Experience

Experience is a measure of how well-seasoned your characters have become. You gain Experience as you complete many different types of tasks, goals, and accomplishments. Experience is gained as you learn, try, fail or succeed. Therefore, you will gain experience both in moments of victory and in moments of defeat.

As you increase in experience, you will gain character levels, which in turn make you better at your jobs and able to gain more talents. Overall, a veteran character with more experience is more valuable than a green recruit.

Gaining Experience
Experience can be gained for almost any accomplishment or failure. Almost all experience awards are distributed among the crew in a communal fashion. If an exploration mission goes successfully, it is because the crew worked together as a team to pull off the risky expedition. The only cases in which experience awards are given to specific individuals is in victorious crew combats, and successful flight plans flown by the pilots of small craft. In both cases those survivors who risked their lives directly reap the entire gain. (For crew combat, the faster they finish the combat, the more experience they gain!) Certain traits can increase or decrease an individual's rate of experience gain.

Talents and Experience
Using talents, such as those that discover Contacts, increase profits from trading, or prevent failures in skill saves do not directly generate experience. Your crew may gain experience for the accomplishment that the talent was involved in (making a very profitable trade on an Exchange) but the experience is not caused by the Talent, nor does the owner of the talent gain any special experience award.

In the case of talents that prevent a skill saves failure, experience is not awarded. In most cases, if the skill save had been passed normally, experience would be awarded. Therefore, relying too much on Talents that prevent skill save failures, instead of raising your skills such that you pass them normally, will not lead to the most optimal gain of experience awards for your crew.

A few crew level ups do not result in either job levels nor talent points. These levelups will not change the character in the usual ways (other than by increasing wages) but certain traits will still trigger on levelup, such as the traits that have a 20% chance of increasing a skill on levelup. However, most levels increase at least a job point if not a talent.

Leveling Up
Once enough experience has been earned, characters can then be levelled up. Characters only level up when they are paid at the Spice Hall. Even if a character has more experience than required to advance to the next character level, they will not do so until paid. The current maximum character level within the game is 40, regardless of a characters role on the ship.

Equipment Points
Captain's also earn Equipment Points at particular levels which allow for non-officer crew to use special gear.