To upgrade the SPEED of your crew, set them JANITORS / GENERAL and they will upgrade SPEED first and then HEALTH ;))

@NumbTongue: If you can't mine because your cargo space is full, you must have at least 5 metal lying around somewhere. That is enough to build a cargo hatch! That's 5 metal used, and 100 space created, so you can mine another 105 resources! And if there is no room on your hull for a cargo hatch, then expand your hull to MAKE space for a cargo hatch. Each tile of hull costs only 2 metal.

i always see speed level up on my janitors. its usually the first or second stat they start improving.

I believe it's possible to level speed, I'm just thinking it's the last thing to level. One of my enginners (starting at 3 skill) got the 4th engineering, maxed health, got a level in combat. (science and speed were not affected by the time it got 4 level ups) Never seen another character get speed. The time it takes to increase speed is not worth waiting for when you can start out fast and level the primary fast enough to not be super annoyed with it.

I blieve my tip on shield recharge is now obsolete, as the dev has changed shield behavior to address it (it was rather exploity, after all).

@terl43 - I believe I've seen speed level up. The way levelling seems to work is Primary stat -> 4, then endurance -> 4, then speed -> 4. It may just be that you haven't had anyone level up long enough to max out their primary stat and endurance first. Although, I could be remembering wrong here.

@ThatSamurai-Super Chad, Just gives you a base point to start from instand of having to re-make your ship thousands of times at the start so you can just load it instead

wHAT DOES THE "CALL YOUR SHIP SETUp bit do, ive named my ship setup and saved it and nothing has happened

Here's a tip. Speed is the most important stat for engineers, not engineering.

Why? because in the 20 or so hours I've played, I've never seen speed get leveled up, but I have seen all the other stats level. It takes about 2 hours to get an engineer from level 1 to level 4, and durring most of that time, a starting skill 3 engineer will be waiting on resources anyway. Sure you build slow, but your resource income is slow, so it's not a problem. Later on, your level 4 engineers will be better than the ones you got for starting with a 3 skill in engineering and 1 or if you're super lucky 2 speed.

Here's a tip: Shield recharge is vastly more important than shield capacity, and shields become more powerful when hovering between empty and barely charged. Whenver the shield regenerates it, intercepts everything within the shields radius. 1 shield hit point can block an infinite number of lasers, missiles, and asteroids this way. Thus having multiple boosters and staggering them (toggling power with a second or so in between) will allow the shield to regenerate multiple times in succession, intercepting many more shots than it otherwise would.

If you lack a resource and cannot mine more because you have no more cargo space, right click the ship core or cargo box and jettison some resources you don't need so you can mine for something you do need.