Hard FTL Do’s and Don’ts

Overview

FTL is a great game because it has so many variables to account for, and this is especially true for hard mode. I have personally finished hard with every ship in the game, but I noticed that there is a lot of information out there that I consider inaccurate. Instead of writing a long guide, I made a simple list of do’s and don’ts for FTL. These should help you make the right decisions in the game.

Do’s

A. get weapons that offer concentrated, focused fire on a single system. I’m editing this guide to add this point since it’s really important and I did not sufficiently mention it. You do not just want to fire fast, but you want to be able to fire at a single system, knocking it out at will. This is what gives you control over fights, lets you avoid damage and win in the long run. An enemy ship might have several threatening systems like weapons, hacking, maybe mind control or drone control, but one of these will always be the most obvious threat, and usually it’s the weapon room. Get weapons that enable you to take down this threat quickly and at will. This is the main reason that I do not recommend attack drones, the pike beam, slow weapons like the glaive beam, gimmicky stuff like the bio beam or fire beam or anything else that does not offer this. Good weapons are burst laser 1 and especially 2, chain laser, charge laser, flak 1 and similar weapons, small bomb and breach bombs, whatever comes your way. This is also why hacking is important: it lets you shut down a system at will or enables you to fire through shields at a single system. One thing many new players of FTL complain about is how RNG can determine the outcome of a fight, and this is why it’s so important to be able to control fights by being able to fire first, focused and fast. All of this prevents attrition damage, and lets you, and not the RNG, take the initiative in fights.

B. go for a boarding strategy if you do not have weapons that enable you to do A, since boarding can also result in a quick, controlled and reliable victory.

1. keep the flagship in mind throughout your run. Your goal is to build a ship that can take down the flagship, not just get to the last sector.
2. try to fire first. Get your salvo off before they can fire on you, or board and destroy their weapons before they can harm you. Slow weapons are a problem.
3. get several defensive options for different situations. Get some shields, but also evade or cloak, or a defense drone.
4. go for crew kills, these net more scrap and will let you snowball a run, they are also fun to do. If you have good boarders, get a teleporter.
5. get hacking. Hacking is the most useful system along with teleporter, and can help you out in many situations or even achieve crew kills by hacking oxygen. You can bypass defense drones by depowering your hacking module at the moment the drone fires its shot, then immediately repowering after the shot passes.
6. try to upgrade systems that go well together. Hacking and drone control don’t go very well together because they consume the same resource (you usually want hacking), but hacking has good synergy with stealth. A zoltan shield goes well with evade and stealth, mind control goes well with bombs and teleporting. Achieve synergy.
7. plan your path through the sector. Go for a snake-like winding path that lets you scout for shops. Maximize nodes and dive into the fleet on your last jump if you have strong engines, if that will net you another node. This is especially true if the last node is a nebula, which will always be an empty node that you should consider “diving” since it yields no rewards, unlike a normal final node.
8. if you see a shop, pass by as many nodes as you can before actually visiting the shop, to build up a stack of cash to spend on a good upgrade.
9. get long ranged scanners. Sell them in the last store.
10. pass through nebula nodes, these slow down the fleet and let you rake in more cash.
11. avoid natural hazards unless you’re equipped to handle them (sometimes asteroid fields can make for easier fights). Avoid pulsars and ion storms.
12. train your crew if you find yourself up against a ship that cannot harm you.
13. upgrade your oxygen and med/clone bay at some point, these give you blue options and put you in a safer position and lower downtime. Use your upgraded clone bay to hurl boarders at the enemy without the need for teleporting back.
14. try to get good weapons that make sense for your run. Some weapons are generally good, others suck but some are useful in niche situations. Bombs can be a sensible choice if you have mind control and boarders.
15. know which sectors to choose. Pirate, mantis and rebel sectors are great for cash. Engi have drones which suck for stealth based ships, so avoid them. Zoltan sectors can also be tough since they slow your crucial first salvo. Rock ships have missiles so pick rock sectors if you have defense drone or stealth. Civilian sectors are a trap unless you are really in need of a store. Nebula zones are generally not a great choice, but still better than civilian.
16. go to homeworld sectors, since they offer better rewards.
17. do quests and prioritize distress signals.
18. go to abandoned sectors only if you are planning a boarding run.
19. if you are in an abandoned sector, keep 40 scrap in store at all times since you can use it to buy a Lanius from a common event.
20. buy a second Lanius from a store. You now have the best boarding team, which trivializes a lot of encounters and lets you casually board attack drones.
21. get a cosmopolitan crew makeup to take advantage of blue events and deal with situations. Humans are the worst since they offer nothing special. Rockmen are only good as pilots or doormen. Slugs are good, but you only need one. Engi, Zoltan, Mantis all make the best crewmembers but a duo of Lanius are very overpowered in a boarding setup. Crystalmen are on par with Lanius for boarding but very rare. Use their lockdown ability in every fight.
22. put two Zoltan in your shield room, prevents the enemy from ioning down your shields completely. A solo Zoltan goes in the engine room.
23. Engi should man sensors or doors so you can have them roam and fix problems if needed, same for Mantis.
24. vacuum suckers that board your ship. Game the way the AI moves around, you can easily manipulate them into running in circles in vacuum rooms, beating at doors. Boarders are generally not a serious threat.
25. upgrade piloting early on.
26. upgrade doors to level 2 depending on your crew makeup.
27. juggle power between systems as needed. Did your defense drone just shoot down their missile? Good, depower it because you won’t need it until their next shot. Enemy ship has only one laser but two bombs? Depower shields down to 1 pip and boost engines.
28. pause all the time, stutterpause during their salvo to immediately repair systems hit by their weapons or open doors to extinquish fires and kill boarders.
29. play the game on easy mode to unlock ships you don’t have. Some of the achievements are extremely annoying or not easy to achieve on the A ships, so just get them done on easy mode and then come back to them on hard once you filled out your roster.
30. try to get a good pilot. A good pilot should be able to reasonably defend against boarders. Boarders are generally not a serious threat, except when they board straight into piloting, at which point you’ll want someone who can hold them off while you get reinforcements or to buy time to build up a vacuum. Lanius are, again, the best race to fill this role since they just keep the room at a vacuum, causing the boarders to flee if your lanius leaves the room. Rockman is another good choice.
31. have a crewman on doors if you can spare them. For example, if you have someone manning shields but nobody on doors, put your shields crew on doors for the beginning of each fight, this will help against unpleasant surprises and you can always transfer them to shields as needed.
32. use the “save crew positions” hotkeys, they’re really handy, especially after damage control and other situations where your crew has to move around a lot.
33. order your weapon loadout. In the event that the weapons room gets damaged, the weapon furthest right on the weapon bar will shut down first.

Don’ts

1. buy crap you don’t need. You don’t need level two doors right at the beginning of the game, you also don’t need three shield pips in sector two, these are luxuries that make you feel safe but prevent you from building a good offensive capability. Scrap is a zero-sum game, if you spend it on situational utility you can’t spend it on essentials.
2. upgrade your reactor except for the bare minimum needed. You don’t need to power oxygen throughout your fight, you don’t need to power stealth, shields and engines at the same time. You don’t need to power your defense drone except to stop an incoming missile or drone. Save scrap, scrap is life.
3. buy crew from stores, especially early in your run, except in some unusual situations or if you’re in the market for Lanius. Most runs will still result in maxed out crew even if you don’t buy any. Engi B can be an exception to this rule.
4. be tempted by fancy slow firing weapons like the Glaive Beam, Burst III or the Vulcan. These come into their own lategame on stealth ships (or in the rare case where you luck into a preloader), but they’re a liability early on. Get reliable, fast firing lasers like Burst II, Flak I, and things like that.
5. upgrade Fed C’s flak artillery, it’s garbage.
6. leave your crew in the medbay except when they need to heal. If the enemy hacks your medbay you just lost a crewmember.
7. forget that ships can jump away. Once you’ve dealt with an enemy’s weapons, fire a few shots at piloting to prevent their escape.
8. perform risky boarding operations on ships that are about to jump away. You will lose your crew even with a clonebay, just accept the loss unless you’re really sure what you’re doing.
9. look into the great eye. You might lose a crewmember even with a clonebay.
10. accept offers of surrender, since they are nearly always worse than what you get if you kill them. Only exception is if you’re really low on fuel and they are offering fuel.
11. buy missile weapons. They are almost never worth it. Bombs are better since they bypass defense drones, but only go for them if you’re boarding and have mind control as well. I generally don’t buy bombs, but sometimes keep them if I find them in events. Missiles are shop trash.
12. fight at pulsars. Pulsars are one of your biggest enemies. Ion storms are also really bad news.
13. be afraid of boarders. Boarders are mostly a joke and you can pull pranks on them by exposing them to space.
14. worry too much about enemy mind control. This can be annoying but you can usually juggle in some other crewmembers to keep the mind controlled one occupied so they do not destroy a system. Focus on destroying their weapons and other things that pose a more real threat instead.
15. forget to turn oxygen back on at the end of fights.
16. use ion weapons in most cases. Ion weapons don’t do anything that a good laser salvo doesn’t do better, although they can sometimes be a decent supplement to a beam setup.
17. rely on the pike beam as your primary damage source. The problem with the pike beam is that it can only do 1 damage per system, which will prevent you from knocking out weapon systems quickly in the later sectors. You want concentrated fire.
18. forget to have fun with the game. Sometimes going for a weird setup, or using a crappy ship can be more fun than building another killer gunship or mantis boarder. I’ve had a lot of fun with firebombs and suffocator ships, and some of these setups are good against the flagship.
19. try to get the Crystal event chain on any ship other than Rock C, which comes with a Crystalman. For Rock C, the chance of getting and completing the event is once in a blue moon. For all the other ships, it’s like finding a flying horse on the same day you win the lottery.
20. try to unlock Rock B and C on hard mode using Rock A. Rock A is the worst, most tedious ship in the game and Rock B isn’t really much better. Rockmen and missiles are awful. Get those achievements done on easy mode to unlock Rock C, then use easy mode to get the Crystal ships. Don’t be a masochist.
21. underestimate the weapon charger augment, these stack and are very useful in getting your salvos off fast or charging up chain weapons or vulcans.
22. keep useless augments like the DNA bank, emergency respirators, rock plating, system casing, slug repair gel and other utility crap. Sell them all, they only take up augment slots. Also sell the zoltan shield at the last store since it has almost no value against the flagship, buy engine bars instead.
23. use attack drones. Attack drones are all bad.
24. use shield drones. One exception is the Stealth C special shield drone, which you might want to hang on to if you can combine it with stealth.
25. use defense drone II, defense drone I is better, requires less power and does not waste shots on lasers.
26. use any of the boarding, anti personnel or repair drones. These do not add much. The only good drones are Defense I, Hull Repair and maybe Anti-Drone if you’re being generous.
27. buy drone control as your first system. It’s too defensive and that 85 scrap is probably better spent on a weapon or hacking. Drone control is not horrible but it’s more like a fallback option.
28. get comfortable. Even if you have a cool loadout and are cruising through your run, there is always a type of ship that can still hurt you badly, or an event that can seriously mess with you.
29. listen to people who say hard FTL is impossible. It’s doable, fair and fun if you learn about the variables in the game.
30. waste your time in normal mode. Once you’ve unlocked stuff on easy, go straight to hard! Normal does not make for much of a difference, and hard is where the real game is.

Thank you for reading my guide. You may have noticed that none of these points really touch on the final fight with the flagship. That’s because I wrote a separate guide explaining how to beat the flagship on hard. Find it through my profile and let me know what you think in the comments, I’d like to hear if there are points people disagree on or things I forgot to mention.

Epilogue: a typical hard victory

To round out this guide, I’d like to add a depiction of what some typical hard mode victories look like

Exhibit A:

This is with Lanius B (unfortunately, I took the screenshot slightly too late to show what was going on on the ship). This is what I would say is a very typical run: the ship has an extremely pragmatic setup with fast-firing, basic weapons that combine to form a salvo. Hacking is the main offensive system, but the ship is also capable of sending boarders, which I used especially in phase 3 to shut down systems after I’d killed the crew. On this run, I actually had terrible RNG with a lot of annoying situations, but because Lanius B is one of the best ships in the game, and because of the pragmatic setup, I managed to squeeze out a win.

Exhibit B:

The fact that this is Fed C already makes it an atypical hard victory because, basically, Fed C sucks. Still, I like this shot because it shows how a weird ship can still win with a bit of luck. To me, this win shows how strong suffocation and fire weapons can be, since the enemy crew is completely inept at dealing with breaches and especially fire, and even worse with both of them at the same time. You might notice I actually upgraded the artillery weapon (something I say in my guide you should not do), the reason for this is that I started out this run starved for weapons and upgraded flak out of desperation for any kind of firepower (towards the end of the run, I used it as a shield-puncher to make way for my fire beam). At some point, I lucked into a breach II, bought another one and a missile duplication augment. I believe that quite a bit of luck was involved in this win, but breach II is actually a very strong weapon, especially if it can be combined with fire and boarders. Breach II is one of the most effective weapons at shutting down a system completely, reliably and for a long time. Stealth is also important here: it buys time to let me charge my breach bombs and fire beam, to get around the long charge times for these weapons.

But the real stars of this run cannot be seen in the screenshot: 2 stacked weapons charge augments and a shield weapons augment. As I say in the guide, the weapons charge augment should not be underestimated, especially when combined with stealth weapons that let you fire while staying cloaked.

Other things to note about this screenshot: 2 Zoltan in the shield room to prevent being ion’ed, a third Zoltan in engineering. Charge Ion for suppressing shields, combined with (not pictured) a weapons charge augment.

Exhibit C:

This was a bit of a lucky run, but this shot still shows off the power of boarding. Of course, this is Mantis C, which comes with powerful boarders from the start, but I was able to expand my boarding crew to 4 mantis total (1 of whom died on the first phase of the flagship, RIP). Paired with a fully upgraded teleporter and trained crew, this meant that I could just throw 4 Mantis in 2 waves at every enemy ship, quickly overwhelming most enemy crews before the enemy could really get more than a single shot off.

The weapons here are again extremely practical, but barely saw any use outside of the flagship fight and the occasional drone, since the Mantis would just do nearly all of the work. Hacking was useful as always, mostly for shutting down medbays or missile weapons, lategame I used the money accumulated from crewkills to buy stealth, which meant that I didn’t even have to worry about enemy weapons.

Although the run went very smoothly, I was still very aware all the time that I had to rely on the medbay instead of cloning. Without the clonebay, I had to occasionally teleport my boarders back to rescue them, and it made the flagship more difficult because boarders easily get killed during the FS’s stealth, problems which the clonebay doesn’t have. To make sure I wouldn’t lose boarders to escaping enemies, I invested in an FTL jammer augment as well.

Overall this was another run that was all about control: I boarded and killed enemies very quickly while remaining untouchable throughout most fights.