Level up pilot for autotrade?

[Capbar]

I bought a medium freighter and hired a pilot for it. The pilot is only 2.5 stars and needs to be 3 in order to auto trade. How do I get him to level up? Sending the ship to do other tasks like partol/explore/revisit known stations seems to do nothing. I don't want to have to manually set up trade orders Everytime.

Thanks

[Falcrack]

You could try buying the cheapest ship possible, and hope that the assigned pilot is above 3 stars, then transfer the higher level pilot to a new ship. Kind of a waste of money though.

You could try to level it up by using distribute wares.

You could take pilots from mining ships that are 3 stars and transfer them to your trade ship. Mining helps level up pilots, supposedly.

You could just manually give a ton of sequential buy and sell orders to the trade ship. They will just go about doing their thing for quite a while while you do other stuff. Maybe they will level up while following your manually assigned trade orders, does anyone know?

[duncan idaho]

I bought a medium freighter and hired a pilot for it. The pilot is only 2.5 stars and needs to be 3 in order to auto trade. How do I get him to level up? Sending the ship to do other tasks like partol/explore/revisit known stations seems to do nothing. I don't want to have to manually set up trade orders Everytime.

Thanks

I wouldn't bother trying to be honest; it will take many hours of manual trade orders. Your best bet is either to transfer a more skilled pilot from one of your lower end ships (autominers may have some pilots that have been around long enough to level up to 3). The other, more cheaty but reliable approach is to go to a wharf, select the cheapest ship and select the high default. Then proceed to switch out all of the equipment with the cheapest. Build one of these, and you should get a decently skilled pilot - if not, sell it and try again.

Supposedly we're supposed to be getting improvements to crew skill gains in 2.0 but all I've seen so far is adding more skill gating (which I personally despise).

[EvanRath]

What I noticed is they level up fine by just flying around.

So when i started after I was able to buy another ship (it came with a 2 star pilot) then transfer the pilot to starter ship.

Then I just manually used him as an explorer, by ordering him to an unexplored sector and making him do a "spiral."

Right click and select "fly to" at a point slightly inward from a corner of the hexagon.

Then just order him to the next corner and follow a pattern inward (match the hexagon sides) so that when he is done it will have the entire sector explored. Estimate for the area around the ship that reveals for fog of war. I found it was about 1 inch when zoomed in and the sector borders are at the edge of your screen. So that way you dont overlap much and dont miss any.

edit: note that you can have infinite amount of orders, he will go to each "fly to" waypoint and remember to click "proceed with orders" if he doesnt start moving. You can also move the grey waypoint arrow if it is off point.

Its kind of like a Zamboni at a hockey rink.

My 2 star ended up at 4 stars and got a sector explored.

another edit: the actual explore command is a joke, they just fly around randomly.

[Eagle]

The other, more cheaty but reliable approach is to go to a wharf, select the cheapest ship and select the high default. Then proceed to switch out all of the equipment with the cheapest. Build one of these, and you should get a decently skilled pilot - if not, sell it and try again.

This worked for me, thanks.

[duncan idaho]

What I noticed is they level up fine by just flying around.

So when i started after I was able to buy another ship (it came with a 2 star pilot) then transfer the pilot to starter ship.

Then I just manually used him as an explorer, by ordering him to an unexplored sector and making him do a "spiral."

Right click and select "fly to" at a point slightly inward from a corner of the hexagon.

Then just order him to the next corner and follow a pattern inward (match the hexagon sides) so that when he is done it will have the entire sector explored. Estimate for the area around the ship that reveals for fog of war. I found it was about 1 inch when zoomed in and the sector borders are at the edge of your screen. So that way you dont overlap much and dont miss any.

edit: note that you can have infinite amount of orders, he will go to each "fly to" waypoint and remember to click "proceed with orders" if he doesnt start moving. You can also move the grey waypoint arrow if it is off point.

Its kind of like a Zamboni at a hockey rink.

My 2 star ended up at 4 stars and got a sector explored.

another edit: the actual explore command is a joke, they just fly around randomly.

Odd. I tried to level the pilot of my player ship by ordering her to fly me around for several hours and she didn't gain even a 1/3 of a star.