Recruit Anyone as Ship Crew

Have you ever wished you could bring more of your friends on your journey? Is there someone you'd like to whisk away from their troubles? Do you have a favorite bartender or shopkeeper that you'd prefer to keep close? Have you spawned some new NPCs on your ship using my Spawn NPCs mod, but some of them just stand still and you wish they'd make themselves at home? Do you have 200 ship crew slots using my 200 Ship Crew mod, but can't find enough people to fill them all? Then this is the mod for you.

In front of the bed in your room at the Lodge, you'll find a mysterious box that contains a most impressive piece of jewelry - The Ring of Recruitment!

The Ring of Recruitment allows you to talk to nearly any NPC to mark that NPC for recruitment, then talk to them once more to confirm and recruit them to your ship. Simply equip the ring, speak to an NPC, wait a few seconds, then speak to them again and welcome them to your roster! NPCs on your ship will act like they live there, sandboxing and using furniture as you'd expect them to.

Notes:

If you update this mod, you may need to go back to the Lodge to retrieve the ring from the box again.

The Ring of Recruitment takes up no armor slot, so you can wear other rings at the same time.

NPCs recruited using the ring will not have any special skills, and won't give you any special crew dialogue or features; they'll mostly just keep you company and make your ship feel more alive.

Recruiting NPCs that are required for quests could cause problems - make sure you're done with an NPC's quests before recruiting them, unless you're willing to take the risk. Or, spawn a copy of them using my Spawn NPCs mod, and recruit the copy.

Marking an NPC for recruitment is final - even talking to a different NPC with the ring on afterward will recruit the NPC you marked. Make sure you're ready to recruit an NPC, and take the ring off when you don't want to recruit.

Most NPCs will respond silently when you mark them or recruit them, but some will say something short such as "Huh?"

Since most dialogue in Starfield is location-locked, many NPCs will have little or nothing to say while aboard your ship. There's nothing I can currently do about this.

There may be some NPCs that cannot be recruited, although I haven't encountered any during testing.

I've tried to prevent recruitment of NPCs that can already be recruited, but in some edge cases you may be able to bypass this. I'd recommend against using this ring on NPCs that are already recruitable, since they may not have full crew features using the ring.

In my testing, recruiting generic NPCs like citizens or guards has worked, and they've persisted over time, but I don't know whether they'll eventually be recycled and disappear from your ship, and if so, whether you'll be able to get them back by unassigning and reassigning them. Feel free to test and let me know how it goes.

Enjoy!