Three players is the most adjustable crew size in the game, because you have exactly one more player than you need to fight, and exactly one fewer than you need to cover a facility.
That makes the crew split the main decision, and it is worth making deliberately.
Setup one: all three inside
Everyone lands, everyone loots, the ship sits empty.
What you gain: one extra pair of hands per trip, which means more scrap and a shorter day. With three inside you can hold a fight that two players would have to run from.
What you lose: the monitors, the radar and the terminal. Nobody is watching the cameras, so the crew’s only information is what it can see, and a radar booster becomes a map mark nobody is reading.
Use it when: the moon is calm, the quota is the real problem, and the crew already navigates without help.
Setup two: one on the ship
One player stays, two go in.
What you gain: full terminal use. The ship player watches the monitors, reads the map, calls movement, and can ping or flash a radar booster for the pair inside. That player is the crew’s early warning system.
What you lose: a third of the haul. Two players inside earn less than three, and the pair has no third body to cover a hallway.
Use it when: the moon has turrets, landmines or a spawn pattern that needs watching. The Offense moon guide is the clearest case — that is a facility built to punish the pair that is not being watched.
What three players cannot do
Three is not a big crew with one player missing. It is a small crew with one player extra, and the difference shows up in specific situations.
No scout. With two players inside there is nobody ahead. With one on the ship there is nobody ahead either. Somebody enters every room first, and that is a real cost.
No guard on the way out. The walk back is the dangerous part of any trip, and three players means the hauler is not being covered.
No answer to two entities. Four players can split a problem in half. Three players have to send one person away from the group, which is the situation most things in a facility punish.
Equipment for three
Three lights if you are splitting, two if you are staying together. One shovel minimum, two if anyone is ever going to be alone in a corridor.
Radar boosters matter much more in the one-on-the-ship setup, because that is the setup where somebody is actually reading the screen. Walkie-talkies matter in both, because a pair inside and a single on the ship are exactly the people who cannot hear each other shout.
The split discipline
If you are running one-on-the-ship, the pair inside follows two-player rules: never separate, take the first exit, turn back early.
If you are running all three inside, the rules are closer to four-player rules with less margin: you can send one player to check a hallway, but only one, and only for a moment.
The failure mode is doing the four-player thing with three players — splitting into a pair and a single “just to check one room.” That single is the player who dies.
Related guides
- How to play with 2 players — the stricter version of these rules.
- Co-op guide — the four-role model.
- Best loadout — buying order and item distribution for any crew size.