Calculated FTL

Overview

CONTAINS SPOILERS! That, and a very technical approach to FTL: AE, particularly on hard difficulty, although you will find my advice can be useful on lower difficulties, and for non-AE or modded FTL.

Foreword

Hi. I’m HeXaGoN, your local FTL nerd. 600 hours in and counting, I have beaten the game on hard difficulty with every single ship, and have gotten every single achievement on hard. I’ve put a lot of hours into probing every corner of the game, many of which include writing test mods, and trying to understand bits of disassembled code.

I really hope that, if you’re part of the intended audience, you get something out of reading this. If you did, I’d appreciate you rating the guide so that more people can see it!

TL;DR: if you’ve unlocked the unidentified cruiser (or know what it is), it’s probably fine to read this guide.

If you don’t want things spoiled, shoo. Don’t scroll down. The element of mystery can make a game like this a lot more fun, and the last thing I want is for this guide to ruin your experience. This guide is meant for players who have seen everything there is to see in the game and just want to start winning on higher difficulties. This guide is also not meant to help people who are using mods, or playing without Advanced Edition turned on.

The goal of my guide is to familiarize you with as many aspects of the game as I can and to help create a winning mindset. I want to give you a deep and technical understanding of FTL. My secondary goal is to knock dogmatic thinking out of you, and so what this guide is not is a strategy guide. I’m not here to teach you how to win with particular builds or ships. Sure, it might come up, but it’s not the point of the guide. This guide does not contain a panacea for FTL. Unfortunately in FTL it’s rarely ever the case where you can say there is always a right way to do something.

I’ve made an effort to make it readable from start to finish, but I cannot guarantee this is the best way to make use of most of the guide. A lot of this guide is meant to act as a reference for many of the little things in the game. What I mean when I say this is, if something comes up in a game, you can skim this guide and see if I address it. For example, you might be a bit curious about pulsars, so you’d go straight to the environmental hazards section.

Here and there I make recommendations for how to apply those things, but at the end of the day I leave it up to you to figure out all that. Plus, you don’t have to follow my recommendations.

Additionally, this guide also goes over a lot of exploits, particularly in the “tips & tricks” sections. I’m not necessarily advocating for you to use them, especially if you view it as cheating. I just want you to be aware of them.

Be aware that there’s glossary for the notation and terms I use throughout the guide. Make sure to use it if you don’t know or forget what something means.

This is my first attempt at writing any sort of guide for FTL. I can’t consistently wrack up 50 wins in a row on hard w/ Engi B without pausing while streaming to an audience on twitch, so it’s probably not perfect. Feel free to leave a comment if I got something wrong. In fact, if something confuses you, or you feel it needs visuals or even a video demonstration, let me know. If you want me to write an entirely new section on some topic, let me know and I will consider it.

For strategy guides for specific ships, I recommend you take a look at Mike Hopley’s guide.[ftl-ships-guide.netlify.app]

I would’ve never gotten any good at this game without the help of the resources made available by others. I would like to thank, and I encourage you to look into their content:

• DarkTwinge
• Mike Hopley
• A few others who taught me specific tricks. They will be credited wherever their contribution is.

No. I haven’t covered everything I want to cover in this guide, simply put. You might see a few empty sections with “TO DO” in them.

A major misconception

This deserves its own section, because I want to shake this idea out of your head. It’s an idea that’s going to cause you to make crappier plays.

So what’s this bad idea? Simple. The one where you believe you’re going to win or lose because of luck. The reality is that FTL is very much so a skill based game. You’re going to need to accept that the vast majority of your losses to “luck” are really losses to mistakes that you made. Once you do that, you can start improving.

The reason this misconception exists is because beginners are… well, beginners. Hell, I was a beginner, I would know. I didn’t pick up on all of the mistakes I was making. I purchased things that are wastes of scrap. I took unnecessary risks. I didn’t upgrade things that need to be upgraded. Compound that with the fact that I likely didn’t know how to respond to most events at all, and I had a recipe for disaster that was disguised as a bad dice roll. It wasn’t just a bad dice roll. It was a bad dice roll + a dozen terrible voluntary decisions, and sometimes there wasn’t even a dice roll at all. I’m also not going to give credence to the idea that I needed to memorize most of the events in the game to win, but it would’ve helped for sure.

Again, once you stop seeing it as just pure luck and you start analyzing what you can do better, you’ll start winning. You will improve drastically. That’s why I want you to stop relying on the luck excuse. Yes, the game is luck-based, and there is no denying that. The catch is that the luck isn’t enough of a factor to determine a victory or loss the vast majority of the time.

Yes, there are a few scenarios where you straight up lose to luck, but they’re pretty much negligible. For me, the only example that comes to mind is playing Engi B (which has a lone engi for crew), being forced into a Rock sector early on, and then getting the rock mine event which has a 50% chance of killing off your engi. This requires so much setup and so much bad luck I’d call it cosmic interference. It’s just extremely unlikely. Additionally, a lot of time hasn’t been invested into that particular game, so it’s not like restarting would be a big deal anyways.

The main exception to this whole section of course is win streaks. Many people might not realize it, but sector 1 is hellish. It is by far the most sink-or-swim sector in the game, and a bit of bad luck may ruin a win streak there. There’s not much to be done about that unfortunately. However for players who do not play for win streaks, you have the ability to basically ignore that the deadliest sector is the 1st one since you can just restart until you get a nice game where you manage to leave sector 1 with good offense & defense and not a whole lot of hull damage. Stealth B is called a streak killer. and for good reason!

Intro to minmaxing

Some of you may be familiar with how Chess engines (that is to say, Chess playing computers) evaluate how good or bad a move is. Part of their analysis involves the material (pieces and pawns) that are on the board, where each side is given a number representing how much of it they have.

As an example, if you have a king, pawn, knight, and queen, you have 13 points of material. The king isn’t factored into this, since he’s priceless. A pawn is worth 1 point, a knight is worth 3, and a queen is worth 9.

“Okay,” you might say, “but what does this have to do with FTL?”

I propose you look at FTL in a similar light, but rather than looking at it as “how many pawns-worth of material do I have?”, look at it as “how much scrap do I have?”

An analog to the above in FTL may be that your ship is priceless, and that one of your crew is priceless (maybe the pilot) since those are directly tied to the loss condition of the game (if your hull is 0, you lose; when your last crew member dies, you lose). Your crew, your weapons, your augments, and everything else all have some sort of value to them.

It’s not enough to just ask how much you have now, but how much you will have. In Chess, you can put your knight in a position where he’s guaranteed to be captured 4 moves later, which means, even though you have the knight now, you’re effectively down 3 points of material. In FTL, you can fail to get what you need by a certain sector to do well in battles, and now you’ve already effectively lost scrap to repairing hull damage a few beacons later, even though the battles haven’t happened yet.

The gist of it is to think before you make a choice, even if the consequences (good or bad) come much later. Think about how much scrap you have, and also think about how much you will gain or lose down the line from making that choice. You’re going to pick between choices in such a way that you maximize your gains, and minimize your losses. If you can do that, you’re already a big step ahead.

Throughout the guide, I will be teaching you to score your choices, not ship layouts; however, to get you started, I want you to get into the mindset of thinking about just how much everything at your disposal is worth.

As an exercise, let’s take a look at the starting loadout of a ship and score it. How about the good ol’ Kestrel? The A-type, in particular.

I’m going to ignore any starting scrap you might get, because this guide is especially targeted at people wanting to win on hard. While on easy you start with 30$, and on normal you start with 10$, guess what hard starts you with? Nothing. Nada. 0$. You’ve probably also figured it out by now, but I’m using a dollar sign in lieu of the scrap symbol, since there’s really no convenient way to put gears in the text. Sorry.

Moving on, like any other ship, Kestrel A starts with 30 hull points. The value of this depends on what sector you’re in. Since we’re looking at the start, we’re in S1. In S1-3, repairing 1 hull point costs 2$ each. So this is a 60$ value.

Secondly, it starts with the following resources:

• 16 fuel. Fuel is 3$/unit, so this is a 48$ value.
• 8 missiles. Missiles are 6$/unit, so this is a 48$ value too.
• 2 drone parts. These are 8$/unit, so this is a 16$ value.

Thirdly, it starts with 3 humans. Humans are 45$ each, so this is a 135$ value.

Fourthly, it starts with a unique variant of the Artemis, as well as a Burst Laser II. These weapons are worth 38$ and 80$ respectively, for a total of 118$.

Fifthly, we start with 8 power bars, worth 210$. The first 5 power bars are 30$ each, and the 6th through 10th bar are 20$ each.

Finally, the optional systems/upgrades the Kestrel starts with:

• Shields-2: 125$
• Engines-2: 10$
• Medbay-1: 45$
• Weapons-3: 65$
• Sensors-1: 40$
• Doors-1: 60$

So we’re getting a pretty good idea of just how much what the Kestrel A gives us is worth. In fact, let’s tally everything up… 980$! Wow, the Kestrel A’s worth a lot, isn’t it?

…well, this value is just an estimate (but an empirical one) of how good the Kestrel A’s starting loadout is, strictly in terms of its scrap value. There’s other things that we haven’t accounted for.

For instance, we can take our weapons guy and put him on doors. That’s a 35$ value right there, since he will raise the doors’ level by 1 if he’s manning them. Even that’s a bit flimsy since, well, by manning weapons, he could charge them 10% faster, which in itself also has lots of value. He could man other stuff, some with actual value (i.e. sensors, which manning would be worth 25$), some without value, but it’d be very situational.

In fact, let’s look at another example, the Crystal B, which is considered by many to be the best ship in the game.

• 30 hull, 60$ in sector 1
• 16 fuel, 48$
• 3 crystal crew, 180$
• 8 power bars, 210$
• Shields-2, 125$
• Engines-2, 10$
• Medbay-1, 45$
• Teleporter-1, 90$
• Cloaking-1, 150$
• Sensors-1, 40$
• Doors-1, 60$

The total scrap value of the Crystal B at the start is 1013$. Better than the Kestrel A, as expected, but only very slightly. Many of us know the Crystal B has much more potential than the Kestrel A. A value difference of 33$ just doesn’t reflect that. So as we can see, the scrap value doesn’t show everything!

That doesn’t mean looking at the scrap value isn’t important. It’s central to this guide, after all. Just realize it’s an aid in making decisions, not evaluating how good your ship is, and for that matter, how good the situation is. Remember, the goal of the game is to win, not just maximize your scrap value.

Auto-rewards

Auto-rewards are randomly generated rewards that are frequently (but not always) used for in events.

So, how do they work? Well, they’re divided into tiers (which dictate how much stuff you get) and categories (which dictate what you get).

The tiers are as follows:

• Low: Lower scrap multiplier, less resources.
• Medium: In the middle, as you might expect.
• High: High scrap multiplier, more resources.
• Random: Randomly chooses one of the other 3 tiers.

Additionally, they’re divided into multiple categories
Let’s call T the tier of the reward.

• Standard: T scrap & low resources. Roughly 3% chance of a bonus.
• Stuff: T resources & low scrap. Roughly 6% chance of a bonus. Often used in surrenders.
• Scrap only: T scrap.
• Fuel: T fuel & T scrap.
• Missiles: T missiles & T scrap.
• Drone parts: T drone parts & T scrap. Unused in vanilla FTL.
• Fuel only: T fuel.
• Missiles only: T missiles. Unused in vanilla FTL.
• Drone parts only: T drone parts. Unused in vanilla FTL.
• Weapon: A totally random weapon & T scrap.
• Augment: A totally random augment & T scrap.
• Drone: A totally random drone & T scrap.

See the bonuses section below for more information on what the bonus is.

That’s not all to the story though. After all, there’s some range of values for what we’re given, and there are occasional bonuses. Resources have a fixed range, whereas scrap rewards tend to scale linearly in proportion to the scrap sector you’re in.

The progression of scrap rewards varies from difficulty to difficulty, which is how FTL makes normal and hard give less scrap. FTL uses the sector you’re in to determine how much scrap you get, but there’s a little more to the story.

On easy, the scrap sector is the same as the sector you’re in. So S1 corresponds to SS1, or scrap sector 1.

On normal, scrap reward progression is delayed by 1 sector, so you’d subtract 1 from the sector you’re in; thus, S1 corresponds to SS0.

On hard, it’s delayed by an additional sector, so you’d need to subtract 2; thus, S1 corresponds to scrap sector -1. Negative scrap sectors are all the same as SS0, so we could simply say S1 and S2 are SS0 on hard, and S3 is where we advance to SS1.

To help you understand this better (since I know the above is a mouthful), here’s a table:

Scrap rewards:
Fortunately I was able to recently disassemble the game, and guess what I found? The formula for how much scrap you get in a given scrap sector!

Where:

• V is the variance in the scrap reward. This is picked randomly.
• Vmin is the minimum variance.
• Vmax is the maximum variance.
• B is the base reward.
• S is the scrap sector you’re in.
• R is the amount of scrap you get.

Now, the values for Vmin and Vmax depend on the tier of the reward. It goes as follows:

It might not be immediately obvious, but the absolute extremes of the rewards tend to be less common. As an example, in SS0, you can get anywhere from 19 to 23 scrap from a high-tier reward. However, you actually have a lower chance to get 19 or 23 exactly. Everything in-between has an equal chance of being selected though. If you look closely into the math, you’ll see why 🙂

Resource rewards:

There’s no real formula for these. These are all values hard-coded into the game.

Occasionally an auto reward in the standard or stuff category will give you a bonus weapon, augment, or drone. That said, these two categories handle things a little differently.

Standard category

• Have roughly a 3% chance of coming with a bonus
• The scrap and resources you get are not altered.

Stuff category

• Have roughly a 6% chance of coming with a bonus
• The scrap reward tier is changed to match the overall reward tier, rather than being low tier.

There often will be times where you have to pick between a “stuff” reward and standard reward. This generally means picking between low-tier and some other tier of scrap, though if you get a bonus augment/drone/weapon then the tier does not change for the scrap—this makes a comparison unnecessary.

Because often times this choice must consider extra rewards (like resources), it is possible to actually gain scrap value when picking a lower tier reward over a higher tier one.

To compute your raw opportunity cost (or gain, even), use the following formula:

Where:

• Vw is your worst difference in variance.
• Vb is your best difference in variance.
• Rw is your worst difference in reward.
• Rb is your best difference in reward.
• Vll is the minimum variance for the worse tier.
• Vul is the maximum variance for the worse tier.
• Vlh is the minimum variance for the better tier.
• Vuh is the maximum variance for the better tier.
• E is a constant for whatever value you might get from other things in the reward, like resources.

A negative difference means you incur an opportunity cost. A positive difference means you gain from the choice.

Default rewards

There are some generic events that are often (but not always) used for when ships are destroyed, or the crew on them is killed. Let’s have a look at those, because we’ll often be making decisions based around these rewards. I encourage you to look at the auto-rewards section if you haven’t, since you’ll need it to understand this section.

When you destroy a ship, this event is the most common one to pop up. By default, you should think of this when you think of what destroying a ship is worth. You’ll receive a medium standard reward, so your rewards will vary wildly.

This is an event list that’s used all over the place for whenever you kill all of the crew on a ship. This is the reason why boarding nets you more scrap overall compared to simply gunning a ship down. The events that can be picked from this list have the following results:

• There is a 1 in 3 chance you will get a medium standard reward.
• There is a 2 in 9 chance you will get a high standard reward.
• There is a 2 in 9 chance you will get a high fuel + scrap reward.
• There is a 1 in 9 chance you will get a crew member + a low scrap reward.
• There is a 1 in 9 chance you will get a weapon + a low scrap reward.

Let’s break it down by how much scrap you stand to get:

• 4 in 9 chance you’ll get high scrap.
• 1 in 3 chance you’ll get medium scrap.
• 1 in 9 chance you’ll get low scrap, but a weapon that can either save you scrap, or be sold. Anywhere from a 10$ to 95$ value in addition to low scrap, depending on how you look at it.
• 1 in 9 chance you’ll get low scrap, but a crew member, which is a 45$ to 60$ value depending on what race they are.

So 2 out of 3 times, you’re going to get much more scrap (or equivalent) than you would from a normal fight.

I need to redo this part since I’ve figured out new formulas for scrap rewards which may have shown this bit to have incorrect numbers.

Let’s phrase it a little more technically, since there’s all sorts of exceptions to what will happen. How about, “how much better is getting DEAD_CREW_DEFAULT than DESTROYED_DEFAULT?”

So let’s think about it in terms of not just the scrap we get, but the scrap value. Doing a rough average of what DEAD_CREW_DEFAULT gives us (factoring in the probabilities) and a rough average of what DESTROYED_DEFAULT gives us, I’ve determined that it depends on the scrap sector. Roughly speaking, in SS0, we’d average 73.4% more scrap value, and in SS8, we’d roughly average 20.3% more scrap value. Throughout the game, the average of the boost is roughly 36.2%. The boost follows a reciprocal distribution.

If we insist on looking at only the scrap we get, which goes against the purposes of this guide, then on average it’d be around 9.2% in SS0 and 5.7% in SS8. The average throughout the game is roughly 6.8%. This would make crew kills seem only marginally better, but this is far from the truth. They’re very good.

Responding to surrender offers

These are a perfect example of where my line of thinking shines. You’re about to wipe out the enemy when all of a sudden, a prompt comes up, and a likely mediocre reward is offered to you by the enemy in exchange for their lives. Should you even bother taking it?

Something to keep in mind: there are many different surrender offer events in the game. Generally, they’re tied to the enemy ship that’s loaded in. Enemies tend to surrender when they have 2-4 hull points left, but it depends on the event, and it’s not even guaranteed an enemy will surrender.

There are three major kinds of surrender offers:

1. Ones that offer you an auto-reward in the “stuff” category. The tier of the reward will vary from event-to-event, so use the wiki if you want to find out what you stand to gain.
2. Ones that offer you free crew.
3. Event specific surrenders, which you may or may not be forced to accept anyways.

1. You’re heavily damaged, or are in a situation where taking a lot of damage is likely. Think about the gains you’d get from finishing the battle, as well as how much it’d cost you to repair the damages and how risky it would be to try to get to the next store with low health.
2. The enemy is on the verge of jumping away and you can’t stop them. Getting something’s better than nothing, so this is usually a good idea. Try to avoid getting into such a situation if you can help it, though.
3. If the rewards are high and you wouldn’t incur an opportunity cost anyways.

Often these are mediocre and not worth taking, since often you’ll get resources you don’t need instead of scrap. So people understandably mindlessly click “nope, you die pal” and obliterate the enemy. It’s worth noting that the auto-reward tiers on this one varies, though medium and random seem to be the most common.

I have a few guidelines for these surrenders that you should consider before you make a decision.

If they give you a resource you need
Let’s take fuel as an example. Generally speaking, this is the one you’re going to be using and needing the most anyways. It obviously isn’t the only resource you can apply this mentality to, though.

Let’s say you get a surrender offer with 4+ fuel. If you’re in SS0-1, it’s definitely worth considering. Note, I’m not saying to accept it. Just consider it. 4 fuel is worth 12$, after all, and that gain will often outweigh the opportunity cost. Additionally, in later sectors, this is a bad idea, as the opportunity cost greatly outweighs the value of the fuel.

But what’s better than just stating this? Proving it to you, using the same line of thinking I’m trying to teach you. I’m going to use my formulas from the auto-rewards section, particularly the ones about trading scrap tiers. By accepting surrender, we effectively are trading the default rewards of destroying a ship for low scrap and 4+ fuel.

I’ll make a table. Let’s assume we’re trading medium scrap for low scrap, which isn’t the worst trade possible, but it’s a common one. 4 fuel is worth 12$, so we can add that to our costs/gains. If you haven’t already, I urge you to check out the auto-rewards section to see where these numbers come from.

So early on, we actually have a pretty good chance of getting more value out of the surrender than destroying the ship, and even if we don’t, the losses aren’t all that bad. As we can see, accepting surrender for 4+ fuel in SS0-1 is actually not a bad idea. If we worked out the values for 5+ and 6 fuel, then it’d look even more favorable.

Now, if you were concerned about the fuel that the standard reward would’ve given you, you could subtract another 9$ from the worst loss/gain, since you would get 3 fuel from it at best. That only has a 1 in 6 chance of happening though.

If they give you an augment/weapon/drone
There are very few times where you’ll want to decline a surrender offer with one of these, since such an offer means you won’t necessarily be getting low-tier scrap, and even if you do, the value of the bonus tends to outweigh the scrap you would’ve otherwise gotten.

If you can’t carry any more augments, weapons, or drones, think about whether or not replacing what you currently have with what’s being offered is worth it. If it’s not, decline the surrender if the resources and scrap offered alongside aren’t particularly high.

I would be careful being offered a Repair Arm augmentation. You need all the scrap you can get, so you’ll probably want to only accept it in cases where you know you can sell it before it wastes more scrap than its sell value, 25$. By SS5 it can waste more scrap than its value within 3 jumps.

It’s important to note that the “free” crew isn’t free, since like we’ve established in the other sections, you’re giving up the opportunity to gain scrap from destroying the enemy ship.

Early on, taking the crew great idea. In SS0-2, whatever you would’ve gained in scrap will be less than the value of the crew (which is 45-60$).

In SS3-4, the maximum scrap gains are equal to the crew value, so you’re only going to break even at the absolute worst, which is not so likely. Taking the crew is still good here.

Losing out on scrap becomes more probable in SS6. Start thinking about what you can gain if you destroy the ship instead of taking the crew, especially if you don’t need the crew.

In SS7-8, you’re treading in territory where it’s often not worth it to take the crew unless you really need it and you’re struggling to find it. Low-tier scrap rewards are at least half the value of the crew, and high tier scrap rewards are worth 50% more than the most expensive crew. So you might be better off destroying the ship and purchasing a crew member from a store.

If you are even able to decline, I would advise against doing so. Many of these give very good rewards. As an example, the second fight with the mantis ship collector and the event with “The Black Raven” both give high scrap and a weapon when the enemy surrenders. You will never incur an opportunity cost from these surrenders.

Shield upgrades

I see some rather common guidelines for what level your shields should be at when you’re at certain points in your game. I agree with a bunch of these, although maybe not exactly.

Firstly, here’s what I’d generally recommend for most ships:

• Shields-3: ASAP
• Shields-4: Also ASAP. S2 at latest.
• Shields-6: By the start of S5.
• Shields-8: Before flagship phase 2, but only really needed if you have no other answer to the power surges.

Before I delve into the reasoning behind my recommendations, I want to make a disclaimer: upgrading your shields by these points in the game isn’t always the best move. Sometimes you simply have higher priority things to upgrade first, so delaying shield upgrades can be a good idea. Use your own judgment!

As an example, ships starting with Zoltan shields and cloaking can safely delay shield upgrades since they already have good defenses. The Engi B can’t really safely delay shield upgrades, but it might have to in order to get what it needs to break through 2 or more shield bubbles.

There’s a really simple reasoning behind this one. If you just have shields-2, and your shields get shot once, bam, they’re down entirely and you’re extremely vulnerable to further damage. Shields-3 makes it so your shields have to take 2 damage before going down entirely. On top of that, it’s a cheap upgrade for just 20$, and if they do take 2 damage, you only need to repair 1 bar to get them back up.

To dive further in, let’s put the value in perspective, let’s say all my crew are unleveled (that is to say, L0 in all skills). Let’s say I’m using the Kestrel-A. It starts with engines-2, and piloting-1, both of which are manned. This means I have 20% evade. I also have a 3 shot volley thanks to the Burst Laser II, and if I man weapons, that means it can charge in 10.8 seconds.

Let’s say the enemy has 2 basic lasers, and that their weapons are unmanned. Then bam, they shoot my shields. Now I’m totally exposed. Right then, since our weapons have similar charge times, I manage to shoot their shields and bring them down. Then I send my weapons guy to repair my shields. Unfortunately, their weapon charges faster than mine. They aim both shots at my weapons, both of which hit, meaning they shut my weapons down before I could shut theirs down.

So far I’ve taken 3 damage. 10 seconds later, I have the shields repaired, but then they target another system before they come back up. One of two shots hit. Now I go to repair my weapons, which will take another 20 seconds. They get off two more volleys, but thankfully my shields are back up, so only one of the shots hits me. Now I’ve taken a total of 5 damage throughout this battle.

Let’s say I manage to finish the enemy off with no further damage. Let’s say I’m rewarded $10. That’s close to the lower-bound of medium rewards in SS0. I gained absolutely nothing from the battle, because depending on how much HP I have after the battle, I’ll probably have to spend that 10$ on undoing the damage I took. Running away wouldn’t have been better, since I wouldn’t recoup my losses, and I could jump into another battle with broken weapons. Even though I gained nothing, I’d still call that a loss on my part, since down the line, I will have to deal with not being able to use that 10$.

I could go on with an endless amount of common scenarios where having your shields down can be costly, even more so than the above example. Obviously not all enemies have 2 basic lasers in S1. Some even have mini-beams, which can get off up to 4 damage per shot. Some enemies have crew to man the weapons, making them charge faster which allows for more volleys. Having your shields going down can be very bad!

So when you think about it this way, rather than just blindly applying the guideline, it can make a lot of sense. It won’t save you very much scrap overall, but in early sectors, you need all the scrap you can get. Plus, you’re going to upgrade your shields anyways, so why not add a buffer point now?

So let’s talk about buffer points. Why even bother with them, and what are they? Well, shields-3 is a buffer point, which means it exists solely to stomach another hit. Shields-5 and shields-7 would also be upgrades solely for a buffer point.

Beyond shields-3, I don’t really tend to bother with buffer points since they become more expensive. Usually later in the game, if an enemy starts to really take down your shields, it’s because they got a whole bunch of hits in, not just one. So the buffer point, while handy, won’t make as much of a difference.

Thus, your scrap might be better spent on things that you’d be buying anyways that would achieve the same thing. Maybe it’s another weapon that’ll help you damage the enemy weapons so they can’t even get through your shields in the first place.

Why? On hard, many enemy ships can have weapons-3 in S1-2, which often will allow for a 3+ projectile volley.

Let’s assume we pretty much have 0% evade, and the enemies are firing on anything other than shields. If the enemy has 3 projectile volleys, and we have 2 bubbles, only one of those projectiles can hit, as opposed to 2 of them. By buying shields-4 this early on, we have effectively taken our average damage per battle and halved it.

Some enemies will obviously have more than 3 projectiles, and some will even have combat drones. This can happen even in S1. In this case, your savings decrease to 1/3, 1/4, and so on depending on how many shots can get through. Savings are savings though, and when you’re purchasing upgrades you need down the line anyways, you can’t complain, can you?

Not to mention, a lot of enemies in S1-2 won’t even be able to touch you if you have 2 shields, since many will only have 2 projectile volleys. You can go through S1-2 and end up taking very little damage at all.

So maybe now you’re starting to see the pattern. In S5, enemies will have much more powerful loadouts. We’re going to counter that by getting an upgrade we’d already get.

Just to show you how bad it can get, on normal and hard, enemies can even have weapons-8 by this point. Seriously. I’ve seen enemies with 3 burst laser IIs before.

Generally speaking here, we’re going to have decently leveled engines, or at least we’re going to be trying to upgrade our engines to at least engines-5 during this sector. So a likely scenario is that we have 35% to 40% evade.

So let’s take those 3 burst lasers as an example. Luckily I have fast weapons and can shut one of them down before it can fire. Then boom, a 6 shot volley comes. On average I’ll evade 2-3 of those shots. With 3 shields, I’ll either take 1 damage or no damage at all on each future volley. With two shields, it’s 1-2 damage per volley.

If I had slower weapons, it’d be worse, but I’d still take less damage.

It’s not really strictly necessary, but I personally find myself purchasing it whenever I don’t have a good way to counter the drones on flagship phase 2, or the superweapon on flagship phase 3. In general, if you had to choose between the two, shields-8 is a better purchase than engines-8.

Shields-8 costs 180$ before power bars. As an example of its effectiveness, we’ll use the superweapon which shoots 7 shots. Shields-8 dictates that 5 out of 7 of the superweapon shots need to hit before you can take damage. If your evade is 45%, there’s only about a 31.7% chance of this happening, and there’s only a 10.2% chance of taking more than 1 damage.

Keeping shields-6 and purchasing engines-8 costs 260$ before power bars. 4 out of 7 shots need to hit for you to take damage. This has a 39.2% chance of happening, and there’s a 15.3% chance of taking more than 1 damage.

If you’re wondering where I got these probabilities from, look into binomial distributions.

Engine upgrades & evasion

Like shields, engines basically need an entire section all for themselves. Here’s my general recommendations for engine upgrades:

• Evasion should be at least 20% in S2.
• Evasion should be at least 45% in S6.
• Engines-6: If wanting to dive and you don’t have cloaking.
• Engines-7-8: Mainly useful for flagship phases 2 & 3. Not needed unless you don’t have cloaking and shields-8 isn’t enough.

Once again, these are just guidelines. Some ships may have more important things to upgrade before engines. The Stealth B for instance, will probably do better with upgrading to cloaking-3 than upgrading its engines. The Engi B will probably do better with delaying engine upgrades until it has stronger offense. Use your own judgment!

I’m not going to go into a whole lot of depth here. Simply put, anything lower than 20% is pretty much just as bad as having 0% evasion, since on average, you won’t dodge a significant amount of shots.

Thankfully, in most cases you start the game with 20% evasion—you’ll have engines-2, a L0 pilot, and a L0 engines dude. Some ships aren’t as fortunate. They may lack the crew needed to man the engines, or they may start with engines-1.

There are cheap and easy solutions, fortunately.

• Upgrade to engines-2 (for 10$), and if that’s not enough, engines-3 (for 15$). This is the most probable route you’ll go.
• Manning engines. If you aren’t manning engines, and you have more than 1 crew, put somebody on engines. That will boost your evasion by at least 5% for free.
• Idling in situations where you can dodge projectiles and there is no risk of them penetrating your shields. A common one is an enemy having just a basic laser, which on its own, can’t even penetrate one shield bubble. I don’t really advise this since, it’s boring and takes a lot of time, and your pilot/engines dude will level up naturally anyways. That said, speed hacking the game can help with that, and as far as I know, isn’t considered cheating by most FTL players.

The amount of shots per enemy volley builds up as you go from sector to sector, and by S6, you can be looking at 6+ projectile volleys easily. Dodging an average of 45% of those 6+ shots is a huge deal, since it can entirely negate the damage if you have shields-6.

The most common setup for this is to have engines-5, a L2 pilot, and a L2 engines dude. I wouldn’t really recommend anything else since it’s very easy to build up to this throughout S1-5.

The evasion boost isn’t why you’d purchase engines-6. In fact, upgrading your evasion beyond 45% has diminishing returns, as I’ll discuss in the next section.

Engines-6 is useful because of FTL recharge rate it that grants you. If you have a L2 engines dude, you can almost always safely jump out of a beacon with an ASB hazard before you take a hit from the ASB. This is important for diving, which is covered in the beacon routing section of the guide. There’s still a tiny chance you’ll get a very early ASB projectile, but I personally don’t find this to be that big of a problem. Still something to be wary of!

If you have cloaking and at least 40% evade, engines-6 and beyond aren’t necessary since you can cloak for 100% evade and dodge everything.

So why do I say these just aren’t necessary unless shields-8 isn’t enough? Well, they’re very costly for what they give. Engines-7 is 80$ for a 3% evasion boost, and engines-8 is 120$ for another 4% evasion boost. 200$ for 7% evasion is a crappy deal. Just for comparison, upgrading from engines-1 to engines-6 costs 155$ overall, and adds 23% evasion.

Now, recall the reasoning I gave for considering purchasing shields-8. It can help against flagship phase 2 & 3. So can engines-7 and 8; however, they’re worse than shields-8 on their own. If you combine them with shields-8 however, then that can be really good.

Let’s analyze the flagship superweapon again, which is a 7 shot volley in case you forgot. With engines-7, we can get up to 51% evade, and with engines-8, we can get up to 55% evade. Since we’re combining this with shields-8, it’ll take at least 5 of those 7 shots to hit in order for us to take damage.

If we compare what we get from higher level engines to what we got from the 45% evade:

• Engines-7 reduced our chances of taking any damage by a third, and halved our chances of taking further damage.
• Engines-8 halved our chances of taking any damage, and reduced our chances of taking further damage by two thirds.

Not only that, but if we look at the probabilities in isolation rather than comparing them, we can basically say engines-7 and 8 nearly eliminate the risk of taking more than 1 damage from the superweapon. That’s really good.

Just remember though, if you have to pick between the two, shields-8 is strictly better than engines-8. Combining the two, however, can prove to be very powerful defensively.

Your base FTL charge speed is 68 seconds. If there is no hazards or enemies present, your FTL charges instantly. If there is a hazard or boarder present, but no enemy ship, it is 23 seconds.

Manning engines appears to provide a 10% boost in charge speed. A L1 engines dude will provide approximately a 17% boost in speed, and a maxed engines dude will provide a 25% boost in speed. All of these boosts are multiplicative, not additive. So having engines-5 and L2 crew does not net you a 2.25x FTL charge rate, it nets you a 2.5x charge rate.

The multipliers shown by the game’s upgrade menu are inaccurate, but they are close enough to the point where you don’t really need to know the true values. The reality is that the multipliers are slightly higher than what the game says they are.

If anybody has an explanation for that uh, let me know.

Other system upgrades & purchases §1

The upgrades to your weapon control system are driven by what weapons you want to get online. Do note that you don’t necessarily need to get them online as soon as you obtain them, so you can delay weapon control upgrades until they’re needed.

You can also upgrade weapon control to get a damage buffer, that way the enemy can’t shut anything down from just one shot. Buffer points are really great, and I recommend you consider adding one.

Totally not a popular opinion, I find drones to generally suck in vanilla FTL. The key word is generally, because there are drones that are just really good, and sometimes a generally not-so-good drone can be a great addition to a build!

The price of buying drone control is a bit interesting. The base price is 60$, but you almost always see it for 75$ or 85$. This is because a drone comes with the system. The price of drones ends up being this base 60$ price, plus the sell value of the drone. As an example, the system repair drone costs 30$, so the sell price is 15$. If the system comes with a system repair drone, the price is 60$ + 15$.

Generally speaking, you want to purchase drone control if it comes with a drone you really want (most likely defense I, since it is really good for countering missiles). If it doesn’t, then you should probably only buy it if you already have the drone, and/or lack the drone control system and really need it.

Other than that, drone control should generally be upgraded to support the drone that takes the most power at once. Maybe add some buffer points. You usually don’t need multiple drones powered simultaneously. Even if you use multiple drones, you can easily shuffle power between them.

There’s really no need to upgrade oxygen throughout most of the game. Upgrading to oxygen-3 is a complete waste of scrap in my opinion.

There are events in the game which offer to upgrade your oxygen system for a reduced price. I usually just ignore these since they come up at times where I need all the scrap I can get.

There are only really three situations where oxygen-2 is handy, which I’ll outline below.

Countering hacking:
This is the most common one. If your enemy has high level hacking, oxygen-2 pretty much negates it. By the time the enemy hacking goes off cooldown, your oxygen will be refilled.

Examples of scenarios where this might come are flagship phase 1, fights with Lanius Scouts, and fights with Engi Hackers.

Slug sabotaging your oxygen system:
There is an event in slug nebulas where a ship will disable your oxygen. The text used in the event ends with “you’re going to suffocate!”

If you do have oxygen-2 for whatever reason (say, you’re playing Rock B which starts with it), then it’s a no-brainer. Use the oxygen to counter the sabotage.

If you don’t, but you do have hacking, then you can counter the sabotage with that too. I’d wager you’re much more likely to have hacking than oxygen-2, so you can see why buying oxygen-2 for just this event would be a dumb idea. The 25$ price tag for oxygen-2 can be a lot depending on where you are.

Personally, if I didn’t have oxygen-2, I’d pause the game and try to work out how long the battle would take me. Most battles can be finished before your oxygen drains to dangerously low levels, so if you’re in such a battle, I’d just fight without the oxygen on.

Flagship phase 2:
In sector 8, the game will flood you with scrap, which makes the 25$ price tag of oxygen-2 chump change. If you can spare the scrap, you can make dealing with the boarding drone in phase 2 of the flagship just a tad easier by purchasing oxygen-2, and then opening the doors around the room that the drone breached.

A lot of the time the drone won’t breach anything too important, so you might be able to ignore the drone anyways, making the upgrade pointless. You never know what’ll happen though!

If you’re looking to swap from a clonebay, don’t. It’s probably a waste of scrap.

If you’re looking to upgrade it, then whether or not doing so is a good idea depends on what build you’re making. If your ship is boarding oriented and you’ve leveled up your teleporter, medbay-2 might be a good purchase since it helps to increase the rate at which you can send and return boarders.

Additionally, the event with Kazaaak gives you a blue option if you have medbay-2. This rewards high scrap, mantis pheromones, a fully leveled mantis crew member, and on top of that, Kazaaak’s stash, which has more rewards. Consider it if you think there’s a chance you’ll come across a mantis homeworld sector.

There are also other times where buying medbay-2 can be helpful. You’ll find those in the tricks sections.

As for medbay-3, I don’t really think it’s ever necessary. It’s a luxury upgrade.

If you’re looking to swap from a medbay, don’t. It’s probably a waste of scrap.

Clonebay upgrades follow a similar line of thinking to medbay upgrades when it comes to supporting a boarding build. As you probably know, though, your clonebay getting destroyed can end up getting crew killed permanently. As such, I’d highly recommend purchasing clonebay-2 and clonebay-3 whenever they can be afforded to act as a damage buffer.

Similarly to medbay-2, clonebay-2 can also be used in the Kazaaak event.

Clonebay upgrades can also reduce the need to utilize the medical airlock trick, which I’ll talk about in the tricks sections. The less your crew dies, the more easily they can retain their skills.

Teleporter-1 can serve you well for a long time. If your boarders aren’t rocks/crystals, and you want to board automated ships, teleporter-2 can help with that, since it recharges before your crew suffocates. Teleporter-2 also helps reduce the risk of your crew dying during boarding, since you can teleport them back quicker.

I find teleporter-3 to be great for spamming boarders on the enemy ship and overwhelming them. You don’t need it, but it’s not something I would automatically consider a waste of scrap. Use your own judgment.

Cloaking is one of the many defenses the game gives you against missiles and large volleys. I’d seriously consider alternatives (such as a defense I drone) though, since cloaking tends to be very pricey, and sometimes inferior given its long cooldown.

In most cases, you won’t be upgrading cloaking at all, as you’ll usually use it to dodge something, which very low cooldowns are ideal for. Some ships (like Stealth B) benefit from longer cloak times, since it gives them time to charge their weapons with impunity. If your ship fits this description, consider higher level cloaking if you already have it.

Cloaking-2 is a relatively cheap upgrade, and cloaking-3 is especially great for early-game Stealth B, since it needs time to charge its glaive beam. I’ll explain this in more detail in the cloaking tricks section.

I feel that it’s a useless system for the most part, since it takes forever to charge. I don’t even have it powered on in the early game, since I’m using the power bars that would otherwise go into it for my shield upgrades.

To add insult to injury, this system can be detrimental to have powered on if you’re using a boarding setup. Not that it’s any better powered off, since it’s still wasting a system slot.

The beam artillery is the better one, since at the very least, it can help with situations where getting through the enemy shields is difficult, as it ignores shields, making it do the most potential damage. If you’re having a hard time finding a way to get through enemy shields, it may be a good idea to upgrade it. The flak artillery is just a crappier, slower Flak II that you can’t even aim, but the same idea goes for it.

Other than that, it’s only really worth considering upgrading artillery in the late game, since the upgrades cost a lot of scrap and do very little for you.

Other system upgrades & purchases §2

This system is great. It’s definitely worth considering buying it, because it opens up a lot of opportunities for tricks, and it can counter enemy mind control as well.

Upgrading it can be worth it, since it makes your controlled crew member last longer and dish out more damage. If you want assistance in boarding, or to get a few crew kills without even boarding the ship, consider upgrading it!

Here’s exactly what all the levels of mind control do, since the game doesn’t explain it entirely:

When the mind control starts, the enemy is healed by the health boost. If they’re at 20/100 HP, they’ll have 50/130 HP when controlled with mind-3, similarly to how 100/100 HP results in 130/130 HP.

When the mind control ends, the enemy’s health stays at whatever it was, but is still capped to their original HP. So as an example, if you mind control an enemy with mind control-3, and they have 60/130 HP, they stay at 60 HP when it wears off. If they’re at 130/130 HP when it wears off, it gets reduced to 100/100 HP.

With both of these in mind, you might be thinking: “can I heal enemy crew this way?”. The answer is, as long as other crew don’t interfere, yes, absolutely. It probably won’t ever be helpful to know this, but there you have it.

This is the most overpowered system in the game, bar none. It’s common and comparatively cheap for what it is, making a great quasiweapon—that is, something that isn’t really a weapon, but can be a substitute for one.

Let me put the value in perspective. Hacking costs 80$. Hacking-1 is already enough to take down 2 shields. It effectively acts like 2 projectiles in a volley, except they always hit. So rather than buy (or hope for) a weapon, then upgrade your weapon control, and all that stuff (which can be much more costly), you can buy hacking.

Then there’s hacking-2, which takes down 3 shields. Only an additional 35$. This is insanely cheap for what it is. It basically adds another guaranteed “hit” on their shields for a very low price, and it does so without taking up any more weapon slots.

Then there’s hacking-3, which is mostly good for the very late game, since you’ll use it to take down 4 shield bubbles. This upgrade costs 60$.

Overall, 175$ to take down 4 shield bubbles without any chance of missing or taking up a weapon slot. Overpowered as hell, and cheap for what it is. I haven’t gone into detail about the less obvious effects of hacking.

The next best thing is probably a Flak II, but adding that will incur the additional cost of upgrading your weapons. So not only do you have to obtain a flak 2 somehow (which requires either getting lucky or paying 80$), but you also have to pay anywhere from an additional 100$ to 265$ to get it online depending on where you’re at in the game. Not to mention, it can miss. Plus, even though flak II and hacking have similar cooldowns, it’s very likely you’ll have to wait for the flak II to charge!

Oh, and I’m just getting started. Let’s also factor in the other stupidly overpowered things hacking can do once one of those devious drones latches onto a room:

• Lock the doors down. Duh.
• Makes crew unable to man the hacked system.
• Halves the speed of repairs to the hacked system. Yeah, did I mention it’s overpowered?

I don’t find the auto-pilot terribly useful. You’ll only really want to upgrade your piloting as a damage buffer, so that a stray shot doesn’t immediately set your evasion to 0%.

I usually upgrade to piloting-2 towards the end of the game. Doing so earlier isn’t a bad idea either, since it’s a really cheap upgrade, coming in at 20$.

It’s really up to you if you think piloting-3 is worth it. It costs 50$, but you can stop a small bomb from immediately zeroing out your evasion.

Sensors and their upgrades have a few specific use cases. If these don’t apply, you really do not need to spend scrap on sensors.

If you have Lifeform Scanners, a slug, or a view of an important room thanks to hacking, a lot of what would make sensors useful is pretty much thrown out the window. If you don’t have those, then consider upgrading or manning them for the following use cases:

• You need to mind control crew. Sensors-2 is needed.
• You need to check if certain enemy systems are manned. Sensors-2 is needed.
• You’re still unfamiliar with enemy weapon timing. Sensors-3 is helpful.

For all other cases, sound cues and paying attention to doors will help, so even sensors-1 is unnecessary with good play in a lot of cases. That’s not to say it’s not helpful.

If you don’t have doors (say, you’re playing Rock B), whether or not to buy doors is somewhat situational. Use your own judgment.

If you do have doors and you do have scrap to spare, upgrading these can be handy. I recommend you resort to having somebody man your doors system before you do that, though, as it may not be necessary to actually upgrade it early on.

Doors are mostly useful for dealing with boarders. Early on, doors-2 (from manning it, not upgrading it) is pretty good. Later in the game, boarding events may get more nasty, in which case, upgrading your doors once (and keeping them manned) is a great idea.

As you get to the flagship, it can be a good idea to get the super blast doors, since on phase 3, the boarding AI uses a special mode where they just send boarding team after boarding team, and you want to impede their ability to do anything as much as possible.

People seem to be split on this thing. I’m talking about the people who actually remember to use it, of course. I’m one of them, by the way, and I love this thing.

The backup battery is great for powering systems that only temporarily need to be powered (like hacking, cloaking, and the crew teleporter). Such systems usually ionize themselves, which makes them hold onto power bars against your will. Having disposable and temporary power bars like the ones provided by the backup battery solves this problem.

The backup battery is also completely unaffected by ion storms, so if think you’re going to run into those a lot (say, you’re in a nebula sector), think about purchasing it. It can help counter the reduced reactor capacity.

Additionally, the backup battery proves to be cheaper than buying normal power bars at times. Buying it in the first place costs 35$. Battery-1 gives you 2 bars, which means you pay $17.5 per bar.

Battery-2 gives you an additional 2 bars for 50$. You’d be paying 25$ per bar then. In the late game, this can be quite nice, since you often end up at the point where power bars are usually 30$ to 35$.

I would only advise against buying it if having power bars on a cooldown is too much of a burden (and you don’t have a battery charger), or if you think you’ll forget to use it. That said, I really think you should learn to remember to use it if you have it.

Damage

There probably isn’t a whole lot you don’t know here, but I’ll go through this anyways.

When the type of damage something deals is not explicitly specified, and it does N damage, the following will happen:

• N hull damage.
• N system damage to the system it hit.
• 15N crew damage to crew in the room.

This damage directly affects your hull, and it’s the only type that can destroy ships. Not much more to say.

Each unit of ion damage will remove 1 power from a system. It does not limit how much you can power it by 1 additional bar, it forcibly removes a bar. This means partially powered systems will still lose power when ionized. This is crucial to consider, but easy to forget for some people.

Additionally, each unit of ion damage will place that system on a 5 second cooldown. The blue circle does not count the amount of seconds left for the system to return to normal—it counts how many multiples of 5 seconds it will take. This multiple may not ever exceed 5, that is to say the cooldown may never exceed 25 seconds. While on cooldown, power cannot be added or removed from a system. In the case of weapons/drones, it cannot be reassigned, which is also mentioned in the tips & tricks section.

Ionizing a system that is already completely depowered has no further effects other than increasing the cooldown.

Most weapons will deal damage to all crew present in the room that is hit. The sole exception is beams, which will only deal damage if the beam passes over the exact tiles crew are in.

Some weapons are specified to do a specific amount of damage to crew, like the Anti-Bio beam and many of the bombs. This will always be some multiple of 15.

When a system is damaged, the amount of power bars that can be put into it will be reduced by the amount of that damage. If a system is destroyed by boarders or a fire, an additional 1 hull damage will be inflicted. Bombs that specialize in system damage are unable to deal hull damage, which can be useful for reasons outlined in the weapons tricks & tips section.

Picking your weapons/quasiweapons

People love tier lists. Yes, some weapons are great in their own right, and some weapons are terrible no matter what. I’m not gonna put a tier list in this guide, at least not yet. I feel you need to look at a few major variables, including but not limited to:

• The damage-to-projectile ratio. Higher is better, since it reduces the need for more hits to deal more damage. A single 2-damage projectile has a higher probability of dealing 2 damage than a pair of 1-damage projectiles.
• The damage-to-power ratio. Good weapons tend to have a ratio above 1.
• The projectile-to-power ratio. Higher is better, and is important for good shield breakers.
• The cooldown-to-damage ratio. Lower is better. This is the most important variable for a good damage dealer.
• The cooldown-to-projectile ratio. Lower is better. This is the most important variable for a good shield breaker.
• Are there extra effects to take into consideration? The type of damage, fire/breach chance, if drones can negate it, the type of weapon, etc.
• Does it use a finite resource? If so, can you gain more of that resource than you use? If not, this is a big downside.
• Can you get it online quickly? By which I mean, if you obtain this weapon, can you then upgrade your weapon control system and reactor enough to use the weapon by the time you need it?
• Does it actually fit with your build? As an example, if your loadout consists of fast weapons, a Flak I (which is a fast shield breaker) will probably help more than a Glaive beam.

So let’s actually quantify this. Let’s compare some stuff, shall we? Due to size constraints, we’ll need to use short-hand. How about P for power bar(s), p for projectile(s), D for damage, C for cooldown (in seconds), and $ for cost to get online in scrap (which only factors in the cost of weapon system upgrades and power bars, assuming they are not already present).

Just by looking at these numbers, we can make a few remarks about each weapon.

• Flak I: in terms of raw efficiency, this is the best gun of the 4 listed. It’s easy to get online because it requires only 2 power bars. It has the lowest damage-to-power and projectile-to-power ratio. It is also very fast, given it has the lowest cooldown-to-projectile ratio, making it a great shield breaker. The only drawback is, it’s a flak weapon, meaning its projectiles can be shot down, and it’s inaccurate, making it less fit as a damage dealer than its runner up.
• Burst Laser II: the 2nd best, and not a far cry from the Flak I, boasting essentially the same upsides. Its stats are slightly worse all around, but in exchange, it shoots with no spread, and only Defense II drones can shoot its projectiles down.
• Heavy Laser II: the 3rd best of the 4. It’s a good weapon, still. It boasts a damage-to-power ratio above 1 alongside the lowest cooldown-to-damage ratio of the 4 weapons—meaning it deals damage more rapidly than the other 3! The cooldown-to-projectile ratio is a bit high, and the weapon does 2 damage per projectile, which means you probably shouldn’t use this for shield breaking. The only real problem with this weapon is that, given it takes 3 power bars, it can be expensive to get online.
• Breach Missiles: The damage-to-power ratio is fine, so this is probably a good weapon right? Wrong! It’s expensive to get online, and boasts a horrible power-to-projectile and cooldown-to-projectile ratio. 1 projectile every 22 seconds, for 3 power? I see a long wait for a miss just thinking of it. And Defense I drones can shoot the missile down? Yikes, that’s bad. Oh, and it uses missiles, making it finite. The only upside is that it has is that, alongside doing a lot of damage when it does hit, it also has a good chance of causing a breach, further delaying enemy repairs.

Beams are a little trickier. The whole projectile thing doesn’t apply to them since there are no projectiles! Instead, you’ll want to judge beams by how many rooms they’re able to hit, and the damage-per-room. Other than that, it’s pretty similar; you’ll want to compare those numbers to the power usage and cooldown.

As for quasiweapons, like hacking, drones, etc., you may apply similar logic. You may note that hacking can be cheaply upgraded to take down 3-4 shield bubbles, while using 2-3 power bars, and having a 20 second cooldown (that only comes into play after it is used). I encourage you to come up with a way to quantify and compare this to actual weapons just to really get an idea of how powerful hacking and other weapon alternatives can be.

Intro to micromanagement

Some situations in FTL don’t ask much of you. Charge and aim your weapons, and plonk, the enemy dies without laying so much as a scratch on you.

Then there are situations where you think you’re going to lose for sure. Pause the game. Do it. Seriously, pausing is perhaps one of the most important features in FTL, and you should make use of it to the fullest extent. Yes, your battles will probably last much longer. Yes, micromanaging can be tedious. On the other hand, it allows you to multitask, and it allows you to think about the best possible thing to do in every little instant. It can make the difference between life and death in FTL.

I’m not saying you need to pause to win the game (some people do pauseless runs, which is impressive), but it helps.

Advancing time by an iota
By default, FTL actually has the pause function bound to your space bar and pressing your mouse wheel. Try this: while the game is already paused, unpause it with space, then immediately after click your mouse wheel (or use whatever you have it bound to). If you do it quickly enough, the game will only advance forward by 1 or 2 frames. If you have a fancy keyboard, or AutoHotkey, you could make a macro to do this for you as well.

Playing the game out frame-by-frame in some scenarios can be incredibly helpful. As an example, maybe the flagship superweapon shoots at you. Your shields go down, and the projectiles close in on your ship. Your cloaking is just about to get off of cooldown. You can advance the game frame-by-frame, and cloak at the absolute last moment—right when the projectiles are on top of the room they’re about to hit.

Cycling power
One common mistake people make is buying too many power bars too early. At some point though, they’ll realize that some power bars can practically be moved around for free. As an example, I realized that I could just briefly pause the game, divert power from oxygen to my engines, unpause to help dodge projectiles, then put the power back in my oxygen once my engines don’t need it anymore.

I suggest you take it a step further than that example though. You can cycle power from everything, because every situation is different. Sometimes you only need one shield bubble. Sometimes you just don’t need engines or oxygen at all. Sometimes a volley is about to hit you, and you can divert power from a weapon for a very brief moment and put it into your engines to help your chances of dodging it.

I won’t get into the specifics, because it’s up to your judgment as to where to draw power from and place it, but I want you to keep this in mind.

Also I’d like to advocate for the backup battery. I said why in the section about system upgrades.

Weapon tips & tricks

Time your weapons:
Generally fire your weapons in a volley. I stress generally because sometimes you’d do best to fire a weapon prematurely, or after the rest have already fired. Some weapons have slower projectiles than others. Use your judgment.

Also, some weapons tend to be better to fire in a certain order. I’m not saying you should always fire these weapons in this order, but it can be helpful:

1. Bombs/missiles: You can get crucial systems down quickly, and if targeting shields, soften enemies up to help the rest of your volley get through.
2. Flak: These weapons are shield breakers, which means you’ll use them to take down shields so your other weapons can get through.
3. Crystal weapons: If there’s still one shield bubble, these can get through. I tend to fire these at the same time as light lasers.
4. Light lasers: These operate as both shield breakers and damage dealers. You want these to get through usually, since they’re more accurate than Flak, allowing you to hit specific systems more reliably.
5. Heavy/hull lasers: You don’t want these to hit shields, since the extra damage is absorbed. You want to hit the ship and do as much damage as you can. So fire these only when the shields are totally down.
6. Beams: Similar story as above. You want to ideally fire these when shields are totally down, or at least as down as they can possibly get.

Again, use your best judgment. Do not adhere to this list strictly.

Know weapons from their sprites:
Most weapons have unique sprites. Some don’t, but their projectiles do. Learn to recognize these differences, so that you can tell what weapons enemies have, and adjust your strategy accordingly. There will be an important section regarding the enemy AI that addresses this further.

Sort your weapons by how important they are:
Weapons are powered from left to right. This means should you remove power from your weapons via any means (manually or because of damage), weapons in the right most slots will go offline first. It can be said that the left-most weapons are high priority since they go down last, and the right-most weapons are low priority since they go down first.

Remember, you can change the weapon ordering on the fly by dragging-and-dropping, even outside the inventory menu. Put your most important weapons to the left!

Ion damage:
If your weapons take ion damage, then whatever weapons remain powered up will be locked in. You will be unable to reassign power from one weapon to another. Reordering your weapons won’t help either.

As with simply removing power from your weapons system (rather than depowering specific weapons), or having it damaged, lower priority weapons will go offline first.

Often times you shouldn’t use it, as you should usually be manually timing your weapons, but there’s a few things it can be handy for.

Only auto-firing individual weapons:
You don’t need to turn on auto-fire for everything. In fact, there’s a key (by default, it’s ctrl) that you can hold down while selecting a weapon to fire to make auto-fire.

Firing a projectile from the same angle every time:
If you leave a weapon on and set it to fire automatically, whatever projectiles it shoots will always come from the same angle towards the enemy, rather than a random one. This can be useful for a few other tricks, or to adjust the timing at which projectiles hit. It’s not all too useful to know about, but worth pointing out.

If multiple weapons have identical cooldowns:
With such weapons, you can use auto-fire to repeat a volley if you know you’re going to fire it exactly the same way every time. Even better, if you fire each weapon at different times, the delay between each weapon firing is preserved.

Beams are quite interesting. They’re aimed differently and the damage is calculated differently. Let’s discuss the exploitable quirks.

How damage is dealt:
With the exception of the starting room, the ship will only take damage from a beam whenever the beam “enters” a room. This means that you generally should maximize the amount of rooms entered to deal the greatest amount of damage possible.

It’s also important to note (and yes, I know the game tells you this) that beam weapons can penetrate shields. Subtract the amount of shield bubbles from the damage the beam deals per room. If this number is greater than zero, you’ll penetrate the shields, and do that amount of damage per room.

Know the length of the beam!
This is a stat not straight-up given to you by the game, unfortunately. Fret not though, as I have the numbers. From shortest to longest:

“Tile diagonals” refers to the length of the diagonal of a tile in the rooms of the ships. These are about 45 pixels long, since the rooms are 32 by 32 pixels.

You can figure out the maximum number of rooms a beam can hit by rounding up its length (in tiles) and multiplying that by 2.

Any beam can be an anti-bio beam:
Due to the above, if the shields of a ship are up when your beam begins firing, you can actually end up doing no damage to the ship, at least in the room the beam started in. You can still damage crew in the same way the anti-bio beam does, though. This can be difficult to time, though, given beams do not fire instantly, and the speeds of projectiles from weapons vary.

I haven’t tested this extensively, but I’m fairly certain that just like the anti-bio beam, the beam actually needs to pass through the tile the crew are in to deal crew damage, not just the room the crew are in.

Taking down Zoltan shields and doing damage simultaneously:
I don’t know who discovered this, but it’s a nice trick. If an enemy has a Zoltan shield that you can take down with your beam alone, and your beam can penetrate the enemy shields, consider doing this!

The idea is to set up the beam so that it will enter the room you want to damage at the last moment. This is because beams damage shields based on a timer. If you do it right, the shields will go down before the beam enters the room, allowing damage to be dealt.

Check out by DarkTwinge if you need a visualization.

Cheeky swipes:
Due to the way the game determines when a beam is inside of a room, there are little gaps between rooms where the beam will effectively not be considered to be inside of any room. However, with some very precise aiming, you can still hit the rooms in spite of the apparent gaps. That, and you can hit some rooms twice with the same beam. I’ll be writing more about this one later, but for now…

Cheeky Swipe Science

[imgur.com]
Credit to Masala for discovering it!

Bombing your own system before boarders can destroy it:
Since bombs only deal system damage, you can actually bomb a system at the very last moment to completely destroy it. This makes it so the boarders won’t get that final blow that causes you to take hull damage.

Event tips & tricks

If you want to win, don’t guess. Pick a response knowing what will happen, even if it’s a blue option (yes, bad blue options do exist). You can memorize events if you want, but in case you find it difficult to recall what happens and don’t mind a little external help, look at the FTL wiki. Personally, whenever I forget what happens in an event, I go straight to the wiki.

You can find the wiki here.[ftl.fandom.com]
Note that their definition of event differs from the one in this guide.

Sometimes you’ll see events that offer resources, crew, upgrades to subsystems, upgrades to your react, etc. at a discounted price. Ask yourself if you’re really getting your scrap’s worth before making such a purchase, because sometimes it’s a waste.

As an example, if you’re offered a discounted oxygen upgrade early on, it’s probably a waste of scrap. Later in the game you’ll be able to upgrade it for not very much scrap anyways, so why buy it now when you really need to be saving scrap for other things?

Pausing the game right after the battle starts:
I suggested earlier that you should look at an enemy’s weapons and figure out what they are so you can form a game plan. If you pause the game, then advance a frame or two forward, the enemy weapons will extend and get ready to fire, allowing you to see what they are without letting them charge.

Pausing the game during the event prompt:
This probably sounds silly. You’re probably thinking “it’s already paused though!”. Yes, but try hitting space while the event prompt is up anyways. The screen will get darker, and when you make a selection, the game will remain paused rather than automatically unpausing. Neat, huh?

Since the enemy ship will trigger events (i.e. when they want to surrender, when they start their FTL, etc.), there are a few quirks to the system that can be exploited.

Jumping away right after an enemy jumps away
If you’re facing a rebel scout, or some automated ship that will warn the fleet of your position, and the ship has jumped away, it’s not too late to do something about it. If your FTL is charged, you can open up the jump menu to FTL away with no consequences before any events load.

It turns out that the event that is loaded after the ship jumps away doesn’t get loaded immediately. There’s a short delay between the jump and the loading, and this delay is affected by whether or not the game is paused. The jump menu pauses the game, so it too can stop the event from loading.

Drone tips & tricks

Reordering your drones:
Similarly to weapons, drones are powered from left-to-right, and have the same “priority” concept. You can reorder your drones by dragging-and-dropping without needing to open the inventory menu.

Ion damage:
Similarly to weapons, power cannot be reassigned from one drone to another once your drones are ionized.

Parking:
All crew drones can be stopped in their tracks by turning them off. If close to an important system, this can be used to keep them close to that system, rather than in the drone control room.

This drone, although mostly uncontrollable, is predictable. One very important thing to note about it is that it assigns certain systems and actions different priorities. Higher priority things will be tended to first.

Here’s the priorities:

1. Shields
2. Put out fires in any room
3. Fix breaches in any room
4. Weapon control
5. Clonebay & Medbay
6. Artillery
7. Oxygen
8. Crew teleporter
9. Piloting
10. Engines
11. Cloaking
12. Drone control
13. Mind control
14. Hacking
15. Sensors
16. Backup battery
17. Doors

Turn it off and turn it back on again:
If a system repair drone is busy fixing something, and something that’s higher priority in the above list breaks, you can turn the drone off, and then turn it back on to make it go repair that thing instead. Note that it has to be off for some period of time, so doing this while the game is paused won’t work.

Boarding tips & tricks

Boarding is considered by some to be a complex aspect of the game with many arcane bits to it. Let’s unearth some of those bits, shall we? This section is a major work-in-progress, so let me know if visuals are needed, or you know something that isn’t here.

For now, if you’re confused on anything, Twinge has videos on YouTube that cover a few of the things mentioned here. Here’s his and video on boarding tactics. I go over them in text here, but these things may be explained better through a video.

Do note that many things that would otherwise go in this section can be found in the enemy AI section. Search there if you don’t find what you need here.

Returning unlimited crew
If you have more crew than can fit in your teleporter on the enemy ship, don’t fret. You can return all of them at the same time. The extras will just be placed outside your teleporter.

Additionally, your crew don’t need to occupy a tile in a given room to be returned. Just as long as they’re in the room (even if they’re walking through it) they’ll be teleported back.

Turning it off/on
Hacking isn’t just good for creating a bottleneck for the enemy to struggle to get through. It’s also good for its ability to toggle that bottleneck. Sometimes it’s a good idea to let an enemy into or through a hacked room, so remember, you can turn your hacking system off and the doors will unlock for the enemy to freely open and close.

Truffle shuffle
Dunno if this is the name everybody uses, but I’ve heard it before. Basically, when you tell crew to enter a given room, crew fill the room in order from the upper left to the bottom right, akin to words on a page if you write left-to-right. Given a 2×2 room, the first crewmember will go in the upper left, the second in the upper right, the third in the bottom left, and so on. The only exception is when the room has a console that can be manned, in which case a crewmember will occupy that console first.

You can use this to your advantage to rearrange your crew as desired. For instance, if you have a crewmember who’s low on health fighting an enemy mantis in the upper-left alongside another crewmember with lots of health, you can order them to leave the room. Of course, your intent isn’t to make them leave the room, it’s to make your crewmembers swap places. So, you then order your high-health crewmember back into the same room first, then the low-health one second. This makes them swap places.

This is extremely useful for when you don’t have time to send a crewmember out of a room to heal, or get them a replacement to fight with. Just remember, this tactic works best while the game is paused. If you try this while the game is unpaused… well, your crew will then actually attempt to leave the room, which isn’t what you want.

Safety dance
Another oddly named one. Basically, this involves moving your boarders in a room, letting them hit whichever enemy comes in first a few times, then leave before any other enemies can enter the room. The goal is to keep your boarders fighting only one enemy at a time, even if it means tediously spamming orders to your boards to go all over the place. This only works well with fast crew like mantises. Don’t try it with rocks!

Other tricks

Getting a defense drone with drone control every time:
Before purchasing the system, go to the main menu, and then continue your game. The drone that comes with the system will be replaced with a defense drone.

Rarely hitting “repair all”
Some players (like myself) have noticed the occasional event outside of stores where you can get 5 hull repaired for free. Thus, we often don’t repair past 25 hull points, so that we can take advantage of it. Not everybody does this (since it doesn’t save you all that much scrap), but it’s worth considering.

Ion dodging:
This is applicable to ion weapons and pulsars. You can very briefly turn off your shields to prevent your shields from getting ionized.

If trying to dodge ion weapons, I also urge you to simultaneously manipulate the enemy AI’s weapon targeting (which there is a section for in this guide) because your shields could get hit anyways if you’re not careful.

If trying to dodge a pulsar, make sure the shields are powered off when the pulse hits (which is right when the screen turns white). If they are powered on at all (even if just 1 power bar), they will get ionized because of how pulsars work. It doesn’t even matter if you have actual shield bubbles up or not. One upshot of this is, even if your shields are ionized while offline, they will only take 1 ion damage, and thus be down for just 5 seconds.

You can also partially depower shields, with the idea of reducing the ion damage taken (specifically, for reducing the time it takes for it to wear off). See pulsars in environmental hazards section for more info.

Why do this seemingly risky move anyways? Well, it’s often better to drop the shields briefly than risk them getting ionized for several seconds. This reduces the window you give the enemy to attack massively, and is especially helpful if the enemy has beams if timed well. Experiment with your timing!

Medical airlock:
If you have crew that are low on health, it might be best to get a fresh clone of them so they don’t die mid-fight at the next beacon you jump to. Vent out a room and put your crew in it to kill them off.

Killing off Lanius:
Lanius cannot suffocate, meaning killing them off intentionally to force a clone is a little more involved. There are however some ways to do this.

1. Use bombs that deal crew damage. Put your Lanius in a room where the bomb will not cause harm to the ship, and kill them with the bomb.
2. Leave your Lanius in a room that is on fire. Make sure they don’t snuff the fire out though.
3. Intentionally leave your Lanius on an enemy ship and destroy the enemy ship. Cannot be done if the ship ends up with a neutral relationship to you, since neutral ships cannot be targeted and all shots from your weapons will miss.

Environmental hazards

Let’s talk about environmental hazards and how they work. My knowledge of these isn’t perfect, but you should still find some helpful advice here.

Most of the environmental hazards stop you from upgrading your ship, even when there is no enemy ship or boarders. The only exception is nebulae.

Additionally, most environmental hazards cannot occur at an exit beacon. They only occur if triggered by an event (ex: playing on normal or hard and rebel fleet claims the beacon), or if the beacon is within a nebula.

Don’t feel pressured to leave an environmental hazard as soon as you can. You don’t necessarily have to. All you really need to do is leave before you take unnecessary damage. Use whatever time you’re given to prepare to jump to the next beacon.

If an environmental hazard has a warning siren associated with it, unless otherwise is stated, it is sounded 5 seconds prior to whatever you’re getting a warning for.

You will get a solar flare roughly every 28-34 seconds.

If you have any amount of shield bubbles up (including zoltan shields), then when a solar flare hits, you take 0-1 damage, and 1-2 fires will be started.

If you don’t have any shield bubbles up, you take 1-2 damage, and 2-5 fires will be started.

Damage from a solar flare works in specific way. Rooms are picked at random, and 1 damage is applied to each of them. If a system is in the room, then it takes 1 damage. Otherwise, you only take hull damage.

If you have revealed the map, or are using long range scanners, and you see a beacon that’s close to a star that has no ship in it, stay out of that beacon. It’s always a boarding event that nets you nothing.

You will get an ion pulse roughly every 11-18 seconds. The rules below apply to both you and the enemy, which means you should let the pulsar take down their shields for you!

If a Zoltan shield is not present:
2 systems will be chosen at random and they will take ion damage. It doesn’t matter if the systems are powered. The only exception is that if you have any amount of power in shields (even 1 power bar from a zoltan counts), then shields will always be one of the two systems targeted.

The formula for the amount of ion damage taken for each system is as follows:

Where:

• D is the ion damage taken.
• P is the power in the system.

Subsystems get treated as if they were a fully powered system. So for example, doors-3 will be considered as having 3 power bars in it, and thus will always take 2 ion damage. The bar added to the subsystem level for doors and sensors is also considered. So manned doors-3 is treated as if 4 power bars are present, and thus 3 ion damage is taken. The system is totally ionized and as such, the system goes unmanned.

Since the damage taken is actual ion damage, the shenanigans related to that will come into play.

If a Zoltan shield is present:
If you do not have ordinary shields (either lack the system, or shields are unpowered), the game will act as if you don’t have a Zoltan shield either, so you’ll need to refer to the above section. This is probably a bug.

If you have ordinary shields alongside it, it will completely absorb all of the ion damage, regardless of how much health it has left. It will take 3-4 damage. Thus, a well-timed shield drone can be used to mitigate the effects of the pulsar.

Asteroid fields cause an asteroid to be flung at you and your enemy periodically. The rate at which the asteroids spawn in is proportional to how many shield bubbles you have.

Asteroids act like any other 1-damage projectile, but they can be shot down by defense drones.

You cannot level up piloting or engine skills using asteroids without an enemy ship present.

There are two obvious things nebulae do, and one not-so-obvious thing they do.

Firstly, nebulae slow down the rebel fleet by 50% if you’re inside them when you jump, as the rebel fleet speed is determined by the beacon you’re in, not the one you’re jumping to. As for nebula beacons where the rebels knew about the nebula ahead of time, the rebels get slowed down by 20%.

Secondly, they disable your sensors entirely. This isn’t really that big of a deal, but it is worth noting. You can counter this by having slug crew or Lifeform scanners, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get those things just for this.

The non-obvious thing is that nebula beacons tend to have less rewarding events, as they’re frequently empty beacons. If the rebels haven’t taken over the exit beacon, then the exit beacon is guaranteed to be empty if it’s in a nebula.

Ion storms either occur randomly inside of nebulae or when you enter a non-exit nebula beacon controlled by the rebel fleet. They halve your reactor output (if it’s an odd number it’s rounded up). Zoltan power bars and the backup battery are unaffected, so those are a good way to counter ion storms. Buying additional power bars can help, but it’s a little costly.

Pausing the game during the event prompt will allow you to easily redistribute your power before beginning any battles.

Unlike suns, when you’re using long-ranged scanners and a beacon has an ion storm with no ship, there can be more than just boarding events, and the event can net you rewards.

There will be lots of projectiles shown in the background. Most of these are aesthetic. The actual shot that hits you will be announced by a siren and the “ASB TARGET LOCKED!” text.

Unlike other hazards with a siren, ASBs use different timing. Every 15-20 seconds, the warning siren will come up. Then 5-10 seconds later, the ASB projectile will appear. The projectile be aimed at a random room. If it hits, the projectile will deal 3 damage and cause a breach. ASB projectiles can be evaded, and thus cloaking + 40% evade can negate them entirely. Nothing else can defend you from ASB projectiles—not even zoltan shields, which as far as the projectile is concerned, don’t even exist.

In some events, the ASB will target the enemy rather than you. Other than the target, nothing else is different about this.

It’s important to note that ASBs and other hazards cannot co-exist. The rebel fleet will, however, overwrite the contents of the beacons they take control of, so for the most part this does not apply. However, it does apply to nebula beacons, since the rebel fleet cannot overwrite the nebula. Thus, rebel fleet fights in nebulae are ASB-free.

Since the ASB projectile takes a minimum of 20 seconds to appear, and a couple of seconds to actually hit you, you can jump away unharmed if your FTL charges quickly enough. At minimum, a L2 engines dude and engines-6 is all you need, since this will cause your FTL to charge in 22.7s. You can occasionally get unlucky if you go with the bare minimum, because the ASB can hit before that time elapses in rare circumstances.

How events work

You might’ve not realized it, but the rewards you get differ from event to event, and most events aren’t even really just one event—they’re a tree or chain of events.

There’s three main ways events will show up.

Firstly, each beacon gets assigned a random event at the start of a sector.
Not all events can show up in this way, but many do. Of these, some events are generic and can occur in all sectors, and some are restricted to certain kinds of sectors. Some can only appear once per sector, and some can appear an unlimited amount of times per sector.

The exit beacon is unique in that it is always assigned an event where you won’t need to fight a ship. Additionally, the exit beacons located in nebulae will always be empty beacons. Of course, these two things don’t hold true if the rebels control the exit beacon.

Secondly, events will cause other events to show up. This is done in three ways:

1. When a prompt shows up and you choose a response. Choosing a response loads another event, which you might not notice since a lot of the time an empty event that does nothing is loaded.
2. The event can generate a quest beacon, which will overwrite some other beacon in the sector you’re in.
3. The event can load a ship, which can prompt further events. Each ship can load events whenever the enemy begins charging their FTL, successfully jumps away, offers surrender, their ship gets destroyed, or their crew gets killed.

Lastly, when the fleet takes over a beacon, the event at that beacon is changed.
Whatever was there will typically be overwritten with an event which has you fight a rebel elite with an ASB firing at you. Different versions of the event are used depending on the conditions, most notably:

1. If the beacon is an exit beacon and you’re playing on easy, there is no ASB.
2. If the beacon is in a nebula, there is no ASB. Additionally, there will be an ion storm.
3. If the beacon is an exit beacon, and it’s in a nebula, there’s no ASB or ion storm.

In FTL, everything that happens is controlled by events. As a reminder, check the glossary, because event has a very precise definition there.

Anyhow, here’s the list of gameplay altering things events can do:

• Display a prompt with responses which load other events when chosen.
• Set the beacon’s properties (change the environment, if it’s a distress beacon, store, etc.)
• Load a ship, and set it to a hostile or neutral relationship.
• Give you random rewards, aka an auto-reward.
• Give you a predetermined reward.
• Take away items. Usually scrap, fuel, missiles, or drone parts.
• Change the power capacity of a system temporarily.
• Spawn boarders.
• Kill/remove crew members, and even turn them into boarders. Can negate your clone bay.
• Damage your hull. Optionally damage systems, set fires, and/or add breaches too.
• Reveal the sector map, showing you the details of all beacons.
• Speed up or slow down the rebel fleet’s pursuit.
• Add a quest beacon with a specific event.
• Unlock a ship.
• Teleport you to the Hidden Crystal Worlds.

Technically, an event can do all of these things simultaneously or even several times, but you’ll never see it in practice, especially in vanilla. This is a big list covering all sorts of different things, but those of you who are astute will realize that you can boil down much of these things into scrap gains/losses.

It is said that if an event does none of these things, it is an “empty event”.

In FTL, sometimes an event will have a random outcome. This is because rather than simply loading another event, it looks at some list and picks a random event from the list. DEAD_CREW_DEFAULT is a good example of this: it’s a list with 9 different events (some of which are duplicates).

Event lists

So let’s discuss some of the event lists. In particular, I want to focus on those that are used to select the events for each beacon in a sector. I encourage you to look through the game data yourself if you want more information, since I don’t want to bog down the guide with a giant fat list of what’s in here.

I have a hunch that when picking several events from a list when generating a sector, the game will only allow each event to be picked once. Meaning eventually the entire list can get exhausted.

It’s important to note that most sectors have their own versions of these event lists that generally take precedence. In some cases this just changes the text you generally see, and in others, it totally alters what events you tend to see. For example, Engi sectors will have a lot more events involving Engi.

NON_HOSTILE
A combination of the NEUTRAL and ITEMS lists.

HOSTILE1
Has a bunch of events that guarantee a fight. The majority of these are with auto-ships.

NEUTRAL
This is the list used to fill a sector’s beacons should all the other event lists used by that sector be exhausted (see the sector types section for more info). As the name suggests, it’s full of neutral events. A neutral event is one where a fight or taking some sort of risk is optional, or you get some reward regardless of what you do.

This also includes stuff like the mercenary, the slaver, pirate bribe, and a few others.

EXIT_LIST
EXIT_LIST is actually just a combination of NEUTRAL_EXIT and ITEMS. As the name suggests, it’s used when you get to an exit beacon that isn’t in a nebula.

NEUTRAL_EXIT
Very similar to the NEUTRAL list.

NEBULA
Every event in this list will cause a beacon it’s placed inside of to become a nebula beacon. The vast majority of the events are actually not empty.

ITEMS
Includes events that give you free drones, weapons, and resources. Also includes events where you trade resources, sell missiles to miners, hire crew for a discount, etc.

DISTRESS_BEACON
Includes events that occur at distress beacons.

QUESTS
Include events that give you quests.

Sector types

As you all know, there are several types of sectors in the game. Perhaps you’ve played enough to pick up on some of the differences, and why you might choose one sector over another. Well, it’s time to put into writing what makes each sector different.

Perhaps you’ve also picked up on some myths or some dogma. Perhaps you’ve heard red sectors are more profitable than other types. While not entirely false, it isn’t entirely true either, and we’ll see why.

This information comes from the game files and from other player’s research. I’d like to thank /u/mekloz from Reddit, in particular.

Every sector type has:

• 16 beacons, 1 of which is an exit beacon. The Last Stand’s “exit” beacon is the “base” beacon instead. Exit beacons use a special event list. With the start beacon in mind, that means all of the events I discuss below only apply to the remaining 14 beacons.
• A lower bound for when they can show up. Many types of sectors show up from the get-go, and some only show up after sector 2.
• A start event, which usually is empty. This event is also used for things like activating the Distraction Buoys.
• A pool of event lists. Each event list has a certain amount of events selected from it and put into the sector. Note that some events can only occur once per sector. Make sure you read the event lists section before this so you understand what I’m saying.
• The potential to be flagged as unique. Some sectors are considered “unique” which means they will only show up once per game. This tends to be homeworld sectors.
• Data which changes how rare it is for certain races to appear in stores or events that give crew in that sector, or if they’ll appear at all. If it doesn’t alter the rarity of races, it instead falls back to the default rarity defined for each race.

From a scrap value perspective, civilian sectors are the most profitable of all sectors. This may seem counter-intuitive given it’s not red and you always start in a civilian sector, but it’s true.

Here’s the data:

• 2-3 store events
• 2 events from the ITEMS list
• 2-4 neutral events
• 1-2 empty events
• 1-2 distress events
• 0 boarding events
• 6-8 hostile events
• 0-8 nebula events
• 0-2 quest-giving events
• Default race rarity

Overall, not so many empty events, lots of good neutral events, and a plethora of nebulae (which in this sector tend to not be empty) lead to good profits since you can explore more beacons overall. You will mostly fight auto-ships, pirates, and some manned rebel ships.

Also for the record, I’m not saying boarding never happens in Civilian sectors. What I am saying is that the game doesn’t explicitly pick from an event list dedicated to boarding events. You might still get boarded. Keep this in mind as I describe the other sectors. I am also not saying that there can only be 6-8 hostile events; other event types (i.e. nebula events) may lead to fights.

Not as profitable, but okay. A big issue is that Engi ships can sometimes have a lot of drones, which makes them a giant pain to deal with. However, they’re very weak against boarding due to Engi being poor fighters, so consider that if you have a teleporter.

• 2-3 store events
• 2 events from the ITEMS list
• 4-6 neutral events
• 1-2 empty events
• 1-3 distress events
• 0 boarding events
• 5-7 hostile events
• 0 nebula events
• 1 quest-giving event

Race rarity for crew is altered.

• Engi are very common, with a rarity of 1
• Humans are somewhat uncommon, with a rarity of 3
• Zoltan are rare, with a rarity of 4
• Everything else will not show up.

Identical to Engi Sectors, except for the following:

• 1 event for unlocking the Engi cruiser
• There are 5-7 neutral events instead
• Only appears from S3 onwards.
• Can only show up once per playthrough.

Pirates are easier enemies to deal with often times.

• 1-2 store events
• 1-2 events from the ITEMS list
• 0 neutral events
• 1-2 empty events
• 1-2 distress events
• 1 boarding event
• 6-8 hostile events
• 0-5 nebula events, all of which have a guaranteed fight
• 0-1 quest-giving events
• Default race rarity

While true that there are slightly more hostile events, we end up profiting less due to a lack of neutral events and having less quests while having more empty events, plus a boarding event.

TO DO

Beacon routing §1

The way you decide to move throughout a sector is absolutely crucial.

Some very common rules of thumb I hear and agree with in most cases:

• Visit as many unique beacons as you can prior to going to the exit beacon so you can maximize the amount of scrap value you get from a sector.
• Do not visit the same beacon twice unless it’s either absolutely necessary, or somehow does not reduce the amount of unique beacons you get to visit.
• Try to visit as many unique beacons as you can prior to visiting a store, that way you can accumulate more scrap to buy things. This isn’t as important if you already have lots of scrap, though.
• Don’t just go to a store for the sake of going to a store. Also, while many people say having at least 40 scrap can justify going to a store, I’d like you think like this: only go to a store if you know what you want and if you can afford it.
• Prefer distress beacons if you can ensure you’ll get something out of them (i.e. you have something with good blue options for such beacons). Otherwise, a normal beacon might be more rewarding.
• You probably want to avoid environmental hazards, especially early on in the game. Many ships just aren’t prepared to handle them very well early on.

Again, none of this is meant to be taken dogmatically, but I’m sure you get the idea. There’s a lot of variables to keep in mind. Sometimes you should violate these rules. Use your own judgment.

Then there’s some less common rules of thumb…

Be it with the width of your fingers, a ruler, pixels, whatever. Find a way that lets you tell at a glance where the rebel fleet will be after a certain amount of jumps. This is crucial for making routing decisions.

Personally I like the Extended Pursuit Indicator mod. It basically does this for you. The only downside is that it doesn’t entirely account for the effects nebula have on the speed of the rebel fleet over the course of multiple jumps.

The thread for the mod on the FTL forums can be found here.[subsetgames.com]

Personally I use the “x24 with numbers” version, as I find it to be the most useful of the bunch.

Go to your options menu, and look for this setting under the gameplay options. Make sure it’s enabled, because it’s absolutely important for figuring out the connections between beacons. It allows you to quickly hover over everything in the map and plot out a path.

On top of that, be sure to look very carefully at the displayed connections. Sometimes it’s easy to miss a good route because two lines were very close together, or something covered up the lines!

When figuring out the path you want to take throughout a given sector, try to pick beacons with the most connections, especially if you have Long Ranged Scanners. Not only does it give you more information (by increasing your chances of revealing stores, distress beacons, etc.), but it opens up your options by letting you choose from multiple beacons for your next jump.

Especially if it’s in the late game!

Sometimes paying a mercenary to distract the rebels really does end up profiting you, because you get to visit more beacons, which can net you a lot more scrap than just destroying the mercenary, because you can get an extra 2 beacon’s worth of scrap!

Booby trapping caches is a great idea too. Personally I always do it late game, unless I need missiles and I am drastically low on them. Usually you’re not going to be low on them in the late game, so seriously consider it.

Also worth mentioning: while Distraction Buoys aren’t a great augment, they’re a pretty nice way to get extra scrap, especially if you get them for free. In fact I’d argue they can straight-up be better than the Scrap Recovery Arm. That’s not to say they’re necessarily an augment you should hang on to.

Diving is the act of letting the exit beacon get overtaken so you can visit more beacons. It only ever works if there are beacons to the right of the exit beacon that you can explore, and if you can safely get back to the exit beacon.

I highly recommend it if the exit beacon is in a nebula, or if you’re far into the game. See the section on engine upgrades to figure out if you can safely dive when the exit beacon isn’t in a nebula.

As for when it is in a nebula, it tends to be safer to deal with rebel elites since there’s no ASB hazard. The only issue is, if you need to go through other overtaken nebula beacons to get to the exit beacon, you’ll have to deal with ion storms.

It’s also worth noting that often times the exit beacon itself is a good beacon to visit, so long as it isn’t in a nebula. In many cases visiting the exit beacon twice is okay, since it wouldn’t decrease the amount of unique beacons you visit in a sector overall.

Beacon routing §2

Consider visiting them! I mean sure, it’s kind of obvious, they do slow the rebel fleet. What’s not as obvious though is, you won’t always benefit from that. For one, nebula beacons are more likely to be empty than non-nebula beacons. For two, you can get some nasty ion storm events.

And finally? Sometimes visiting a nebula beacon does not make the rebel fleet arrive at beacons later than they normally would, something I like to call “not hitting a breakpoint”. How the heck does that work? Well, the Extended Pursuit Indicator mod does a great job of showcasing this!

Here’s an example where it’s actually beneficial to visit the beacon:

To figure out if visiting a nebula is beneficial, pick a beacon you want to get to after that nebula. In my case, I want to get to the exit beacon. Now, figure out how many jumps it would take the rebel fleet to overtake it normally. In this case, it’s 11. Subtract a half jump from that. Is the beacon past that point? If so, visiting the nebula actually benefits you. If not, then there is no benefit. In the image above, you can see I drew a red line to represent this subtracted half jump, and that the exit beacon is indeed beyond it.

After I jump to the nebula, the exit beacon is still going to be taken over in 11 jumps, which means I did benefit. I got to visit an extra beacon, as if the rebels had not moved any closer to my destination. Additionally, if we pretended another nebula beacon were present, we can see going to it now would not benefit me since the exit beacon is behind the half-way line.

Now here’s an example where it’s not beneficial:

Here we’re looking at the exit beacon again. It’s behind that half-way point, as indicated by the red line. Let’s just say for the sake of example that we only want to visit the beacon circled in green. Okay, so let’s try it…

Well, now that we’ve jumped, the rebels will overtake the exit beacon in 12 jumps. Previously it would’ve taken them 13 jumps. So basically, we might as well have not visited the nebula at all. A second nebula beacon would be beneficial though, since now the exit beacon is beyond the red line.

Also, don’t forget, the rebel speed is only altered by a nebula when you’re jumping from it, not when you’re jumping to it.

Now onto nebula sectors themselves. The only really important thing that comes to mind when considering them is the distribution of stores.

In an uncharted nebula, you’re guaranteed at least 1 store inside of the nebula itself. In a slug nebula, you’re guaranteed 2 stores. All nebula sectors also have a 50% chance of having a store in the non-nebula portion, which means it’s very much so worth it to at least check if there’s a store there.

The Enemy AI §1

It’s stupid, and very primitive! But it’s a big part of what makes FTL fun to play, and for that matter, even possible to win.

Once you understand it, you’ll be able to exploit it. You’ll know what it will do every single time.

Generally, the enemy AI will shoot a weapon as soon as it is charged. If an enemy is cloaked and the cloak is just about to run out, they will wait until uncloaked to fire their weapons. This means enemies with cloaking-1 will tend to not fire weapons while cloaked.

Systems that work on a cooldown are used in a similar fashion. Enemies will cloak, deploy drones, and hack the moment it’s possible; they will never wait. If using the invasion boarding mode (see below), they will use their teleporter the moment it’s off cooldown. If somehow you mod an enemy ship to use a backup battery, they will use it as soon as it’s off cooldown as well.

TO DO: explain how enemies manage power bars

One thing to note here that you may or may not have noticed: enemies can cheat with multi-projectile weapons. They can target a different room with each projectile.

You might have some misconceptions about how exactly the enemy chooses what rooms to target. There is some truth that randomness comes into play, but it is a little more nuanced than that, at least for weapons.

The rooms the enemy picks depend a little on the difficulty you’re playing on. The odds are as follows:

It’s worth emphasizing that “random room” includes empty rooms and rooms with systems in them.

What the heck does “priority system” mean, though? Well, it’s a targeting mechanic exclusive to hard, which, once you know about it, can ironically make the game a little easier.

Basically, systems are placed in a prioritized pool that is picked at random from 25% of the time. In order to be placed in the pool, a system must satisfy a certain condition. A system does not necessarily have to be powered to be targeted. The conditions for the systems that can be prioritized are as follows:

• Shields: Is powered. Doesn’t matter if it’s just 1 bar from a Zoltan.
• Weapons: Is powered.
• Drones: Is powered.
• Piloting: Evasion above 25%.
• Engines: Evasion above 25%.
• Oxygen: Oxygen below 50%.
• Clone bay: Any crew members are in the cloning queue.
• Crew teleporter: You have boarders on the enemy ship.
• Cloaking: Not on cooldown.
• Artillery: If it is about to fire in 4 seconds or less.
• Hacking: If hacking is in progress.
• Doors: If fires or intruders are present on your ship.

Theoretically speaking, this means if only one system is in the priority pool, then that system will be targeted 25% of the time + whatever chance the system had to be picked out of all the rooms/systems.

A useful early game tactic is to very briefly depower your weapons before the enemy fires theirs, that way the only way they would target the weapons is if they did not pick from the priority pool. If we were talking about Stealth B, as an example, I’d say you can go a bit further by venting rooms so your oxygen is below 50%. This will make oxygen more likely to be targeted, and cloaking less likely to be targeted.

Burst weapons:
When an enemy targets multiple rooms with a multi-projectile weapon, each projectile will hit a different system, usually.

This means on hard, they can actually target everything in the priority pool with 1 weapon, and still have a few shots to go. What happens when everything in the pool is exhausted, I don’t know yet.

The Enemy AI §2

Crew that are already in a room, regardless if they’re boarding, manning a system, fighting, etc. will tend to stay in that room to finish the task they’re working on. This is generally the only way you can more have than one enemy crew fixing a system at a time, as an example. If they have nothing in that room, then they will leave.

Pathfinding for crew isn’t perfect. Sometimes they will ignore better paths, or paths that actually work, and insist on the shortest path. A very infamous example is them trying to beat down a door when an open one is right next to it.

Enemy crew will man the following systems in this order:

1. Piloting
2. Engines
3. Weapons
4. Shields
5. Oxygen (even though there is no manning bonus)
6. Sensors
7. Doors
8. Any room with a system that does not have anybody in it.
9. If all priorities are exhausted, the enemy will stay in the room it’s in (even if there’s crew already in it).

Additionally, crew may go to the medbay (should it be present) if there is an open slot in it and they have less than 25 health. Crew will also leave the room should it run too low on oxygen, or there are too many fires to put out. I don’t know the exact threshold that prompts them to leave just yet.

Enemy crew that are mind controlled on your ship will behave in a similar manner. As a result, you do have some control over where they go, but not completely. They can man a system and not budge until the mind control wears off, unless you vent the room and they take enough damage to want to go to the medbay (which actually can heal them, in some cases).

The AI has a predictable way of dealing with repairs.

Firstly, assuming all crew aren’t in the same rooms as the damaged systems, it will move one crew member to each damaged system. It will move the crew manning the lowest priority systems first. You can use this to your advantage by damaging more systems than they have crew members, which will draw the pilot out of the cockpit, decreasing their evade, or even dropping it to 0. Don’t damage piloting though, because the pilot will stay in the cockpit to repair it, defeating the point.

The enemy AI will use the same general repair priority list as system repair drones (see the drone tricks part of the guide), and will pretty much act in the same way. The only difference is that dealing with boarders seems to be the highest priority, rather than fixing shields.

The boarding AI has two major modes: sabotage and invasion. For most of the game, sabotage mode will be used. Invasion is used on flagship phase 3. The key difference between the two modes is that the former will only send one boarding party, where as the latter will swarm you with crew, teleporting as many boarders onto your ship as possible as soon as the cooldown wears off.

I don’t yet understand how rooms are chosen are very well. I know it depends on how many boarders the enemy has (since they seem to factor in the size of the rooms).

Enemy ship generation – Introduction

This is a highly technical section. I doubt you’ll need it to win the game, but it can be helpful to know about.

There’s one thing I need to get out of the way real quick: every class of ship is different. Not just in how they look, but the things they can come with. You’ll see some ships that have certain things that others don’t, and you’ll see some ships that never have certain things when others pretty much always do. As an example, the only ships you see lacking shields are automated ships.

This section doesn’t go into detail about the differences between the classes of ships, at least not yet. If you want to look into individual ship classes, check out the FTL wiki.[ftl.fandom.com]

Do note that some ships will appear to have the same class, but actually be different ships in the game files. A good example is the event with a mantis controlled engi ship, which is not the same ship as the normal engi ship, even though the game will claim they’re the same class.

Not all ships are generated on the spot. As an example, the Rebel Flagship is one that isn’t generated. Most of the ships you encounter will be randomly generated though, and internally those ships use something that the game seems to refer to as “auto-blueprints”, which makes sense, considering randomly generated rewards are called “auto-rewards”.

So here’s another sector-based concept, progression sectors. Like scrap rewards, enemy progression changes from difficulty-to-difficulty and sector-to-sector. On easy, progression is delayed one sector, so S1 corresponds to progression sector 0. Hard and normal are neither delayed nor sped up, so S1 will correspond to progression sector 1 on these difficulties.

This formula is used in various aspects of generating an enemy ship, so I’ll put it here and refer back to it later.

Where:

• Sp is the progression sector you’re in.
• Pmin is the minimum the quantity can possibly be throughout the whole game.
• Pmax is the maximum the quantity can possibly be throughout the whole game.
• Lmin is the minimum the quantity can be in progression sector Sp.
• Lmax is the maximum the quantity can be in progression sector Sp.
• C is 1 if the quantity is the level of a system, and 0 otherwise.

B is a bit more complicated:

• B = 0, if the quantity we’re looking for is not the level of a system (i.e. it’s the crew count)
• B = 0, if playing on easy and Sp ≤ 0
• B = 1, if playing on easy and Sp ≥ 1
• B = 1, if playing on other difficulties and 1 ≤ Sp ≤ 2
• B = 2, if playing on other difficulties and Sp ≥ 3.

Enemy ship generation – Systems

Let’s discuss how systems and their levels are determined. This is probably the most complicated topic when it comes to how enemy ships are generated.

In the data for the ship you’re fighting, there’s a list of systems that the ship can and will have.

There’s 4 noteworthy variables controlling the generation of each system:

1. The minimum level of that system possible, should it come with the ship.
2. The maximum level of that system possible, should it come with the ship.
3. Whether or not the system is optional.
4. Which room that system is placed in. I only bring this up because it brings to light that, just like on player ships, systems on enemy ships are always placed in the same room. So a Rebel Fighter will always have its piloting in the top room, as an example.

It’s important to note that enemies don’t abide by the same rules as the player. It’s rare, but enemy ships can have more than 8 points in weapons and/or shields. On easy, they can have up to 9 points in these systems, and on other difficulties, they can have up to 10 points.

To wrap this section up, two things come into play here in determining what we’ll actually get from these ranges. One, the general progression formula, and two, budgeting. We already know about the formula, so let’s talk about the budgeting.

Systems with a base minimum level of 1 or more and are non-optional are considered the starting gear of an enemy, and they make up the base upgrade budget of the enemy.

Let’s take the Rebel Fighter as an example. There’s more than one “Rebel Fighter” in the game files, so I’ll be referring to the one with the internal name REBEL_SKINNY. Here’s a table of info on the systems it can spawn with:

At minimum, the Rebel Fighter will have piloting-1, weapons-2, engines-2, oxygen-1, and shields-2. The levels of these systems cannot go any lower, nor can the systems be absent.

But what about the maximum?
It turns out that there’s an upgrade budget as well, which can be described with the following formula:

Where:

• Bmax is the maximum budget.
• B is the actual budget, which is picked randomly.
• H is 1 if playing on hard difficulty, and 0 otherwise.
• s is the progression sector you’re in.

So the maximum budget progresses like this throughout progression sectors 0-8:
0 → 4 → 6 → 8 → 11 → 13 → 15 → 18 → 20
And you’d add 1 to each of these numbers if playing on hard

Then the actual budget ends up being a random number not to exceed that maximum. The minimum budget depends on the minimum level the systems must be at for a given sector.

How does the upgrade budget apply?
First, the enemy gets whatever it has at bare minimum. Then it invests every single bar from the budget into upgrading those systems, or adding optional systems. It can only invest so many points into each system though. The general progression formula controls the minimum and maximum level of a system.

Let’s say we’re in progression sector 4 and we’re playing on normal. This means the optional budget for enemy ships will be 11. Now let’s say we end up fighting a Rebel Fighter. Here’s the possible system levels:

So, starting from the bare minimum, let’s say the Rebel Fighter ends up with a budget of 8 points, just a bit shy of the maximum budget possible. There are a couple of possible builds. Below is a couple of them:

• Piloting-1, weapons-4, engines-3, oxygen-1, shields-4, medbay-2, teleporter-1
• Piloting-1, weapons-6, engines-4, oxygen-1, shields-4
• Piloting-3, weapons-4, engines-3, oxygen-1, shields-4, medbay-1
• Piloting-1, weapons-4, engines-3, oxygen-1, shields-6, teleporter-1

If you do the math, you’ll find all of these add up to 16 points. Remember, the bare minimum the Rebel Fighter gets is worth 8 points, so budget wasn’t spent on that. The budget was spent on upgrades, which are what the other 8 points were.

Additionally, the minimum system levels in this progression sector differ from the bare minimum system levels the ship starts with. So effectively, the enemy ship is forced to invest some of its upgrade bars into those systems. For instance, shields-2 is the bare minimum overall, but shields-4 is the minimum for this sector, so the enemy has to spend 2 upgrade bars on shields.

Enemy ship generation – Misc

The amount of hull points an enemy has is the simplest thing to predict. Every enemy has a base HP, which ranges from 7-11 for the most part. Notable exceptions include the Auto-Surveyor which has 6 HP, Elite Assault ships which often have 14 HP, and the flagship phases which each have 20, 22, and 20 HP respectively.

To figure out how much health the ship will have, take its base HP, subtract 1, then add the progression sector you’re in. As an example, on hard and in S6, a Rebel Fighter (10 base HP) would have 16 HP. If we were playing on easy, it’d have 15 HP instead.

Every ship has a minimum and maximum amount of crew. Additionally, the races of the crew members can be set in the ship properties, or be altered by an event. Enemy crew are always L0 in all skills.

The amount of crew present is determined by the general progression formula. As a side note, in normal gameplay, the actual maximum amount of crew will never be hit. So if the game data says a ship can have up to 6 crew, it can only really have up to 5 in normal gameplay.

When an event alters the crew’s races, it does so by specifying what portion to alter, and what to set the race to. As an example, the event with the mantis controlled engi ship replaces 100% of the crew with mantises. There’s also an event with a mantis ship which sets the crew to 80% mantis and 20% engi.

A general rule of thumb: ships with one race of crew members are very common. Pirate ships almost always have crew of random races. Mantis ships can often have an engi to go with their mantis crew.

These are entirely predetermined by the ship used in the event. Usually you’ll see 10 missiles and 4 drone parts, but there are a few ships here and there that have different amounts. For instance, the Rock Scout only carries 6 missiles and the Auto-Assault carries 5 drone parts.

These are entirely predetermined by the ship used in the event. Most ships don’t have them. Examples of ships that do have them include engi ships which have Engi Medbot Dispersal, and slug ships which have Slug Repair Gel.

Enemy ships will get a randomized set of weapons that use up all of the power bars in their system. The list used is predetermined by the ship in the event. Rarity of weapons has no effect on this.

As an example, here’s one of the lists used, WEAPONS_REBEL:

• Basic Laser
• Dual Lasers
• Burst Laser II
• Burst Laser III
• Heavy Laser I
• Heavy Laser II
• Leto
• Artemis
• Hermes
• Breach
• Mini Beam
• Halberd Beam
• Small Bomb
• Flak I
• Flak II
• Chain Laser
• Vulcan
• Charge II

Works the exact same way as weapons, except obviously a list of drones is used instead.

As an example, here’s one of the lists used, DRONES_STANDARD:

• Combat I
• Combat II
• Defense I
• Defense II
• Beam I
• Beam II
• Fire
• System Repair
• Anti-personnel
• Boarding
• Ion Intruder
• Shield Overcharger
• Anti-Drone

On another note, I know the name DRONES_STANDARD implies this is very commonly used, but I don’t find this to really be the case.

Glossary

X → Y
This indicates that X is a shorthand for Y.

X$ → X scrap
Example: “30$” means “30 scrap”
Since many people have asked me, I feel it’s time to mention it: as much as I would love to, using a gear symbol would be much more cumbersome for me, not to mention it’d be a pain to switch to it now.

SX → sector X
Example: “S1” means “sector 1”

SX-Y → sectors X through Y
Example: “S1-4” means “sectors 1 through 4”

SSX → scrap sector X
Example: “SS1” means “scrap sector 1”
Note that since scrap sectors can be negative, and they’re all the same as SS0, I will be writing SS0 for them.

SSX-Y → scrap sectors X through Y
Example: “SS1-4” means “scrap sectors 1 through 4”

S-L → system S that is at level L.
Example: “shields-3” means “shields level 3”.
I should note that I am referring to the number of bars in the system, not the number of bubbles. Shields-3 would be 1 shield bubble with a buffer bar.

S-L-M → system S at a minimum level of L and a maximum level of M
Example: “engines-1-5” means “engine levels 1 through 5”

LX → level X
Example: “L1 pilot” means “level 1 pilot”.
You’ll see me specifically use this for crew skills only.

LX-Y → levels X through Y
Example: “L0-2 pilot” means “level 0 to 2 pilot”.

• AE: Stands for “Advanced Edition”.
• Auto-reward: A randomly generated reward, with a category for what you’ll get, and a tier for how much you’ll get. Scrap rewards are also affected by the scrap sector you’re in.
• Default rewards: Rewards given by a generic event that’s caused by you destroying a ship or killing all of the crew on it.
• Diving: Intentionally letting the exit beacon get overtaken by rebels to visit beacons to the right of it. Often allows for visiting more beacons in a sector overall compared to simply getting to the exit beacon before the rebels and jumping to the next sector.
• DPS: Short for “damage per second”, used to quantify the rate at which something deals damage.
• Empty beacon: A beacon with an event that effectively does nothing, other than waste a jump.
• Empty room: A room that does not house a system.
• Empty event: An event where nothing happens. Often has a single “Continue…” response, but doesn’t need to.
• Event: A named set of things that happen. This does not need to come with a prompt. For example, you can make a choice and immediately get scrap with no further prompts, which counts as an event.
• High reward: Often used to describe an auto-reward that has a high reward tier.
• Level 0: Refers to a skill that hasn’t been leveled up (is neither green or yellow).
• Level 1: Refers to a skill that’s been leveled up once, and thus has a full green bar.
• Level 2: Refers to a skill that’s been mastered, and thus has a full yellow bar.
• Low reward: Often used to describe an auto-reward that has a low reward tier.
• Medium reward: Often used to describe an auto-reward that has a medium reward tier.
• Progression sector: The sector the game sees you in when computing enemy ship loadouts. This only really changes anything on easy, where the progression is 1 sector behind, making it so that S1 corresponds to progression S0.
• Prompt: A popup created by an event with responses to choose from. Every response will load an event when chosen.
• Quasiweapon: Something that is not a weapon that can be a substitute for a weapon to win battles. For instance, hacking, boarding, combat drones, and even environmental hazards.
• Reward: Something valuable an event gives you, usually something with scrap value.
• Random reward: Often used to describe an auto-reward that has a random reward tier.
• Resource: Umbrella term for fuel, missiles, and drone parts. The game itself refers to these as “items” but I find that to be confusing when talking with somebody about FTL.
• Shield breaker: A weapon or quasiweapon that is good for taking down shields.
• Scrap sector: The sector the game sees you in when computing scrap rewards. On easy the scrap sector is the same as the sector you’re in. On normal, subtract 1 from your current sector to get the scrap sector. On hard, subtract 2. Negative scrap sectors are the same as SS0. For example, on hard difficulty, S1 corresonds to SS0.
• Scrap value: The amount something is worth in scrap.
• Surrender offer: An event prompted by dealing a large amount damage to an enemy ship. Often gives you an auto reward with the “stuff” category, or a free crew member.
• Standard reward: An auto-reward in the “standard” category.
• System: Used to refer to a system or subsystem, as the game describes them, or to refer to a room containing one of the two. I know, it’s a little weird, but the distinction between the two doesn’t really come up very much, so I’m calling them both systems.
• Subsystem: The subset of systems that do not use power. So sensors, piloting, doors, and the backup battery.