You start with three crew members to start with (eventually four then five), these persons have names, characters, and backstory to go with them to help you flesh-out the where and why. Each one has a specific skill they specialize in, but they don't matter as you can train any character in any of the skills: gathering wood for your futuristic, sci-fi, wood-burning furnace; gathering e-waste that you use for everything from upgrading storage capacity to repairing systems; and preparing food from your plant based food-synthesizer that's never explained. Later on a fourth is added when your engineer finds you, and it's basically the skill of recharging your generator's battery pack. Each skill level determines how much you bring back for each trip, or in the recharging skill, how fast it takes. Every time you gather resources, you have to travel farther from the relative safety of your base, exhausting each character more and more both from the excursion and the progressively more fridgid air. You can restore their exhaustion and hunger by entering a relaxation pod, or going to the fridge, but here is also the biggest flaw that hinders this game from being good. These people are brainless. If you order a crewmember to gather wood, they will not stop until they die of exposure or hunger. If you tell a member to eat and there is no food in the fridge, they will, despite being mere feet from the food synthesizer, stand in front of the fridge until they die of hunger. If they barely make it back from gathering e-waste, literally dying of exhaustion, they will not stop, they will diligently unload their pack and run right back outside to their death. If you do not stop them, they will die of hunger while preparing more food for a fridge that is already jammed full. You will fail so many times because your attention was drawn to one side and not the other. As others have said, once you lose a crewmate, you won't be able to make it back up. You'll just be breaking even.
