

Salaries

Every pirate in your crew is paid once a day out of your treasury, and the info subpanel shows the daily total (in red if you can't cover it). A pirate's salary scales with what they'd cost to hire, their average skill, their reputation, and how much they care about gold - a greedy star is the most expensive thing you can own.

If your balance doesn't cover the bill, the game takes whatever you have and every unpaid pirate loses satisfaction, in proportion to how much of the payroll you missed. Keep playing games: gate receipts are what pays the crew. Crumiros work for free.

Opinions and satisfaction

Every pirate is born with a few strong opinions (up to four) about the galaxy: space, drinking, games, gold, and the various populations - Galdari in particular tend to look down on everyone else, humans included. Their card lists what they really like and really dislike.

Doing something a pirate cares about "satisfies" that opinion and makes them happier with the crew:

• Playing a game satisfies games;
• Drinking Rum satisfies drinking;
• Getting a Kg of Gold (g from the pirate's card, costs 1 Gold) satisfies gold, and so does getting paid on time;
• Exploring or going on a space adventure satisfies space.

Repeating the same thing twice in a row does little: an opinion only pays out in full once it hasn't been touched for about a day. And a pirate who dislikes something gets unhappier when you make them do it - dragging a homebody on adventure after adventure is not a favour.

Population opinions work differently: they don't get satisfied, they just colour how pirates treat each other. On the court, a pirate passes more often to teammates from a population they like, and freezes out the ones they don't.

Satisfaction is the pirate's overall opinion of your crew, shown on their card ("content with the crew", "fed up with the crew", ...). It matters a lot:

• It caps morale: max morale is satisfaction plus half the pirate's Charisma, so an unhappy pirate can drink all the Rum in the galaxy and stay flat. It also cushions morale losses;
• It drifts slowly downward every day, and drops faster when a pirate sits out a game, when their morale hits zero, or when salaries go unpaid;
• Below a low threshold, a pirate can quit your crew on any given day, and the chance grows the unhappier they are.

Firing a pirate leaves a grudge: they remember how they felt about your crew, minus a hefty malus. Pirates remember their old crews in general, so a pirate you rehire picks up roughly where you left off (plus a small honeymoon bonus).

Training

Pirates train by playing. Each one has their own training focus, set from the Training column of the roster table (or with T on the selected pirate), which steers where the experience goes:

• Athletics: Quickness, Vertical, Strength, Stamina
• Offense: Brawl, Close Range, Medium Range, Long Range
• Defense: Steal, Block, Perimeter, Interior
• Technical: Passing, Handling, Post Moves, Rebounds
• Mental: Vision, Aggression, Intuition, Charisma
• A court position: pushes that position's fitness instead of raw skills

Training speed is affected by the Doctor's Training bonus, and by how far the pirate still is from their potential. Gains are applied once a day with a bit of randomness on top, so two identical days won't give identical results. Skills also decay slightly every day, faster for old pirates, so a crew that never plays slowly rots.

Drinking and drunkenness

Pirates can drink rum to keep their spirits up. From a pirate's panel, the Drink action (D) downs one liter of Rum for a big morale boost, but it also raises that pirate's drunkenness.

The drunker a pirate is, the higher the chance the next drink leaves them wasted: their tiredness shoots straight to maximum and they pass out drunk. They recover no tiredness while drunk, so they stay knocked out until they sober up, after which their tiredness wears off as usual. High Stamina pirates hold their liquor better and get wasted less often. Drunkenness otherwise wears off slowly over time.

Drunkenness matters in games too: drunk pirates on the court raise the chance of a brawl breaking out, so a tipsy lineup is a rowdy one.

Pirates also drink on their own, without asking you. While the crew is idle (not in a game or a tournament), someone will occasionally raid the Rum stock, and the pirates who love drinking are the likeliest culprits.

The same happens during games: your team's in-game drinking setting controls how much rum the crew brings to a match and how readily benched pirates take a swig, with low-morale pirates and heavy drinkers going first. The usual wasted risk applies, so a pirate can drink themselves out of the rest of the game.

The Spugna trait is the exception. Spugnas get drunk ten times more slowly, their morale jumps straight to maximum whenever they drink, and a Spugna Pilot who gets wasted while travelling or exploring can open a portal to a random planet.