After you build your colony deck (by selecting your Origin, ship, crew and, probably, passengers or cargo) but before Station Approach which begins the real-time evacuation, you can examine your crew and make certain changes. This phase has no timer so you can take all the time that you need.

While EXODE is designed so you can't min/max everything, you can now review some of your crew members' statistics after they are generated and alter a subset of those. You have a fixed pool of Investigation points and can spend them to reveal more statistics and/or increase values. Characters with the Investigation skill in your deck give you more Investigation points (currently equal to the investigator's Quality Level)

Epic and Legendary characters will start with their 3 top skills revealed while Common and Rare characters will only have their top 2 revealed. You can use your Investigation points to reveal other skills that a character has or discover their background, which can potentially have significant effects upon play. You can also use Investigation points to increase revealed skills or to re-roll your background (costs one Investigation point and forces a different background each time).

Do you have a particular officer that you want to base your colony game-play on? Name this character your XO! Your XO is your First Officer or “Number One” and receives a huge bonus in Discipline, Loyalty and other attributes (above and beyond the normal +10 Loyalty and +10 Discipline that officers already get).

Finally, you can rename your characters (although possibly with limitations on the Veteran ones). Once you are done altering your crew, you can move on to the evacuation itself.