The 98-strong crew gacha (internally "Aviators", "Pilot" in the UI). Every worked skill, every shard cost, and the real recruit odds — decoded from the config tables.
What a Pilot is
Pilots are collectible crew members that buff your fighter passively. Each one carries a single accumulate skill — a bonus that grows as you play — plus flat combat power, and levels up along two separate tracks: Tactics stages (paid in Training Guides + Stars) and stars (paid in Badges + Pilot Shards).
98
Pilots in the config
74
actually obtainable in banners
10
Tactics stages (+ a skill-cap step)
6★
star tiers, then an Awakening step
Grade note: internally Pilots use rarity 1–6, but the game displays rarities 1–3 all as "N" — so the visible ladder is just N → R → SR → SSR (red). The roster splits 16 N / 30 R / 48 SR / 4 SSR. The four SSRs are chase units that currently appear in no banner at all.
Camp note: the config defines four camps (Catherine, Chris, Alice, Mina — the four Mech Spirits), but in this build all 98 Pilots are assigned to Catherine's camp. The camp/fetter machinery exists; the roster just hasn't spread across it yet.
The full roster
Skill text below is worked: the config's placeholder values (trigger threshold + per-stack bonus at stage 0) are filled in. "Max bonus" is the ceiling at Tactics stage 10 — per-stack growth × maximum stacks. "Pool" is the recruit-banner wave a pilot first appears in (the pool expands as batches release); — means not currently recruitable.
How a Pilot skill works
Every Pilot skill is an accumulator. The game keeps a hidden counter per skill — diamonds spent, bosses killed, hours of idle rewards claimed, daily missions finished, and ~40 other triggers. Each time the counter hits the skill's threshold, the bonus ticks up by one stack and the counter resets, so the buff keeps growing as you play.
The cap on stacks is set by the Pilot's current Tactics stage — that's the real reason to push stages. The per-grade patterns:
N — small flat bonuses (e.g. +3 idle-reward per stack), caps growing 6 → 60 stacks
R — flat combat stats, and the per-stack growth itself escalates with stage (20 → 53)
SR — +1% per stack, hard-capped at 11 stacks (stage 10)
SSR — +2% per stack, same 11-stack cap → up to +22%
Worked example: Freya (SR): "For every 3,000 diamonds consumed, Dodge +1%" — at Tactics stage 10 she holds 11 stacks, so a fully-farmed Freya is a permanent +11% Dodge… for 33,000 diamonds spent. The skill is literally a loyalty card for the cash shop.
// a Pilot splash from the asset bundles
Track 1 — Tactics stages (the Guide economy)
Ten upgrade stages per Pilot. The Training Guide bill is identical for every Pilot regardless of grade — 150 Basic, 150 Standard, 350 Advanced, 375 Expert to max one Pilot — while the Stars (soft currency) bill scales with grade, roughly doubling per tier.
Track 2 — Stars & Awakening (the shard economy)
Six star tiers, then a seventh Awakening step. Star-ups cost Badges (a universal material from the recruit banner), and the last steps additionally demand universal Pilot Shards of the matching grade. Each star also adds a flat pair of stats (each Pilot rolls two of Physical/Energy ATK/DEF).
The step-change is deliberate: ★1–★5 are cheap enough to reach from casual play, then ★6 triples the Badge price and Awakening stacks a four-digit universal-shard bill on top — that's the whale wall.
Recruiting — the Pilot banner, with real odds
The Pilot Recruit banner rolls one of seven outcomes. The config ships the same banner in four "waves" — identical tier odds, but the unit pool expands as release batches go live (29 → 44 → 59 → 74 pilots), which quietly dilutes the chance of hitting any specific pilot. A parallel Limited-Time Recruitment re-uses the same tier odds over a small featured subset (3 N / 6 R / 6 SR).
The 54.5% "Materials" bucket is exactly the upgrade economy above: — the banner that sells you Pilots also drip-feeds the currency to upgrade them.
A full SR Pilot is a 1.5% event, split across 12–30 units depending on wave — i.e. 0.05–0.125% for a specific SR. Shard hits pay ×5 shards toward a 20–50-shard unlock. Pity/guarantee mechanics for premium chests are covered in Gacha & Odds.
