Because the game heavily relies on luck, you want to skew the odds in your favor. In practice, this means to pick a captain with a strong skill (3 or better).

E.g. your captain has 3 bravado points, pick officers who also have a high bravado rating if possible. If not, either start over or go for an additional strong stat.


Ideally your crew will have 7 or more skill points in one field. This means that the odds of a positive outcome (= green tick mark) are much better. If you max out the boxes on the Probability Drive, the boxes for positive outcomes will become "very positive" outcomes (star icons). That's what I call an advantage.

For example: A crew with a high diplomacy skillset will turn your odd from tho one in the image above to this: And that's pretty sweet.

Of course, you won't always be able to select your strongest skill in the encounters, but it's still better than having your crew's skills distributed evenly but low.

On the map, you can click on each point of interest to reveal a little icon indicating what resource you can expect to gain (if you're lucky):

Food
(secret)
Fuel
Crew
Hull Points

As of version 2015_08_08_14, running out of fuel or hull points does not affect you in any way, so there's no need to cry over spilled space-gas or a dinged fuselage. But food, on the other hand, is vital. Quite literally. If you run out of food, you lose 10 crew by each step or your officers take 2 HP damage. That's ouch. So do it like the Cookie Monster and always go for what you can stuff in your pie-hole or at least an unknown box. Of course, depending on your luck you may still end up running dry on edibles, but since you know it's priority number one, you can do your best to keep your crew fed and happy.