cant hire NPC with the pilot icon on their head - Explained.

[palm911]

no option to hire , regardless of race.

its a very old save i had, upgraded to 4.1

[Alan Phipps]

Yes, those version 4.xx station NPCs titled as 'Captain' cannot be hired as they are 'visiting ships' captains' (to quote a dev). They are have no gameplay role (so far) and so that aspect is currently as intended. Similar thread.

[palm911]

Yes, those version 4.xx station NPCs titled as 'Captain' cannot be hired as they are 'visiting ships' captains' (to quote a dev). They are have no gameplay role (so far) and so that aspect is currently as intended. Similar thread.

ahh, ok, so no captains can be hired now? i do recall that those offering missions cannot be hired, but now you dont even have the choice to hire them in the radial menu. it is intended? i have seen over 10 of those and everytime i talk to them the option to hire them is not present. does not happen with the others, who always have the option to hire them (regardless if they are busy or not)

[Alan Phipps]

Basically, you can hire engineers, pilots and marines (yes, there are some marines staying around now) - as long as they are not offering missions or already employed on the station. It is just the visiting captains that have next to no dialogue options at the moment, and as currently intended.

[Zloth2]

I haven't seen a faction-owned pilot I could hire in a while. Not one. If you got a mission to hire pilots in 4.0, it was rare to find any but at least the ones you did find could be hired. Now you've got tons of visitor pilots to wade through. If they are clearly of a different faction (a Paranid walking around an Argon station), they're easy to skip, but many of them aren't.

I guess it isn't too hard to work around: pilot manuals are not at all hard to find and they can turn an engineer into a pilot very cheaply. They may be dress wrong, but that's not a big deal.

[Alm888]

In other words, EgoSoft made pointless station-walking even more pointless by diluting hire-able NPCs with useless dummy ones in a 50/50 ratio. Great move!